#Dev Blog

I’ve taken to trying to keep you all abreast of what’s going on in the world of your Developer (in relation to Core-Exiles lol) and it’s been easier to drop a few paragraphs into the Discord specified channel (#dev-log).

For those of you that don’t use the chat or can’t access for one reason or another, here’s a copy of the posts since my last data dump here.

Federation Of Mining
This morning, the F.O.M office has received the upgrade to the new filter office view that many of the others have received lately. I have NOT changed how the office works, other than to increase (quite a lot) how many missions are offered per viewing.

For now, I have left the regen in place, as you can only carry one F.O.M Mission at any one time. (Perhaps a conversation could be help for holding more than one (not same field). But I’ll leave that to you to raise.

F.O.M Missions can be quite lucrative if you pick them up when you’re far from home, or intending on travelling a long way. I have left the level 10 lock out for players outside the Sphere. Thinking there is to not get them too far from the sphere chasing down large pay days. Again, I’m open to discussion on this is its needed.

I also ran an eye over the take mission and hand mission code to ensure it’s cleaned up and more in line. Again, no actual changes were made so your Hallowed FOM office still does the same thing, just a little better 🙂

Cyber Deck Re-tooling
A follow up request for the re tooling of the cyber deck, just one suggestion so far. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3882
[12:00]Coops: Community forum Update
Today I did something I’ve been putting off. I upgraded our forums to the latest release of the phpbb software. This brings us bang up to date with 3.3.8. From the user’s point of view not much will have changed (if anything for you) but under the hood there were a number of changes.

If you’re geeky and lie to know the what’s what, visit https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2623141

From my perspective it’s sometimes sweaty palms moment doing these patches / version upgrades as fixing a broken upgrade is often a Real P.I.T.A. I’m glad to say it went smoothly this time!

Large tree limb I dragged in from the garden put back out, blowtorch and gaffer tape placed back on the development shelf.

NPC Mission Changes
Historically most NPC’s in Core-Exiles have always been mono-mission. By that I mean you either need to kill, collect or do a specific task throughout the mission line.

Thanks to Elkhorn giving me a rather long and complex mission line I have decided to bit the bullet and create an NPC system that will allow us (going forwards) more flexibility and NPC’s will be able to switch and create complex missions lines based on almost any in game activity. – @Elkhorn – challenge accepted 🙂

Passenger Group Update
Looks like the passenger groups didn’t get the memo when Research Station 2 was destroyed : viewtopic.php?t=1181 I have this morning reset their tickets to new destinations. Thanks @Porrima

Janus Virus Cure
A while back, players trading in high volumes of the fluffy cute creatures we call Ribblez here at Core-Exiles, had started to become infected with what was later called the Janus Virus. Deemed to be harmless but annoying with a few unknown side effects.

Well now Dr. Giles Robinson over at DSV-MED-03 in the Medifield System has perfected his ‘cure’. It’s a doozy I’ll give him that. He’s a little eccentric but, apart from his taste of fine wines, he can be trusted to cure anyone infected with the Janus Virus.

Those infected will be informed by the G-CDC Administration, and this is normally due to storing high volumes of the fluffy critters on your ship. The G-CDC take a dim view of these infestation critters and generally intervene before they get out of hand, but from time to time some captain will push their luck and become infected.

Once infected you can (should you choose) go see Dr Robinson, others may decide to live with the side effects, though I’ve heard the hallucinations can drive a captain to drink.

Dr Robinsons cure will make you immune to any further infections, but the G-CDC will still be on the lookout for Ribblez should you decided to continue to collect the critters in large numbers.

Charter Licence Upgrade
So the change for Haulage Offices is now out, and balanced to where we want it. I took several weeks of monitoring and tweaking to get it where we have it. Overall, the ranges have been tweaked, and the rewards specifically have gone up quite dramatically from the old model. I have also spent a lot of time working on the generation system and the speed and preference of regenerating offered missions.

Whilst removing the ‘Regen’ option in haulage offices and locking you down to a view of 50 Missions, we also planned for players to swamp offices or try to run an office dry (between mission regeneration). Because of this, there is a large pool of missions that the offices hold in reserve.

Today, they have decided to sign a Charter Licence. The default licence still offers captains a view of the next 50 missions on offer to everyone, but for the more discerning captain, they are now allowing you to increase your Charter Licence.

You can increase your Licence in increments of +25. This has been agreed upon by all the Haulage companies, and each company will uphold the licence increase per captain. Licence increases can be grabbed via the in game VIP store or via the CE Store should you wish. Note, no matter where you get your upgrades from, you will not be able to increase your Charter Licence above 200.

Battleship Construction
I have spent most of the last week working on separating out the constructions tasks for Battleships between the four main building sites and also a sprinkling of player construction.

Players will have a hand in constructing a % of the required components and modules required by the three new primary building systems.

These will be Genesis Deployments, Settlements and Corporations. They will take an amalgamation of self built items along with standard ship modules and convert them in to Battleship modules.

Finally the Starbases will take these module components and be able to build Battleships based loosely on a similar system to Player made ships.

There will be laid down a small selection of Frames / Chassis and each battleship will have a series of modular sections that can have slightly differnt selections made. This will ensure that players have a certain amount of flexibility over the build process.

Over time we will add to the whole build process allowing for varied battleships to be manufactured. But initially I want to get a system up and running and thoroughly tested.

Each of the Build systems will be a new series of buildings and in some cases research options for the Four systems mentioned above. These will be player crafted and store bought, when released. A whole lot has to happen before we reach that stage and a lot of testing must take place before final release.

Stamina Stims
From time to time players make suggestions in the forums. Sometimes these are an easy ‘obvious’ change or add and sometimes they need a little more thought or even player feedback.

@Yokose made a suggestion a while back for expanding the way stamina stims count be obtained and yesterday I took a few hours out to do just that.

Check it out : viewtopic.php?p=25491#p25491

Discord Changes
Sadly over the last few months we have had a disruptive small % of visitors come to our chat. As the chat is here for ‘Actual CE players’ to allow them to chat and aid each other and generally catch up with their CE friends I have made changes over that period to the discord Chat.

Yesterday saw another final round of Discord adjustments. We moved the Security setting of our Server to the next level and now before anyone can ‘post’ they will need to have ‘confirmed’ their discord account. Simple enough and ensures that people using discord are actual people, not bots and have a registered verifiable email address.

I have also removed all references / links to our discord channel other than the in game footer link. This means that we should only see people who either are already playing CE or have signed up and logged in to the game.

The server and channels were created for YOU the players and I want to ensure that this is a safe and family orientated place to meet and chat.

Passengers / Groups
Thanks to another diligent player I have spent several hours now getting to the bottom of a few select passenger issues. This related around the pricing, though I feel I have now found the issue and plugged it.

One thing to bear in mind is that whilst passengers are broken into three distinct classes, not all passengers will pay the ‘exact’ same fare for a ticket to the same place as each other. It’s normal to have a slight variance from two passenger fares going to the same place over the same distance. Not much but ‘some variance’.

Settlement Passenger Boost
Recently (thanks to constant updates from Porrima) I have been tracking down a series of niggling issues with a tiny % of the passengers. Some had the wrong Galaxy, some the wrong system, and some initially the wrong ticket price. All very confusing till I eventually found the niggle little snippet of code.

Passengers were given a large boost to their ticket prices last month and along with the new interface it makes them far more lucrative and easy to work with. But today whilst looking at how the settlement Union passengers were created I decided to make a change there as well.

I have increased (quite substantially) the maximum amount of passengers a Settlement can hold on their roster. The actual amount is tied to your tourism rate so the higher that the more the system can bring over to your settlement for movement.

I have completely rewritten that particular code ticker, as it was behaving in a very weird way and was so overly complicated that it needed a complete recoding from scratch.

That has been completed, and been run time and time again with varying tests to see if I could trip it up, glad to day I could not.

So here to happy passenger movement in the Universe.

Day at Bugtrack
Today has seen me working my way through the remaining open bugs. Some I had to fix, one was a non issue and the other a point of ‘balance’ past and present.

Thank you to those of you that took the time to raise and post a bug. As always I appreciate clear concise logging with as much info as possible, this makes working on these issues much simpler.

Battleship Schematics
Been hard at creating the player level Schematics for Battleships last few days. Getting closer to having these completed. Lots of resources being used here along with the schematics for normal PM ships sections.

Now finalised the builds for Genesis, Corporation and Settlements. Certainly going to be keeping you all busy and scrambling for resources when we go live with this!