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Oct
17

Development Progression

Andy has nearly completed his replacement for Lisa. Lisa, for those interested, can be read about here:

http://lisa.sourceforge.net/

Lisa was theoretically fine, but we ran into massive performance and scalability problems when we moved from the "testing" phase to the "production" phase of the new rule-based gameplay code. This is what caused us to release the NPC traders and escort missions, and then rapidly un-release those features. We then spent some time spent trying to fix Lisa, or generally debug what was going on, but eventually ended with Andy writing his own replacement from scratch over the past week.

Andy and Michael are now in the final stages of fixing up the new system for testing (It has an internal development name, but not a final name at present). We hope to test with it tonight, and, if all goes well, start to use it in production this week. Of course "all going well" is open-ended, this is a whole new chunk of code, written from scratch. Theoretically, the performance should be much, much better, and we should be able to make greater use of the Deliverator. Keep your fingers crossed for theories holding up in practice later this week.

Ray is still moving forward with the UI development. The HUD and most of the in-game displays and interfaces are functional, and he's now moving on to the station menus and such. The UI development will be ongoing for awhile yet, but it's coming along well.

That's all for now, just a quick update. We'll post more when we know more, and hopefully you'll see the "new" features starting to show up again. Thank you, as always, for your patience and support.

-john