Again, it’s been a bit since I’ve posted an update on the specifics of what I’ve been working on, so here is your Calypso Update! Over the past few weeks I’ve had two major projects in the works, both of them from the Suggestions system.

The first, at number three, are the proposed scooping changes.

In case you aren’t aware, it was proposed we change scooping from a button spam to a ‘hold the button down and just keep scooping’ type operation. To facilitate this, all scoops will have two new values. The first is a ‘scooping range’ value. Any debris that is within this radius of your ship will be eligible to scoop. The second is a ‘scoops-per-second’ value. This will determine how fast your ship can scoop items while you keep the scoop key held down.

Along with that change, I’ve also added a new feature we plan to use on some scoops called ‘Vacuum Scooping’. A vacuum scoop will not only function as detailed above, but it will have a third new value called ‘vacuum range’. All debris within this range will be slowly pulled towards your ship until it is in scooping range and can be scooped. This means stuff like scooping credits in a DG is going to get a lot easier.

Both these change also mean the way scoops use energy has to be changed as well. Instead of using a small chunk of energy every time you hit the scoop key (which is the way it currently works, scoops will subtract from your overall EPS in the same way shield chargers or other equippable items with an energy requirement do. This delta in the EPS will only be applied while you are actively scooping of course.

Don’t be worried that these changes will make scooping feel unnatural though. These are more of an addition to current scooping functionality than a complete change of how scoops work. If you want to spam your scoop key, by all means, go ahead. But it will be a lot easier to just scoop and hold.

The second, at number nine, is the Neurobind and Mod feature.

Again, if you aren’t aware, this feature will introduce a new right-click option in your client, “Neurobind item…”. Neurobinding and item will require one Bindomite, a new commodity that will be a global drop at all levels (and also be found in prospecting nodes). In exchange for neurobinding the item, the item will be given a roll at the mod system with a minimum of one mod guaranteed (more are possible however!). The “Neurobind Item…” option can only be used on non-neurobound, unequipped items while docked, so yes, you can neurobind an item that is already modded to get more mods on it. However, you will want to be careful. Once an item is neurobound you can’t go back and you will be stuck with whatever mods have been randomly assigned.

Both these changes are about to hit testing so it shouldn’t be too long until you see them (as well as some other suggestions that you guys have voted up!).

Sorry for the lack of a blog yesterday. There wasn’t anything new and exciting to report. Today we had our usual quick meeting plus a meeting with myself, Jeff, Jey, and Kalipso to discuss SS as a whole. Meetings for 1.5 hours today! Woo!

First the dev specific updates!

Jey found the memory corruption issue! Huzzah! This was the source of most of the crashes here recently. We’re crossing our fingers that most of the crash issues have been resolved. (Knock on wood)

Thomas is finishing up our new front page and it’s looking snazzy!

I honestly forgot what Kalipso and Jeff have been doing, mostly bug fixes from what I gather? (it’s late and I forgot to take notes).

I took yesterday largely off to recoup since I haven’t had a day off in 10 days.  I also worked some on our F2P vs P2P page to adequately explain what all goodies you can do as a F2P and what perks you get when you move P2P. I wrestled with JavaScript and taught it a lesson, and thankfully Thomas and SI had more experience with JavaScript than I and were able to help me make JavaScript work with our crappy CMS page editors.

Blue Dwarf has been still working on something with the balance sheets. Yes, they’re still evil.

As I said we had a big meeting today to discuss marketing and how to frame the game as a whole. Jeff wrote up a good document showing how the game is really all over the place and it’s hard to try and peg down what exactly Star Sonata is to a new player. Marketing & advertising Star Sonata has been a right challenge since we have no real central vision. Essentially we are all over the place with different features and ideas, but we haven’t really capitalized on one thing and become the best at it.

Thus, after a very quick deliberation, we have decided we want to focus Star Sonata in a skill based action MMO. We want you to be able to hone in your skills and fight real time to defeat your enemies. We discussed a little bit on how we want our end game to look, but those ideas are very raw and in need of much refinement, and especially with the launch of T22, we’re in no rush to make any sort of change or addition to the end game.

Now that I have a good idea of how we want to take the game, I can now effectively advertise around that. We also know that all the marketing & advertising in the world isn’t going to do anything if our entry to the game is… crap. While the Nexus is fun for some, nothing spectacularly grabs you in that first five seconds of play, and it doesn’t really jive with our idea of positioning SS as a skill based action type game. One of our main priorities then is going to be to vastly improve the entry to Star Sonata to show off what the game is and grab your attention so you don’t click that X in the top right corner.

We won’t be doing any radical changes to game structure, or removing features, so don’t worry. Star Sonata will still have all the kickass features and content it has already. What we’ve decided is that we would like to focus new additions being added to the game around this “Skill & Action Based Combat” idea.

This was one of the first meetings we had where everyone in attendance was largely in agreement about what was being said, which is great. We’ll have more blogs coming up describing what we’d like to add moving forward.

Kalipso did some Prospecting work, when there was an error relating to prospecting there were no error messages transmitting, so that was added to the client.

He finished up some eridium stuff and added a factory that breaks eridium down into 24 pieces to be used as a fuel for energies (so if the server crashes you won’t lose out on your fuel).  He also added some options in the admin panel to add/remove missions without editing xml, which is super nice for us to make things way more efficient.

Jeff rewrote some code for engine thrust since it was ancient and buggy.

I forgot what Blue Dwarf said he did in the meeting, but I know he’s been working on cleaning up something regarding the balance sheets, and apparently no one wants to do it. Balance sheets are evil.

Jey hasn’t reported yet whether he’s found that memory issue, I suppose no news is good news, as we’d be hearing him bitching about seeing hexadecimal in his sleep if he wasn’t on the right track.

Thomas did more website stuff (I was distracted in the meeting with tickets).

I worked on tickets and some investigations. I also started work on our F2P vs P2P page so we can use that in marketing materials going forward. I am having to take a crash course in javascript which makes me cry inside.

All in all another productive day in the SS dev world!

I’m about halfway into my workday so I’ll talk a bit about what we discussed in the meeting this morning plus some other stuff!

Blue Dwarf fixed up some code bugs regarding sticky items & drones. He and I went through our bug tracker yesterday to try and clean it up a bit. We have a TON of old bugs in there that were fixed but never actually marked as such on the tracker. It’s still a little chaotic but definitely getting organized.

Kalipso has been making some new uses for Eridium. One of the cooler things he added is a fancy energy that gets fueled for a day.

Jey’s been split between two different tasks, the first is the in game item shop for things that cost space points, item forms, aug resets, and name changes. He’s also been trying to isolate a memory corruption error and has been staring at Hexadecimal for way too long. He’s like Neo now.

Thomas did some more work on the main page update that will look dramatically different. This is also our first post with the new blog! Hopefully things will go off without a hitch!

I got the support ticket system caught up to date yesterday so it can be easily maintained on a daily basis instead of an every other day to three day basis. We’re at about 33 tickets. I ended up having to add a rule to the game rules yesterday. Too many people were getting their accounts compromised when they shared their passwords, because the people they shared with would turn around and share with THEIR friends, who may be on a team you’re warring. We will now ban if you share the password to an account you do not own, and it leads to compromised accounts/bases. Play the game legit, if you can’t take a base or galaxy cause it’s too strong, don’t log into someone’s account and toss all the shields. Either play legit or get banned. On the same note, we really discourage you from sharing your account password, yes, we can temp ban if someone compromises your account now, but we still can’t get any items lost back into your hands.

Jeff and I had a discussion yesterday about how we want to position Star Sonata moving forward. We both agreed that right now Star Sonata is a bit all over the place, and we’d like to focus it in. We both love how SS is action based, and requires much more skill than a point and click type game. While we haven’t come to a grand decision yet, it’s something that we will be looking into heavily and making decisions on in the next few weeks. How we market SS going forward will also define further game design decisions. We’ve planned a meeting for Friday to discuss marketing and how we want to brand the game going forward.

-Bageese