2020-01-21 Server Crash, Mesh Lighting, Name Species, Site Overlap

[Haxus]

Server Crash
Server crashed when someone surrendered a city.

Fixed.

Mesh Lighting
Meshes in rooms of ships and buildings are not lit by the room lighting.

Fixed an error that was introduced when part groups were added.

Nothing needs to be done to existing designs. The error was in the client side rendering code.

Name Species
Gen4 sentient avatar cannot name his own species. Tells him its not his species to name.

Fixed two errors that caused this to work incorrectly with gen4 dna. One error caused most creatures created from a species to no longer be a part of that species. The other was a rounding error that caused an inconsistency when encoding and decoding a dna value.

EV Suit Cost
Now we just need cheaper EV suits... as they are still VERY expensive to craft and buy

All processes and patents for making EV suits were reviewed. Material costs were reduced in all of them, generally to only one of each of the commodities formerly required. EV helmets no longer require mechanical parts. A sewing needle was added as a required tool, due to the textile requirement.

Plastic Patents
Too many plastic patents

All plastic molding patents were eliminated.

Site Overlap
Prevent mines and wells from overlapping mines and wells. This allows multiple buildings to harvest the same resource.

Mines can no longer overlap mines when placed. This is also true of Farms, Orchards, Drilling Rigs and Wells. Each is prevented from overlapping the site of another industry of its type.

Star Map Avatar Position
The + shaped avatar position indicator on the star map is in the wrong place.

Fixed aspect ratio bug when painting the avatar position indicator on the star map.

Limbo Rescue
There are fifteen avatars in limbo but the limbo rescue process fails to recover them.

Fixed limbo rescue to send avatars with no empire to a new empty home world.

Those people got stuck in limbo when the old style space ships were deleted. I ran a limbo rescue then but did not realize it failed for some people.

[jakbruce2012]

Please extend this mine and well overlap limit to millitary buildings vs civillian buildings and platforms as well. There are some significant exploits to do with this right now to make nearly invulnerable bases.

Welp, time to roll out some changes to the mining ships, gonna need a bigger bay.

[Haxus]

Please extend this mine and well overlap limit to millitary buildings

I thought it should apply to all buildings but was afraid to make that change without further testing. I don't know of any building type that makes sense to overlap on itself. Platforms maybe.

[jakbruce2012]

Please extend this mine and well overlap limit to millitary buildings

I thought it should apply to all buildings but was afraid to make that change without further testing. I don't know of any building type that makes sense to overlap on itself.

It is helpful at times when the terrain is finicky, or to have smoothly overlapped site boundaries, but otherwise not really needed.  Should definitely not allow building geometry to overlap.

[Vectorus]

Haxus, I think preventing mines from overlapping other mines is a major problem with the current rock limits. The solution is not necessarily allowing them to overlap, but increasing resource yield in other ways.

The resource requirements for new-style buildings and ships can just be massive and, in my experience, the rock numbers are simply not high enough to support building them in anything like a reasonable time. The number of processes allowed per rock needs to be greatly increased if this overlap rule is going to be enforced. Otherwise, the gap between established players and new players is going to become unbridgeable - with old players having hoards of materials that would take newbies  a fraction of their life-expectancy to compete with.

For example, right now, even with overlaps allowed, it would take me longer to gather the resources needed for a mid-range ship than it would to actually run the process that makes it - several months in some cases. An awful lot of my subscription money is just sitting there waiting for numbers to tick up...

There is also a disparity with how much city volume you can dedicate to processing (smelting, making complex parts etc.) compared to how little you can dedicate to mining the tiny veins of raw material. This change will lead to an increase in server-intensive harvester missions and busywork, with mines and wells becoming a very, very second-rate option for their own stated purpose.

With old-style ships, it never took much more than a few days to gather everything you needed, even for the largest, if that. I think new-style ships should remain proportional to that, if the underlying scale of gameplay and player experience is to remain in the same ballpark. 

For that to happen, process limits per rock need to be increased not only 4 or 5 times but 100 times at least. They need to be able to compete with the harvester ships that can hoover up resource counts which actually suit the number of jobs a smelter or machine shop can have.

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Regarding non-resource buildings, it is good to let them overlap because mesh is no longer allowed to overhang the site. If they couldn't overlap, you might place a building where the roof gutters slightly overhang the base of the walls, then be unable to place a road, sidewalk or other building close up to the first.

[jakbruce2012]

I'm currently spinning up a new shipyard, will have to see how the new resource restrictions hold up.

To be fair, harvester ships were more effective than mines in the old(U3) model as well. So this seems familiar, and should not pose a serious problem. The only exception being when 1% does not actually mean 1%, and there is only one node on the planet for say, oil....

[Vooker525]

Outstanding move, forcing players to use harverster ships/stations with officers on worlds that have one to none Q255 resource deposit on surface. With limited worlds this becomes worse. Now i have to develop several ringworlds to have tens of officers just for harvesting purpose when i could just use 2 cities in system to get one good resource.

I suggest atleast add some kind of planetary type of harvester similar that ships are equipped. It would depend not on deposit it was built on but on world's resource abudance. And it would require some rare resources to build.

Because officers are easier to handle by server than bunch of buildings with timers, yes?

[Vectorus]

Could also cut ship and building material costs by 100 or more it that feels more natural? Would be fine with that, though some other processes might need tweaking too.

It just feels painful to design something exciting then have to pay three months and wait three months not doing anything while I wait for it to gather. Can't skip a subscription month where nothing happens, because of decay (not that I would anyway, but other players might want to). 

Other games that make you wait real life months for things (like Eve?) are not games where one of the PRIMARY REWARDS of the whole game comes from designing and building. There, it's just something in the background ticking down while you play the main action sequences. For us, the foreground of our experience is staring at a process that says "not ready".

Remember also that old mines and Wells could share the same rocks between up to 4 buildings.

[Haxus]

Mines and wells are not prevented from overlapping. Mines just can't overlap mines and wells can't overlap wells.

[Haxus]

If they are allowed to overlap, then they might as well have unlimited shops per structure. I don't like that situation.

The actual number of rocks present was always intended to be the limit to the production available there. That limitation fell apart at some point along the way.

In the tile terrain days, a tile had 0-4 rocks. That determined the number of mining processes you could run. Likewise, the number of trees limited the number of logging processes. You could not put two buildings on the same tile.