Abandonment and Decay
Some kind of decay is needed for the new style buildings. The data load keeps getting bigger and heavier, with no relief. Also, it is possible for one person to maintain a ridiculously large empire, something that was expicitly not supposed to happen. If possible, the mechanism for decay should not penalize players who cannot log in for a while. Something must be done; the smaller servers are getting overwhelmed.

There is a finite amount of server resource available. It must be managed and shared by all players.

One way to keep the servers running smoothly is to eliminate data that nobody is using. A big contributor is buildings that get constructed then forgotten or abandoned. Those buildings chug away, doing their work forever, even if their emperor never comes back.

Several strategies have been tried over the years to do this in a way that is fair and works with the way people play the game. We are about to experience the carnage of yet another attempt. If anyone is going to rage quit, now is as good of time as any.

This is how buildings will decay, once this code is fully enabled. The update today does not destroy any buildings due to abandonment. Abandonment will be reported in city reports as a negative to morale, to give people time to make adjustments.

Buildings that are not incorporated into a city are subject to abandonment and decay, the same as buildings in cities or bases. There are no reports to show the abandonment status of unincorporated buildings.

Abandonment
A building can become abandoned.

• Building abandonment begins three days after an avatar on line was last present in its solar system.
  
• Exception, every building is immune to abandonment, in the supersector (3x3x3 sectors) centered on the home building of any avatar on an active account. Empire of the active avatar is not a factor. This is only signaled once per day so don't bother running around declaring new homes everywhere.
  
• An avatar whose account status changes, becoming active or inactive, may take up to 24 hours to register the change of account status.
  
• There is no extra benefit to overlapping the home supersectors of multiple avatars.
  
• Abandonment appears as a negative morale modifier on the city report.
  

• Up to three abandoned buildings in a city will decay at each city report cycle. Decayed buildings are listed on the city report.
  
• Unincorporated buildings on a world will decay. This goes unreported.
  
• When a building decays due to abandonment, it is completely destroyed.
  
• Probability of an abandoned building decaying increases as the negative morale modifier increases.
  
• Decay conforms to city build rules so bases will decay before cities, on any given world.
  
• A city report with decaying buildings is marked with a highlighted icon.
  
• The final city report from a decaying city does not expire in the mail queue. It is marked with a highlighted icon.
  

Servers Crashing and Burning
The Thanksgiving break did not go as smoothly for the servers as I hoped it would. A problem appeared that results in death of the manager server and subsequent death of the entire grid. This happened several times recently and seems to be slowly increasing in frequency.

This one had me stumped because there was never anything left to trace. One or more servers were usually uncommunicative, requiring remote hands assistance from the computer center to reboot them. The rest were all dead.

Sunday morning, yesterday, I checked the server monitor only to see red text and flames from a few servers that weren't completely dead. The rest were gone.

I got to work cleaning up the zombies. Most of them needed a slight wave to send them on to the promised land. One of them wasn't dead! It wasn't deadlocked either. It was using 37GB of memory! What could it be doing?

I got to work sifting through the call stacks of its thirty plus threads. This revealed a world suffering the effects of an asteroid collision. The world was destroying all of its buildings. One building was stuck in an infinite loop trying to destroy itself. A peculiarity of its tiny design caused it to fail.

Once understood, the bug was easily fixed. It was also fixed in similar code copied from spacecraft, though the condition could never logically occur in a valid spacecraft design.

Four days of time were added to all active accounts, to make up for the server down time.

1. Make the game free to play again, possibly with buyable cosmetics/whatever, as long as it doesn't affect the gameplay whatsoever.
2. Make a patreon, add a link leading to it to the launcher.
3. Get sseth to review it.[url=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD6VugMZKRhSyzWEWA9W2fg][/url]
4. Wait.
5. Watch as servers crash due to new players, which quite possibly will donate on patreon. (which they have link to on a silver platter)
6. Upgrade the servers from patreonbux allowing more players to join, creating an infinite money-upgrade loop.

I've seen the playercount and it's what, less than 100 at any given time these days? Heartbreaking. Entire universe to explore, but for who?

• Wormhole P = 1 hour
  
• Wormhole PN = 1 day
  
• Wormhole PNN = 2 days
  

we can't even make anything other than glabrians and yet the new creature creator is the best video game thing ever made. i genuinely think it is incredible! post your fancy guys and your freaky guys and your spindly lil rat bitches



here is my contribution i made it to show it off to the peasants without their own subscriptions, who did not believe it could be intuitive.

Currently, most patents just require chronos, some materials, and time.  This is boring.  The need to go out and manually mine new ores before we can research how to mine them properly is pretty cool, though.  Very hands-on.  We need more of this.

So for example, let's consider the wormhole drive patents.  Researching the P drive should require us to fly up next to at least one positive wormhole and "gather data" for a bit.  Perhaps we'd even need to visit the specific negative wormhole it's connected to and gather data on that end as well, requiring us to deadhead to another system at least once before we can build wormhole drives of any sort.  Then once we have the P drive and start wanting the PN version, we'd need to go collect more data on wormholes, this time by traveling through them, so that we'd have an incentive to actually use the damn thing instead of just spending the next 48 hours screwing around in the ship designer while our grad students slave away to invent the PN drive without us lifting a finger.  The PNN, of course, would similarly require actually visiting a neutral wormhole to gather more data, maybe this time launching some kind of sacrificial probe through it.

Unlocking the submarine should require spending a certain amount of time sailing around on boats and diving sufficiently deep underwater (perhaps while carrying some sort of sensor device), and submersible ship hulls should require gathering data from deeper yet by using the submarine.

Aircraft should require gathering data from high altitudes, whether by flying with your own wings, climbing a mountain, or building and ascending a tower.  Environment suits would require data from even higher altitudes.

Plastic explosives should require some experience with dynamite.

Obviously not everything will make sense to have a hands-on component, but I think enough things do that it's worth adding where appropriate.

Brains
How do I eat brains?

Use a knife to butcher a head. It now produces a Bone and a Brain. The brain retains the DNA and inscription of the head, so you know whose it was.

There is no 3D model for the brain yet. It appears as the default bolt-cube model.

Server Deadlock
A server deadlocked last night.

I was happy to trap this one. There have been a number of server crashes recently that could not be traced because the computers were too far gone by the time I got to them. This one crashed on a beefy computer with tons of memory.

The bug was definitely the cause of the deadlock last night and it probably was not the first time. The bug was created while integrating the new animal DNA.

Stock Limit Bug
The stock limit seems to have no effect on some manufacturing processes.

Fixed a bug that affected processes with only one shop enabled. The bug caused those processes to not show their stock limit, even though it was there.

FTL Drive Patents Cost
When patents were introduced, all of them were configured to take 5 minutes. My intent was to revisit the data to increase the time to develop various patents. I did not do this right away so as not to penalize long-time players who already had developed warp 9 but did not have the patents yet.

Time to run FTL patent development processes was increased.

• Wormhole P, 1day
  
• Wormhole PN, 2days
  
• Wormhole PNN, 3days
  
• Warp 1, 1week
  
• Warp 2, 2weeks
  
• Warp 3, 3weeks
  
• Warp 4, 4weeks
  
• Warp 5, 5weeks
  
• Warp 6, 6weeks
  
• Warp 7, 7weeks
  
• Warp 8, 8weeks
  
• Warp 9, 9weeks
  

I entered a solar system with my ship that had two asteroids. Immediately my sensors officer started repeating this message every couple seconds.

Upgrade DNA
Someone asked if it would be possible to upgrade existing gen3 avatars to use the new gen4 DNA.

Gen3 avatars can now upgrade their DNA to gen4. Start by using the gen4 DNA editor to create an avatar and save the DNA into a .dna file.

If your avatar has gen3 DNA, an Upgrade DNA button appears on the Biology page of the Bio window. The upgrade will ask for a .dna file. After upgrading, the avatar can not do it again.

There is no time limit to do this. Someone could choose to wait until more features are available in the gen4 DNA editor.

Doing this causes the client program to break. You must immediately close the client program after upgrading your DNA.

When the client is restarted, the avatar shown at the startup screen may still be using gen3 DNA. That will update eventually; it takes a few minutes before the login server picks up the change to the DNA. You do not have to wait for the avatar on the startup screen to update to enter the game; your avatar will be gen4 in the game.

Targoss Not Needed for Demis and Highborns
Targoss is annoying when he shows up to greet a newly born demiavatar.

The Reach for the Stars story no longer starts for demi avatars and highborns.

Head Lag
I get a huge lag spike when killing gen4 creatures. It's brutal if you slaughter a village full of indigenous.

The lag spike is due to the time it takes to construct the OpenGL model of the head, worse depending on haircut and beard styles.

Gen4 heads now construct their 3D model in the model maker thread. This could result in a delay of a few seconds between a head existing and it becoming visible in your render scene.

Hair Triangles
Hair on gen4 creatures creates a huge number of render triangles for its OpenGL model. It takes a long time to build the OpenGL model and its a lot to render.

Hair on gen4 creatures now uses 1/4 to 1/3 the triangles it was previously.

This likely contributed to the screaming GPUs reported by some players.

Avatars with Exotic Lungs
Lungs offer a choice of Exotic, for their atmosphere type. Avatars don't come from worlds with exotic atmospheres.

Lungs now offer all atmosphere types as choices. However, any choices other than Standard and Tainted are not valid for use by avatars.

Avatars are now required to have lungs that can breathe Standard or Tainted atmospheres.

Asexual Sex
Asexual creatures should not be able to have sex.

Asexual creatures can no longer enter the mating pose. They cannot mate at all.

They should go through a periodic and/or environmentally based reproduction cycle. That is not implemented yet. Currently, asexual creatures cannot reproduce at all.

Hermaphrodite Sex
How does hermaphrodite sex work?

Hermaphrodites are only sexually compatible with hermaphrodites.

Hermaphrodites may impregnate each other during sex.

Crew Wear BDUs
Someone asked if crew would wear BDUs.

Crew will now wear BDUs, if they are available in the crew's city of origin. Crew prefer uniforms so if you want them to wear BDUs, don't manufacture uniforms.

Someone suggested an empire or ship policy for uniforms and hair styles. This might be implemented at some point.

Married NPCs
Some NPCs should be married.

Officers, crew, troops and passengers now have a possibility of being married. Probability varies by class. The married ones will not have sex with players.

This allows the use of terms like Miss and Mrs, which helps to distinguish NPCs and give them some detail.

A tool tip on the Unit Orders window shows their marital status.

NPC Skills
How can I see the skill set of an NPC?

A tool tip on the Unit Orders window shows the skills of each NPC. The only skills listed are those that apply to their job and contribute to their rank. They could have other skills.

Sex with NPCs
How do you have sex with anybody other than indigenous?

In addition to indigenous people, it is now possible to have sex with officers, crew, troops and passengers.

The mechanism is the same as with indigenous. Any of these methods will work.

• Enter the mating pose and engage in a conversation with them.
  
• Start a conversation and use some euphemism for having sex in a sentence.
  
• Enter the mating pose and order someone to mount you.
  

Fairly simple idea, the first 20 or so infrastructure objects (bridges, aerial platforms, sea platforms, land platforms, biodomes) should not affect the world volume/building limit similar to how the first 20 street lights and fences do not count against you. Why? It makes using these incredibly disadvantageous especially on smaller worlds. Let's say you want to colonize a gas giant with a small core of Sphere 1. You pop up the nice Aerial Platform 820m by Haxus and woah! you just lost 1,370,602m³ out of your 1,625,639m³ total! You have barely any room left for the actual city!

You want to colonize a Sphere 2 moon to mine some sweet resources, but you'll want all the civil and factory buildings under a dome. Pop a few Biodome 300m Level Lawn by Haxus and oh shoot, each of these eats 847,169m³ volume?! 

Even all the way up to Sphere 4 with their limit of 26,010,072m³ your infrastructure is going to take a huge chunk out of usable city space. Why does this matter? Most hostile environments such as moons or gas giants are where these infrastructure projects shine the most and most of these environments are going to be on the smaller world size. Why bother using them when they can cut into so much of your usable volume?

I originally understood why this limit was in place, if they were free people would absolutely spam them, however I noticed that street lights and fences allotted a free amount before they start counting against you and then I decided that would be a very workable solution to preventing spam of these infrastructure projects and still allowing them to be used where they are needed the most, on small worlds.