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.

Wow, sounds great. One question: Will the trade bots and cap chip changes be effective immediately, or will they be added with the next patch?

Great news about the weekly update, but I do have 1 small concern about that team limitation. If you do, do that, we will just have all of the strongest players on 1 team, which will be worse.

But basically (Sorry pants but you are number 1 on the team score ) pants will consist of all the ubers, it mostly does allready but

No they wont. Everyone doesnt want to be in the same team. Pants alone have more then 150 chars as it is, with this change they will be forced to boot pretty much half the chars on the team. We will see a lot more smaller teams and get more competition.

I see an easy workaround. You just make 2 or 3 teams, Pants 1, Pants 2, ect. It will be very annoying not being able to chat together, but they will still act like 1 team, do runs together and stuff like that, act as 1 team in times of war, ect.

If that's what people wants to do it's up to them.

Congrats Jeff on the paying customers, another 6 months and hopefully we will of broke 1000-1500 at this rate. Would be nice to see a projection graph

As for the team caps, it needs doing, but i think it will be the best, most active/useful players left on one team, the favourites so to speak.

Looking forward to these controlbots, great idea.

Awesome work anyway, this uni has been pretty much boring, new uni's are always a good thing.

May I thank you alot!
Cap ships will be faster now, and if you would use turbo's and tractors things will be able to go fro the universe at a normal speed so no issues there anymore, thanks!

I fear the spelling of collector

Hope that includes me!

Sounds great. It's always good for the community to know what the dev's are currently working on, gives us a little something to look forwards to. The trade controlbots with the extra boosts should be awesome, and knowing a bit more about what the lag is being caused by is great too. We can hope that this time next year, SS has doubled the amount of paying customers. Good job so far.

Woopee cap ships are now gonna be faster bullet targets. It had better be a big speed beef to all except the frigate.

Can the speed beef come with a better engine please? A large cap ship at high speed is gonna be hard to stop with the current engine.

the more you work the bigger SS grows, w00t

cool gear jeff

T20 Cap ships are going to redefine the word "broken" once they are speedy.


Just a head's up there.