04/30/14 Updates

I had been meaning to write up this post a few weeks ago but I was too busy making text. The most recent addition to our motley crew is Vega, who has actually made working text without crashing the MOO.

The majority of changes since the last post are as follows:

- Several new hackable 'secure' container types for randomly spawning in pirate encounter rooms.
- Gauss rifles are now far easier to make, and gauss pistols can be made too now.
- Some spooky action involving stat boosting gadgets was fixed.
- Armor no longer erroneously displays a weight carrying bonus of 0.0kg.
- Pirate scouts and ultralites have been fixed and no longer have their pilots go mysteriously missing.
- Pirate fighters now spawn in solar systems.
- Fighter, ultralight and scout class ships can now be produced on the experimental starship workstation.
- Some odd behavior regarding starship debris in space was fixed, sparse starship debris can now be collected with an asteroid mining module and is cleaned up with other junk in space after three or so hours.
- Junk in space is now more intelligently cleaned up on the three-hourly schedule, 'unstable fix' items can now be shot at in space but at any distance (this is a temporary workaround).
- Some new critters to meet and get your face torn off by.
- Adjustments and improvements to shield modules and shield terminals, now better shields will require more power, charge more stability per tick and have more max stability.
- Some organic materials are now edible and can be eaten raw, such as native berries or native fungus. These might give you a disease or a stomach upset rarely.
- Some new 'invisble' (no terrain messages to spam up the map) resources including native (and exotic) spices and herbs, exotic fungus and native tubers.
- A bunch of new food items, a few of which require the new scavengeable organic materials, some which can only be bought and some which even can only be crafted from certain fish. You want depth, we got depth.
- The maker block has been readjusted to make food, drink and other useful items rather than ice cream and assorted tacky junk you'd find in some 99 cent store (it still makes ice cream though).
- Injector logic was adjusted so it is no longer relying on one massive insane if statement to work out what you want to inject. You can now inject anyone following you, in your party or in your corp. Wild animals and robots cannot be injected regardless of the previous cases.
- Pirate kings in moon dungeons have been replaced by moon pirate officers, I plan to make pirate kings the big bads which only spawn on rare occasions or as a result of quest/mission activity.
- A new layer of world generation which produces volcanoes on the surface of a planet depending on the level of tectonic activity present.
- Underground Points of Interest now exist, these will act as large mineral veins, caverns or some other goodie, buried horror or event which will make digging interesting beyond finding a bunch of inert metal every tile. These will be expended and replaced on a daily basis.
- Fixed some odd behavior regarding linking robot handpads when they have no assigned robots, and old hand-e droids not actually being a claimable object.
- Code-locked doors which require you to enter a number between 1111 and 9999 to open the door, these will be accompanied by a mainframe/datapad/chip you have to hack or a pirate you have to steal a note from for the code.
- Kodak flashers (an object dating back to the really early days) now correctly emit messages to the room the user is in.
- Containers now have a dump command which can be used to dump the contents of one container into another, or just to dump the contents onto the floor.
- The player corpnet got a 'history' and 'who command, as well as the ability to be turned on and off.
- Buildings which utilise the On-Demand System to re-use their indoor rooms that can have vehicles loaded into them such as the Large Warehouse can now correctly have vehicles loaded into them.
- Colonist-driven automated harvesting/refining/production is in the works, you can see the work-in-progress input command in the governors office in a sector center.
- There is now a job board in the administrative lobby in central complex which shows all the jobs you can possibly perform and earn rewards for (and those you can't).
- Layer-based dungeons are in the works, these will involve making a 'layer-cake' dungeon formed of a set of floors which are one of multiple different variants of the floor, and can be rotated by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Along with the new randomised encounter contents, this provides more depth and a novel challenge for players used to the static pirate dungeons.
- 8-pound shells and the 8-pounder main cannon are now 96mm shells and the 96mm main cannon now, the weight reference in the name was somewhat odd.
- Even more prefixes and descriptions for stat relics.
- Random material armor can now be passed a set of arguments during population which dictates the material, quality and thickness so now a full matching set of material armor can be populated at the same time. The stat bonuses and module capacity/modules will still be random though.
- Some refinements to the 'put' command which prevents you from putting your worn equipment and wielded weapons in a container.
- Refinements to the robot 'sell' command to consolidate all the selling into one action rather than queuing dozens of actions.

We've recently had a large spike in the number of players regularly on the game, nothing beats seeing a whole bunch of new dudes playing your game and sticking around and the added input from bug reports and suggestions is also speeding development along.
In other news, we had an outage today whilst our server was reportedly moved to a new datacenter.

Keep posted folks, there'll always be new changes to report.

03/06/13 Updates

Aphteroid here, some pretty important development has been going on recently and some of the things produced have opened up large areas of possibility for the game. If you think the game has already got a lot of depth, think again- we're only just getting started.

Here come the updates:
- Major restructuring of how planets and npcs are hibernated, planets are now hibernated per-sector which allows for just small areas on each planet to be active at one time which cuts down on unnecessary simulation. $heart was also modified to reduce unnecessary calls to :creature_heartbeat, both of these changes have resulted in massive improvements of CPU usage and we now run less than 10 $heart queues rather than the 80+ we were running previously, I doubt more than 20% of all NPCs will be active at any one time between each 15-minute hibernation run. Kudos to ASM for these changes, I wouldn't have been able to sort out the mess of hibernation I'd made.

- Experimental pirate pilot AI has been developed, a fitting mechanism to spawn pirates has yet to be formulated but the relatively simple AI module has displayed capability of finding, chasing and then attacking a target in space using their ship. Given the way the module works, it could easily allow a robot to perform these tasks in future.
- Starships that explode in space now leave debris that can be collected with an asteroid miner, they contain various materials including minor components of the former starship.
- Asteroid mining has received an update which allows for resources which aren't raw materials to be mined, and the quality of said items is based off the random quality range of the constituent materials weighted towards the percentage of complexity they provide.
- A new building decay/abandonment mechanic is now in place which abandons your buildings if you haven't connected for over a year, this is to clean up unused objects. Players will receive in-game mail to warn them if their stuff is going to be abandoned soon to give them time to respond.
- Maximum health is now determined via a :health_max verb on players to stop problems arising from changing the player's .health_max property such as permanent modification of maximum health.
 - The status and gear readouts have both had work done on them to make them more informative and provide clearer information.
- Item drops can now be formatted as a set of mutually exclusive items (such as a scavenger rat dropping either a wild hide OR a fur hide) dropped in the same roll, pirates have now had their drops condensed into many of such sets and have had their inventory drop chances nerfed.
- Travelling traders now respect the true value of items they sell, this includes respecting the value of contents inside any containers they are selling.
- Civilians will now wear any gadgets you give them and judge new equipment you give them more intelligently (they still need a longer and more precise routine to compare and decide between two pieces of armor though).

- NPC factions no longer build sector centers and thusly no longer have civilians as members of their faction, this is partially due to hatred cascades where the civilians would end up fighting (and losing to) the faction units for some reason. This also reduces the number of (perhaps unnecessary) civilians chewing up CPU.
- Weapon modules are now available on blueprint chips, these provide fixed bonuses to the weapon they are installed to and all of them have had descriptions set before release (thanks to Endre for the descriptions). It is likely crafted weapon modules will increase in usefulness with higher quality later.
- Tractor beams can now manipulate virtually any ship, and will take differing numbers of stages depending on the size of the ship involved.
- Robots now have a remote inventory command which will tell you what they are carrying.
- Many new implants are now available from black market stores, some are bonus implants and others dispense a useful drug.
- Radiation sickness and rad-shield drugs in the works to make radiation more interesting. (Finished as of 03/07/13).
- You can now load starships into a solar carrier whilst it is landed, useful for scooping up stolen asteroid miners for chopping.
- Datapads for recording notes are now much more stable, you can write, read, list and delete notes on it to your leisure.
- Updates to fuel cells to make them keep any charges left over if the starship is full of fuel when they are used.

Development is continuing at a steady pace, I imagine there's some good things in store for the next few months. Keep tuned folks.

stuff 3: revenge of the stuff

What would appear to be inactivity is actually just developers being very quiet, we've stil been working on the game and have made a bunch of improvements since the last post here.

For starters, we've got a shiny new Central Complex Alpha which is situated inside an actual space station in the local system DSO-12. It's got a bunch of new shops and facilities and now has a hangar floor below, and an administrative floor above the mall and recreation complex floor. Amongst the new facilities are a starship store, rec dome, holotheater, medical bay, a loan terminal, four whole hangars to park your ship in, and three stores which each stock one element of the former central gear stores stock list. All in all, it serves those who visit it better than the original did and can be accessed via starship for pick-up/drop-off of things and people and refuelling.

Moons previous were dungeons which could be docked with, they now have the same randomly generated surfaces as planets (though are mostly boring rocks covered in ice and have no atmosphere) with the existing types of moon dungeon generated within a building somewhere on the moon's surface. The rarer resources are more common on moons and thusly make EVA trips to your planet's local moon a worthwhile activity. As well as this, you might find more than one pirate hideout on a moon.

Likewise, several new items and vehicle weapons have been added to the game and some existing items have had their credit values reduced to allow new players to be able to afford them from the gear stores. Here are some other changes that have been done recently:

- More balancing of crafting requirements on some items.
- You can no longer own more than one pre-fab shelter at once, this makes the retiree background less of a cakewalk.
- Plasma grenades have been added, for giggles.
- A few more starship weapons have been added.
- Vertibird health has been increased by three times, supermarine sillohuette health has been reduced to 300.
-  The starship store in central complex alpha can deliver any starships you buy to a personal hangar or starship complex, if you own one.
- Intelligent creatures (such as pirates) now behave slightly more intelligently towards grenades thrown at them.
- Planets are now centered within their zones, and their moons are spread around in orbits around them.
- Thermonuclear missiles, for extra giggles.
- A whole swathe of objects have been given descriptions.
- Tractor beam modules for solar carriers, so you can collect all those starships people have left in space and chop them up for their delicious parts.
- And a lot more.

All in all, it's been a fairly productive two months and we're looking forwards to pushing into beta (eventually).

2/20/12 update:
- Four new armor sets.
- New armor 'superior' mechanics (which give a bonus to quality, +25 module capacity and a free random module 50% of the time).
- Six new weapons and seven new ammo variations (oh boy 40mm plasma grenades).
- Battlegrounds, a set of maps and scenarios which you can compete in teams against against other players for money, skillpoints and new 'battleground points' which can be spent on goodies.
- Six new armor modules and three new implants.
- Nearly all armor pieces have had weights and values assigned for them.
- A bunch of weapons have had their attacks revamped and given multiple start/miss/hit messages.
- A bunch of new starship weapons.
- Pretty much every armor set has had their resist values changed and all armor pieces should now have the same resist values as their respective torso piece.
- A feature object added to all players to allow them to join/leave a battleground queue anywhere in the game and a command to see the status of the current battleground (it shows the current battleground and queued players if you're not in a battleground otherwise it shows players in assigned teams, team scores, match time left and the match type).
- A mechanic to allow critical success in crafting depending on your crafting skill roll, this increases the produced item's quality by 10-20%.

Updates 11/27/12

* bug fixes, ideas implemented, and general cleanup:

* main weapon room for large ships:

Intruders can hack this room to halt or dissipate the main weapon charge.  The main weapon can be recharged by crew or players with the starship engineering skill.  The more engineers present the faster the main gun will recharge.
 * More guides added to the website
 * Cleaned up indoor map display and spruced up the dreadnought interior:

 * ranger background's hunting skill is now useful:

Updates 10/9/12

* web integration fixed!
* regen chamber for vehicles and starships, allowing players to register for their next respawn at the chamber's location:

* Snap shot as biomes continue to develop:

Oh dear

Everything went badly.

A productive use of time

Today I decided to do something productive.

Things did not turn out as planned.

Changelog 9/18/12

* Starship hulks!
* Respawn terminals for returning to starships, moons, etc
* Supply Expert skill command - REQ (allows the player to requisition items in the field):

* Quality control skill command - INSPECT (allows the player to view blueprints a material or component is used in):

Updates 8/30/12

* moved to a new server for half the cost with double the RAM
* added airlock doors to some starship interiors, allowing you to vent anything in the airlock into space
* added ship intercoms
* a multitude of spawner improvements, mainly to support & implement a full 3d on demand spawning for digging and climbing.  Which does work at last:

* a variety of other random fixes
* digging in it's most basic form:

* new job for linking solar systems with a warp gate
* added two new solar systems
* security cameras are now available on the electronics processor tool:

* new starship for constructing space deployables:

Belated Aphteroid Updates

I went on vacation for a week and got a bit behind on stuff. One thing I'm pushing towards is getting civilians to do stuff on their own, notably making their own stuff and gearing themselves and their buddies up with gear that's better than the terrible civilian clothing they start with.

This hasn't been going too badly so far, I've got the gathering AI module functioning.

The AI module is supposed to 'guide' the civilian, what it's actually doing is grabbing them and forcing them to do all these things. In short, the civilian decides what resource they are going to gather, see if they've got a backpack and relevant tool (and automagically spawn them if they don't) then attempt to harvest ten units of that resource. They will then stuff all that into their backpack and continue harvesting until their backpack is carrying 20 units of resources, where they will then attempt to find a storehouse (and construct one if one isn't present) and get all the resources from their backpack and put it inside the container inside the storehouse.
They then repeat the whole thing until the storehouse container is full, after which they'll go out of their mind and walk in and out of the storehouse and freak out, or maybe drop their backpacks in there and stop harvesting like they're supposed to.

I have done some other stuff too:
I made some demolition weapons, the 25mm grenade rifle and 40mm grenade launcher and their respective ammunition. The grenade rifle holds five 25mm grenades (convenient, as a box of 25mm grenades contains 25 grenades) and is supposed to be some crazy semi-auto launcher or whatever. The grenade launcher is supposed to be a break-action double-barrelled affair and thus holds two 40mm grenades, (also convenient, the box of 40mm grenades contains 16 grenades).
Both of these weapons deal solely explosive damage, making them useful for fighting against buildings and pretty much everything else. I also made a vehicle weapon that uses the 25mm grenades as ammunition, the Assault-class Rat Gatler which is a pretty nasty piece of kit to be on the receiving end of.

As well as this, a few weather types are now a fair bit more hazardous, moderate thunderstorms now come with a chance of lightning (mostly just resulting in messages, unless you're unlucky), sleet comes with a chance of dealing cold damage to you, ice and hail storms come with a chance of dealing a mixture of cold and blunt damage to you, mostly blunt and ice storms being worse.

More to come folks.

Aphteroid changes 10/08/12

Another truckload of changes in the past few days, mostly revolving around civilians and their role in the colony. Whilst we had planned to make them work at the civic buildings you construct this never actually came to fruition.

Instead, I made them available for the controller of the sector center to use as personal bodyguards, if you control their home sector center then you may ask them to follow you or to stay put as you command, if you give them weapons they will gladly wield them (and automagically reload ranged weapons with ammo produced from their magick pockets) and if given a piece of armor they will either put it on, take off an existing piece of armor in the same slot and replace it with that given to them, or reject the new armor if it's value is lesser than their existing piece.
All this, and you can now construct a militia barracks which will encourage the civilians to perform training exercises to improve their maximum health and maximum dice pools, making them more effective bodyguards and defenders of their colony. I also payed some attention to the sector center itself, changing the description of the governor's office to account for statistics including, but not limited to bonuses from surrounding civic buildings and the maximum population the colony's total civic bonus can support. (Generally five, plus the total civ bonus divided by two).

In short:
- Civilians are available to colony owners as bodyguards
-Civilians now accept equipment from people
- Civilians are able to improve their terrible default health and dice pools (with some help)
- Sector centers now update their maximum civilian allowance every three hours dependant on civic building counts
- Civilian housing buildings are now un-hidden by default, now bear lootables of mediocre value and now have default damage resists
- Civilians sometimes spawn with default equipment such as colonial rifles and machetes
- Civilians sometimes spawn with an AI package to allow them to bandage wounds of them and nearby friendlies

Of course I did do other stuff aside from this things, but I'll keep it short:
- Changed food to actually make it beneficial, making it nearly always give you a status effect which provides a dice/max hp bonus and periodic dice regeneration
- More buildings, and more buildings for NPC factions
- More AI and improvements to existing AI packages to make them do less stupid things and cause fewer potentially hilarious accidents (like a complex two ranger being mysteriously dragged around the circumfrence of WY-1444 after a typo in NPC vehicle support)
- Various bug fixes, including the notorious 'oh my god I just typed get all and now I can't stop picking up things please someone kill me oh goooooood' bug and it's variants.
- please help i'm dissolving in text

Aphteroid Changes 07/08/12

Aphteroid again, a few more noteworthy things I've made amongst the ocean of property setting and verb/action tweaks I've done to push progress on the underground.

Random weapon bonuses/modifiers, weapons looted off NPCs such as pirates may now have a random modifier such as 'light', 'heavy', 'serrated' and 'balanced', amongst others.

These modifiers affect the properties of the weapon, at the moment include:
- A fixed reduction or increment to the damage done by the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment in the time taken to perform attacks with the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment to the deterioration chance of the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment to the weight of the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment (usually an increment) to the value of the weapon.
- A fixed reduction or increment to the tohit/accuracy bonus of the weapon.

It was all fairly simple to do, but that's the joy of procedural generation- even a few simple rules can diversify gameplay to a great extent.
I used this new support for bonuses to make a tier 1.5 version of the Colonial Machete named the Bolo Machete, which requires 1 Plastiform Brick, 2 Solid-phase Alloy and 1 Responsive Metal, most of which require some effort and existing infrastructure to acquire.

On top of this, a few new drugs/injectors have been implemented:
- Those who have respawned will be given a bonus to all dice max and max hp for two minutes (approximately)
- Liquid food injectors for those who don't like eating.
- Two new drugs (blast-zone and jerkback) which immediately recover a large amount of dice and give some buffs/debuffs (and will harm you if you go over 5 doses).
- All of this involves the chemistry tool and medical workstation, which are somewhat unloved at the moment.

In other news, I scoured a whole bunch of items which didn't have credit values or correct components and gave them appropriate values respectively, and did a bunch of other things which I forget.
Oh, and I fixed bugs too.

Changes 03/08/12

Aphteroid here. I got my nose to the grindstone for the whole of yesterday and early today and got a pile of stuff done.

- NPC factions now have a great deal more support, and in the nearby future will be populated on-the-fly with the birth of planets or when an existing faction is destroyed. Here is a funky image of the factions database's readout.

- Various bugfixes, tweaks and additions have been made, notably the ability to stop a hacking attempt and the ability to enter 'all' when crafting, this immediately transfers the required number of components from the highest quality components available to the tool.

- Scanning things, it actually gives you details about things in space now! (If you didn't already notice).

- Planets which are not hospitable, for example FA-1116. This little number is small, boring, and every inch of it's flatland-and-desert surface is covered in strong mineral acids and vents that jet the aforementioned acids everywhere. Luckily it didn't quite have the right conditions to generate oceans of mineral acids, but it's still horrid.

-  Claimable machine gun nests with MG-128 heavy machine guns (formerly scout-class 'rat' gatling guns, when mounted on vehicles).

- Vehicle weapons which require ammo.

- Automated crafting workstations, which will pull components from their input hopper, assemble the product specified and put the finished product in the output hopper. This degree of automation should make lengthy processes such as starship construction or the mass-production of processed materials a lot easier.

- Non-sentient wildlife now age a lot faster, dying of old age within (approximately) one or two real life hours. This helps remove wildlife from rooms which should be purged, helping reduce database size and memory footprint further.

- Innate skills and bonus items given by background, the ranger background provides you with a Ranger Duster, an alright piece starter of torso armor for soaking physical damage and the Keen Eye innate skill which provides a +2 ToHit bonus and +5 to your maximum Clarity dice pool.
The Serial Killer background provides you with the Insane in the Membrane innate skill which provides a +1 ToHit bonus, a +1 Dodge bonus and +5 to your maximum Aggression dice pool.
The Lab Tech background provides the Lab Coat, an alright piece of starter torso armor for soaking energy, chemical and toxic damages.

- Moon phases, as 17-EGRET and 7-BLUEJAY both have two moons orbitting them, I decided to have the two moons have phase differences, adding a little flavor to existing moon phase messages displayed by the 'time' command (which I fixed, at some point in the last 2/3 months).

- Intelligent NPCs can now use weapons or armor. Whilst they will not wield weapons given to them, any NPC faction units or pirates will now spawn with weapons or armor with either 100% certainty or a chance of the item spawning. This is due to a spawn equipment support, and attack suggestion update I made a month ago which allows intelligent NPCs to spawn with weapons, armor and gadgets and hook into existing support for wielding the objects they spawn with, they will select weapons they are wielding before they use their standard attacks and will reload any ranged weapons that require ammo.

All in all, a productive month and a half, we're making strides towards our Alpha Stage-2 goals now, having nearly completely finished Stage-1 goals, expect good things in future.

Changelog 7/30/12

* new shot of the on demand status, which has been running quite nicely for the last month or so.  Next up is making it three-D to handle the underground.  Altitude simulation is in as well!

* added vehicle painting customization:

* added the first pvp claimable - a fusion bomb (yes i did get this idea from the dark knight rises).  After a 12 hour delay it scours the land nearby.  A good way to get rid of buildings:

* Aphtonites implemented air support for npc invaders and buffed up SCUDs, among other internal changes.
* Death taunts - now on laffnet!

Update update for 7/23/12

Most of these updates are courtesy of Aphtonites - here are the two I've been working on when I catch a break from real work and going under the dentist's knife.  In addition Adminski has done some excellent work on immersive descriptions and even a little sane community building 8)

* new server configured

* some progress on implementing CheechLizard's much cooler website design

Aphtonites updates:

* New discoverables, including tier 1.5 materials

* A slew of new weapons and armor

* New starships, starship weapons, and tanks (~!)

* vehicle dealers!

* salvaging!

* upgrades to attacks, landings, and various space actions
* NPC factions that build and expand on their own
* Space upgrades of all kinds

* Massive upgrades to the economy, full trade system, fully operational bulk buy/sell options:

* Sniping!

Changelog 7/2/12

* Aphteroid asked me to post some of his changes in the dev blog too. I was going to, but there were so many it would take too long.  Several dozen fixes and additions: for flyers, new explosives and gas masks, bandages, dropped loot, more.
* Apht fixed cockpit view for instance:

* re-implemented HellMOO $decal objects and added the first decal, which of course is a nice scorch mark from your drop pod
* a whole lot of improvements and bug fixes to the spawner:

* weather revamp:

two cloud fronts with rain in the middle

northern clouds / weather shift after update

clouds to the southwest, rainfall off the coast

forest in the middle of the clouds on FROG-1322

Changelog 6/27/12

* flyers vehicles and most normal things now work perfectly on the new on demand planets
* new look for flyer cockpits:

* Some larger planets, too big for screenshots: CT-732 Planet Map, IT-1067 Planet Map, WY-1444 Planet Map
* a double (21 x 21) sized minimap for running around in the wilderness:

Updates 6/26/12

* multiple bug fixes to shops, wilderness, and creatures
* Aphtonites implemented a loan terminal for takin out those loans for new tri-d screens that you don't really need
* implemented inferno pistol on the equipment tool
* implemented maxi-melter ranged weapon with ammo

* new ammo supplier job
* completed the $api.claimable, $api.claimable.implementation, $actions.claim, and $actions.abandon to implement a non hacking based PVP claiming mechanic.  The air scanner pictured below is the prototype:

* uploaded rough draft of $api.claimable to: modular-moocode @ google code
* rough draft of the $ods/on demand spawn system for dynamically spawning rooms: