2019-11-22 Upgrade DNA, Morale Effects

[Haxus]

Upgrade DNA
Someone asked if it would be possible to upgrade existing gen3 avatars to use the new gen4 DNA.

Gen3 avatars can now upgrade their DNA to gen4. Start by using the gen4 DNA editor to create an avatar and save the DNA into a .dna file.

If your avatar has gen3 DNA, an Upgrade DNA button appears on the Biology page of the Bio window. The upgrade will ask for a .dna file. After upgrading, the avatar can not do it again.

There is no time limit to do this. Someone could choose to wait until more features are available in the gen4 DNA editor.

Doing this causes the client program to break. You must immediately close the client program after upgrading your DNA.

When the client is restarted, the avatar shown at the startup screen may still be using gen3 DNA. That will update eventually; it takes a few minutes before the login server picks up the change to the DNA. You do not have to wait for the avatar on the startup screen to update to enter the game; your avatar will be gen4 in the game.

Targoss Not Needed for Demis and Highborns
Targoss is annoying when he shows up to greet a newly born demiavatar.

The Reach for the Stars story no longer starts for demi avatars and highborns.

Head Lag
I get a huge lag spike when killing gen4 creatures. It's brutal if you slaughter a village full of indigenous.

The lag spike is due to the time it takes to construct the OpenGL model of the head, worse depending on haircut and beard styles.

Gen4 heads now construct their 3D model in the model maker thread. This could result in a delay of a few seconds between a head existing and it becoming visible in your render scene.

Hair Triangles
Hair on gen4 creatures creates a huge number of render triangles for its OpenGL model. It takes a long time to build the OpenGL model and its a lot to render.

Hair on gen4 creatures now uses 1/4 to 1/3 the triangles it was previously.

This likely contributed to the screaming GPUs reported by some players.

Avatars with Exotic Lungs
Lungs offer a choice of Exotic, for their atmosphere type. Avatars don't come from worlds with exotic atmospheres.

Lungs now offer all atmosphere types as choices. However, any choices other than Standard and Tainted are not valid for use by avatars.

Avatars are now required to have lungs that can breathe Standard or Tainted atmospheres.

Asexual Sex
Asexual creatures should not be able to have sex.

Asexual creatures can no longer enter the mating pose. They cannot mate at all.

They should go through a periodic and/or environmentally based reproduction cycle. That is not implemented yet. Currently, asexual creatures cannot reproduce at all.

Hermaphrodite Sex
How does hermaphrodite sex work?

Hermaphrodites are only sexually compatible with hermaphrodites.

Hermaphrodites may impregnate each other during sex.

Crew Wear BDUs
Someone asked if crew would wear BDUs.

Crew will now wear BDUs, if they are available in the crew's city of origin. Crew prefer uniforms so if you want them to wear BDUs, don't manufacture uniforms.

Someone suggested an empire or ship policy for uniforms and hair styles. This might be implemented at some point.

Married NPCs
Some NPCs should be married.

Officers, crew, troops and passengers now have a possibility of being married. Probability varies by class. The married ones will not have sex with players.

This allows the use of terms like Miss and Mrs, which helps to distinguish NPCs and give them some detail.

A tool tip on the Unit Orders window shows their marital status.

NPC Skills
How can I see the skill set of an NPC?

A tool tip on the Unit Orders window shows the skills of each NPC. The only skills listed are those that apply to their job and contribute to their rank. They could have other skills.

Sex with NPCs
How do you have sex with anybody other than indigenous?

In addition to indigenous people, it is now possible to have sex with officers, crew, troops and passengers.

The mechanism is the same as with indigenous. Any of these methods will work.

• Enter the mating pose and engage in a conversation with them.
  
• Start a conversation and use some euphemism for having sex in a sentence.
  
• Enter the mating pose and order someone to mount you.
  

The euphemisms were fun. I found a web site with over 400, though I had never heard most of them. One of the funniest was, "playing with the box the baby came in". That one made me lol.

NPCs are generally agreeable to sex, unless they are married or working.

Citizens of cities do not have sex with avatars. They are too transient to bear a child. People would report this as a bug.

Stamina Role in Sex
Sex in SoH is instantaneous.

Participants in sex now use stamina. The one on top uses stamina slightly faster.

When the male's stamina reaches zero, he impregnates the female.

Hermaphrodites impregnate each other at the moment they individually run out of stamina.

Airless Turbo Lift
The turbo lift aboard Atlantis never has air. It has suffocated me and many passengers to death countless times.

Fixed an error when gathering systems information during initialization of new spacecraft and buildings.

Added fixup code to quietly repair existing spacecraft and buildings that have this problem.

Turbo Lift Lights
There is no way to control the lighting in my turbo lift.

Fixed error similar to the one that caused turbo lifts to be airless.

These also get quietly fixed, like airless turbo lifts.

Weird Species in Gear
The species names on several units of meat in my gear change randomly while I watch.

Fixed an error in the way old style gen3 DNA identified its species.

[Deantwo]

Upgrade DNA

But I assume this only affect avatars, not the citizens/crew/officers/others that share the same DNA as the avatar.

I guess cities do have a founder saved that could be used to identify cities founded by that avatar, but citizens might slowly change to the DNA of the indigenous population if that doesn't match. Not to mention merged populations, which I am not even sure is implemented for new-style cities. With a future reset all that is kinda moot though, so whatever.

We do however still want the ability to better control the specie of a city, and even control the specie of the indigenous population. I would love to bomb indigenous villages from orbit in order to reset the world's indigenous specie. We have sex in the game, why not some genocide?

[tackeart]

It might be interesting to have a genetics station later in progression where you can splice exotic lungs into your race and stuff like that, with some tradeoff or another. Or even a race that starts only able to live on exotic worlds.. :eyes:

[tophattingson]

Haxus, if I wanted to see 3d models rhythmic smashing their crotches together, i'd grab "Koikatsu Party". At least then, there would be a reasonable chance that after witnessing such, I will not require an autolobotomy. You didn't need to go into any more detail than fade to black...

[Haxus]

Sorry, had to finish it.

[Haxus]

There is a genetics module for the surgery station, and a cybernetics module. Until now, it has not been possible to make those modules do anything. The new creatures will enable them to work eventually.

There are many details of the new creatures I'd like to work on first, before those surgery stations.

[Haxus]

Later...

Morale Effect on Population Growth
Morale does not seem to have as negative of effect on population growth as it used to.

Minor adjustments were made to the functions that decide whether population is growing or shrinking. Morale now has a slightly more negative effect.

Morale Effect on Building Repairs
Citizens should not repair buildings when their morale is negative.

Buildings are no longer repaired when morale is below zero.

Forum Spammers
The 'I Am Not A Bot' check box doesn't seem to have any effect on the tital wave of incoming spam accounts on the forum.

I went back to using a question that must be answered to create a new forum account.

This time, instead of having lots of random questions that anyone can answer, there is only one question. "What is the current Shores of Hazeron software version?"

Answering the question requires that someone run the software, which must be installed first. That hurdle may have made our forum too much of a nuisance for the spammers. There has not been one single new account created since the change.

Warp Signature Detection
Buildings with sensors detect warp signatures even if they have no power.

Buildings will no longer detect warp signatures unless they have power.

Radar Coverage
Radar coverage by ATC should require power.

Radar sites must now have power to provide air traffic control services, such as they are. That includes warding off pirates. The ADIZ does not exist if the radar station is not powered.

Weapon Sensor Range
Weapon bases cache their sensor range because of the work required to calculate it. That cached range value can get out of sync with the actual available sensor range, based on power availability and building damage.

Fixed cached sensor range value on weapon bases.

[Haxus]

Because I feel like rambling...

The Airless Turbo Lift, Hair Triangles, and Weird Species in Gear items were really brutal. I think two days were spent between the three of them.

Weird Species was caused when a sizeof function on a class object rounded up to the next whole 32 bit boundary, which added a byte. Later memcmp (memory compare) functions failed when comparing otherwise identical DNA, when that overhanging byte contained random data. This one had me questioning my sanity.

Airless Turbo Lift resulted from the addition of part groups. Turbo lifts used to all have the same room name, “Turbo Lift”. Some old code did not get updated with the change. That change also broke room light switches in turbo lifts. The change means that each lift tracks its own light and air states by group name, so they can be separated. Previously, all lifts were treated as the same room. The design report now warns when a turbo lift has no name.

Hair Triangles were just time consuming, to reduce the polys without breaking the hair. Sometimes a tweak to the parameters was all that was needed to fix a broken hair style. For some reason the Eowyn hair style gave tons of grief before it looked ok again. Many iterations were required.

[Celarious]

Forum Spammers
The 'I Am Not A Bot' check box doesn't seem to have any effect on the tital wave of incoming spam accounts on the forum.

I went back to using a question that must be answered to create a new forum account.

This time, instead of having lots of random questions that anyone can answer, there is only one question. "What is the current Shores of Hazeron software version?"

Answering the question requires that someone run the software, which must be installed first. That hurdle may have made our forum too much of a nuisance for the spammers. There has not been one single new account created since the change.

This seems to have completely gotten rid of the spambots! There hasn't been a single spam registration today

[jakbruce2012]

Excellent fix on the spam bots. if they really want to spam, now they have to put some effort in. Also there is still the tech support line in case someone cannot install and still needs help.