2018-09-21 Vehicles, NPC Pilot, Exchanges

[Haxus]

Vehicles not Tallied
Vehicles in my town do not affect the construction or manufacturing processes there.

Finished the code that was intended to do this.

• All vehicles in town are shared by all buildings. For example, one farm machinery would be enough to satisfy every farm in town.
  
• Vehicles are tallied if they are at any building site or in any building of the same town as the building that is looking for one. Vehicles must belong to the same empire to be counted.
  
• When a vehicle is added or removed from the town, it can take a few minutes for all buildings to notice.
  

Construction Modifiers
It seems like the new buildings have less time reducing construction modifiers than the old buildings.

Added SUV, computer, electricity, and shovel as time reducing modifiers to all construction processes, if they did not already require those things.

Exchange Structure
It is painful to look for a space station among the blueprints in the exchange.

Added a Structure column to show the hull structure of blueprints in the exchange.

Exchange Industry
It would be nice to easily see what industry each building blueprint is intended for.

Added an Industry column to show the intended purpose of building blueprints in the exchange.

Spacecraft Startup Jolt
When the crew starts moving my ship away from a planet, there is invariably a huge sudden jolt as the ship begins to move. It is as if it turns to the desired heading instantly, which is confusing. The turn should be smooth.

Fixed three bugs that were contributing to this problem:

• Pilot turn code had an error when calculating turns in negative angle directions. A sign was wrong on a value in the calculation.
  
• Pilot initiation of turn on a spacecraft at rest needed to signal the need for immediate processing by the physics thread.
  
• Initial rotation call on a spacecraft at rest calculated a huge turn due to an elapsed time error.
  

NPC Pilot Roll
The NPC pilot frequently rolls the ship for no apparent reason. This is making me sea sick.

Pilot was observing the orientation to gravity well policy too strictly. He now rolls the ship only when necessary.

Server Crash
A server crashed this morning.

Fixed code that used a null pointer when accessing the construction process on a building that was no longer under construction.

Servers Chugging
Some servers have been struggling in the past few days.

Fixed an unanticipated side effect of removing Tech items. Some spacecraft had mission orders to purchase Tech items by category. This caused a problem because the category was no longer valid.

Memory Leak
A memory leak was spotted while fixing the server crash.

Fixed memory leak when receiving a construction process on a building.

[Vectorus]

I saw "NPC Pilots" and hoped AI vehicles had suddenly landed...


These changes are pretty good, though! Definitely more effective than the seasickness pills we've all been stockpiling till now.

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As of last update, what determines the shipment speed of brokers? Wasn't on the operational quality curve before? Is it the construction Q now?

I was thinking about the tool modifiers in this update. Perhaps the resource quality of the construction materials should modify the speed too, for ships and buildings? Now you can build a Q1 Death Star, but Q1 metal will keep failing, having to be replaced, lengthening the timetable; Q255 stone is so delicious to work with, so easy to shape and durable that craftsmen have to pay to be on the project, rather than getting paid for their work. 

Would add rather more value to slightly useless materials such as high Q stone, lumber etc. Reward you for setting up their distribution networks. Right now they only affect HP, and if you want high HP you're not going to use them, you're going to use vulcium or adamantine.

[Mr. Mortius]

Construction material no longer affects health, only armor. The change was made a few months ago. % armor for each material was also lowered. A speed bonus would make high quality stone slightly more useful though.

[Vectorus]

In that case a speed bonus to construction, along the quality curve, would be an even better way to make building materials valuable. There would seem to be rather little benefit at the moment.

There is the fetch failure, of course, but resources are so abundant now that is rarely a problem for buildings.

[Deantwo]

As of last update, what determines the shipment speed of brokers? Wasn't on the operational quality curve before? Is it the construction Q now?

I would prefer the original ×2 lightspeed. Not too fast but faster than deadheading, and it makes cargo hauling with a warp capable ship very much worth it.

Alternatively it could fetch and install a number of FTL drive modules equal to the number of possible shipments and use that speed.

There is the fetch failure, of course, but resources are so abundant now that is rarely a problem for buildings.

Now that production quality is back to being high, maybe the waste factor should just be increased?

[AnrDaemon]

it could fetch and install a number of FTL drive

Actually, that's not a very bad idea.
Makes broker deliveries less magic.

[Haxus]

Patent Research Problem
Adding the requirement for natural resources, to their corresponding extraction patents, created a problem. You can gather the natural resources by hand but there is no obvious way to supply them to the university.

The Store page on the building window now has a button that says, "Offer to Sell". This causes the building to open a private comm channel to you so you can use the Auction, For Sale, and Accept buttons to work out the deal. The button is never disabled so it can be used even if the building does not have a store. You must remain in the building site to communicate on the channel.

The Offer to Sell button is not exclusive to the university. It is available at all buildings with a Store page.

This was a tragic enough problem that an update was needed right away. It presented a tough hurdle for new emperors. That is why there was a late day update on a Friday.

An indirect method exists to supply the materials to a university, a work around, not intended as the way it should be done. The materials could be bartered for things at a building with a store. The university would get them from that store when it was trying to satisfy the needs of its processes. Few might have tried this.

[Deantwo]

Patent Research Problem
Adding the requirement for natural resources, to their corresponding extraction patents, created a problem. You can gather the natural resources by hand but there is no obvious way to supply them to the university.

The Store page on the building window now has a button that says, "Offer to Sell". This causes the building to open a private comm channel to you so you can use the Auction, For Sale, and Accept buttons to work out the deal. The button is never disabled so it can be used even if the building does not have a store. You must remain in the building site to communicate on the channel.

I didn't know you already added the samples to the patent requirements, might want to edit the update thread (or was it the previous one) to include this information.

And on the topic of selling, why not merge "For Sale" and "Auction"?
See: (Suggestion thread) Merge "For Sale" and "Auction"

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As for patents now requiring samples, maybe a few of the very basic resources should require patents too?
For example if oil drilling required a patent, it would teach players much earlier to acquire samples for research. Only side effect would be that manufacturing torches would be locked behind a patent.

Natural gas could either remain without a patent, or require the same patent as "oil drilling".

[AnrDaemon]

why not merge "For Sale" and "Auction"?

Because it would overload an already overloaded dialog.
But… I just got an idea.

[Haxus]

The “For Sale” dialog has 4 controls: the list of your stuff, the quantity to sell, the sale price, and an ok button. The “Auction” dialog has 3 controls; it omits the sale price. How is that overloaded?

These are in fact the same dialog. Qt dialogs are dynamically created. The sell dialog omits the sale price control when it isn’t needed.

Auction and For Sale are logically two different statements by the seller. Auction says they have something to sell and they want somebody to make an offer. For Sale says they have something to sell at a set price.