So, I figured a nice little post to tell you guys what's going on in the world of DarkSpace would be a nice thing to do, so here I am, doing it.

 

Try to keep in mind whilst reading this that there is absolutely no timeframe involved in implementing any of these fixes and changes, but some will obviously be higher priority than others, and some may be much more difficult to implement.  Now that's out of the way - on with the show!

 

First things first - ship storage.  As you no doubt know, Maverick has been tirelessly working to get a more robust ship storage system up and running.  Not a lot of us are strangers to losing ships when the server goes down, or for some strange reason, you just don't have your garage full of ships anymore.  To fix this, we're moving away from timed updates and using a more reliable event-driven system.  Every time you do something that affects your ship, the ship in storage is updated.  This should make sure that no-matter what you're doing, your ship is saved.  That said, software development is not very often straight forward, so to make you happy, we're planning to add ways to track what enhancements you have so that we can return them if your ship does disappear into the mist.

 

Another annoying bug we're trying to quell, and have recently got some good data on, is the favourite dying via jumpgates and on spawn bug.  I myself have my theories as to why ships are dying on spawn, and have collected evidence to so far support it.  It also relates to the jumpgate issues, but only in a remote sense, as both systems work very differently.  If all works out, then we should have a pretty solid fix in for this, but only time will tell.  But assurance due, we are working on it, and it's very high up on the priority list.

Also on the books is making AI harder to fight.  We're trying to strike a balance between making the AI a challenge, and making them pass out reasonable prestige.  Currently and there's no argument to be had in this, they are handing out too much.  We're putting in place more varieties for you to fight, and improving the current AI to be more interesting to fight.  How we are, and will do this is completely up to you to find out in-game.

 

We're also making small changes to the way the game plays, feels and looks.  Worth a mention is the increase in mining yield by 10 times what it was before.  This should help players to keep resource limits reasonable without having to resort to hour’s worth of play in an extractor, although these ships will continue to be the dominant ship for mining (haha!).  Thinking about you and your FPS limits, we reduced the particle count on all thrusters in the game - they'll look the same, but will be far less costly in performance.  People have also reported that Mir Supply Ships have been causing performance issues when they get close to dying, and on closer inspection we've found the cause and fixed that.  And last, we lowered the brightness of the Procyon background, as it was causing people’s eyes to bleed (source needed).

 

All these changes and fixes will be in the next patch, although we have no ETA as for when this will be.  Ideally we want to squash the spawn, jumpgate, and ship loss issues before we push it to release.  Having said this, I wouldn't be too surprised if we saw a release at the end of this week.