I want to start dong my weekly updates again since I think it's good for everyone to know what's going on and it also helps to keep me stay goal-oriented. This update is mostly about what I personally have been doing not what the team is doing. I want to encourage every dev to also post weekly updates.

Anyway, I have postponed working on the multithreading and lag reduction for now because we really need a new universe. A new universe will greatly reduce lag and rollbacks anyway, since there is so much less in it and less going on. So for now, we have been getting ready for the new universe and also a test emperor run this weekend. (Note the the test emperor run will be using the totally new and revamped emperor rules. I will let HAL elaborate on those at some point, since he is the one that implemented them.)

I figured out that almost all of the queries that are bogging down the database server are activity log writes. Players are constantly generating log items that get written to the activity log database, which we use sometimes to figure out if people are cheating or to track down bugs. Because it is just these activity log writes that are slowing down the DB, I'm going to get a second DB server and make a new DB on that server for just the activity log. Hopefully this will free up the main DB which is currently the bottleneck and cause of lag in the game.

As this universe is now about 4.5 months old and totally full of crap, we've been having a lot of memory problems on the main server. Running out of memory is causing the game to crash and roll back quite often. It's gotten so bad that trying to do a static save is now creating an out of memory crash, so it is very difficult to do a graceful server restart. I tried to restart it just after the threaded save finished tonight, but I did it a little too early, so got the maximum rollback of 50 minutes. Sorry about that guys. Anyway, the new universe will fix this for the next few months at least, and also we have a bunch of memory optimizations and better saving code coming in the next patch that SAL has made. I plan to do a huge patch sometime next week before the uni reset so we can test all our new code before the great land rush when we have 500 players or so on at once.

I've been monitoring the progress of client 2 and cmpiling it and testing it every so often to make sure it works with our latest code that is shared between client and server. It's quite ugly at the moment, but the functionality is really coming along. A lot of the many dialog boxes and GUI of the current client has been ported over. I can't wait until the port is done and us devs can put some serious time into spiffing it up and adding new features.

Tonight I added a bunch of trading control bots as DG loot that give bonuses to your trading slaves. Also increased the speed of capital ships and added Traveling Field Projectors for capital ships which give constant speed increases to let them get to where they're going but big reductions in energy and shield banks.

We've been talking a lot about some redesign on the way teams work. For a long time, SS has dominated by just a few huge powerful teams, and as the player base grows, these large teams just keep on growing rather than having more teams emerge. We are talking about a lot of game design additions that will encourage middle sized teams and also it is very possible that we will put in a hard cap of 150-200 characters per team or else possibly and account cap of something like 30-40. What this would mean is that any team over the cap would not be able to invite any new players and would have a large minus to their team score.

Despite the bad lag and rollbacks, Star Sonata is continuing to grow. We broke 800 paying users at the beginning of this month. I want to thank everyone for their patience. We have been growing so much faster in the last 6 months than we've ever grown before, we were just not prepared to handle the number of simultaneous users that we are seeing these days. But we are working on it. This is obviously going to be all of the devs highest priority after the uni reset which will buy us a few months time. I am optimistic that we can make enough changes in the next couple months to smooth things out a lot.

Despite the bad lag and rollbacks, Star Sonata is continuing to grow. We broke 800 paying users at the beginning of this month. I want to thank everyone for their patience.

it's going to be like equipping a jetstream on it, not like they just get speed CC...

The splitting of teams is not what the player base wants so why change it? whats the goal in changing it? More wars?
There will just be more alliances so that will still be like having large teams when combined.

no stooch i would probly keep to Chars on Pants if it was me, and the rest would go on my own team or a PANTS ALTS team that way we are protected around the clock, and it wont be boring bc u can just log onto the mains team


And yes im agianst this idea of cuttin teams in half...

Have you worked the figures on what exactly +500% means in game terms?

I could get 6.000.000 shield bank and 17.500.000 energy on a cap ship without augs, AT etc being factored in, using items that are essentially free ingame.


Still, the game needs base busters again

pantalones with a P

teh lawlz

We've been talking a lot about some redesign on the way teams work. For a long time, SS has dominated by just a few huge powerful teams, and as the player base grows, these large teams just keep on growing rather than having more teams emerge. We are talking about a lot of game design additions that will encourage middle sized teams and also it is very possible that we will put in a hard cap of 150-200 characters per team or else possibly and account cap of something like 30-40. What this would mean is that any team over the cap would not be able to invite any new players and would have a large minus to their team score.