« News

May
09

Server-side Release

Over the past week, we've made the following changes:

- Fixed a bug that caused spawning far too many escort missions, under certain conditions.
- Addition of new economy analytics, to further track millions of new data points relating to trade convoys.
- Improved existing analytics that track the state of AI relating to NPC navigability.
- NPCs convoys are less likely to be stalled for lengthy periods, while docking (although they can still take awhile on certain stations with limited docking bays).
- Fixed certain rare-condition bugs with NPCs docking.
- Furies will not become aggressive if a player repairs them.
- Mitigated Furie issue with aggression when transitioning from Park to Follow, further work remains to be done.

This work doesn't necessarily scream "gameplay drop", but we're still trying to expand on the new Latos N-2 test economy, and a huge part of that is making sure the delivery convoys actually work properly. Because we're actually delivering items in the NPC convoys "for real" and are not faking it in the background, it's fairly complicated to handle all the different edge cases and unusual circumstances.

The actual individual ship carrying the actual item has to reach the destination. For a single given ship, that's fine, but across thousands of ships flying across the galaxy per day, there are plenty of problems that can arise.

That's where the analytics come in, to help us monitor and measure that situation. Of course, monitoring roughly 135 stations delivering about 250 unique goods to another 135 stations, with various convoy states and success / failure conditions, can quickly blow up into tens of millions of data points to track. That's a whole other type of challenge. But, that's also why we spent a bunch of time building a new analytics cluster to handle this, last fall.

Anyway, we're hopeful that next week we'll be able to do some more content drops. In the meantime, please let us know if you find any bugs or major issues, via the Bugs forum. Thanks everyone!