dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Late start today due to some site maintenance stuff, but still managed to get a fair amount of inventory and item stuff fixed.

Early in the day, a reported spam post alerted me to a handful of users that slipped through the net. I ended up trawling through the logs to make sure I caught them all. Thanks to all who reported the spam!

Hey Folks! Another raft of fixes and features today, mostly centered around in-game organizations and docking.

When I finished yesterday, I was getting the docking fees to save correctly. And upon fixing that, I noticed the name of the Payee in each line item was still a "?" It turns out, I was telling the game that K-Leg station (OKLG) billed the player, but it was just a made-up name. No such person exists in the game. There is a station by that name, but stations are more layout and container stuff, not entities to trade with and owe money to.

Hey Folks! Much more productive day today, though the work was largely fixing bugs. So not exciting to look at.

The day started with a test run where I dock with a derelict, and instead of retrofitting it, I decided to try and loot its contents. Take the spare space suits, clothing, food, hull patches, and scrap materials I could find, then see if I could pawn them off at K-Leg.

Hi Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. More exhausting painting here on Saturday, but yesterday was gorgeous, and our yard has reached peak flowers. Oh, and we had a yummy pizza as a reward for the hard work!

Back at the office, it was more of an email and documentation day today. So that seems like a good time to pull out a little something I've been sitting on for a rainy day: concept art!

Hey Folks! My apologies for the lack of devlog posts yesterday. I was chatting with Michael over Skype at the end of the day, and we carried away talking about AI drama :)

Hey Folks! Spent a pretty good chunk of today revamping the timer code to fix a bug, and then started on some course plotting enhancements. Plus a quick triage.

The timer code bug was pretty much as expected. I was tracking time on generic tickers by subtracting time left per-frame, based on the previous frame's time. However, this seemed to produce sync issues occasionally, which compounded as things progressed. And in the case of breathing, the oxygen deficit would increase at a different rate than breathing would decrease it.

Hey Folks! A bit more work on the gas exchange issues today, finding a bug in breathing, and integrating Michael's job system progress.

The gas exchange system had one more issue to resolve, and that was the way it calculated partial pressures. I was mistakenly erasing the partial pressure data, thinking the gas exchange equations would restore them with correct values in time later. However, it appears even this small gap allowed for weirdness in sensors to crop up (the sensor occasionally sampled the air during that zero partial pressure moment).

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Ours was pretty busy, though not terribly exciting. Usual family/house stuff.

Back at work, I had a bunch of admin stuff to take care of, then I was off to fix the gas dynamics performance. Last week, I noticed a big chunk of the framerate drop in complex scenes was due to gas dynamics. Specifically, the gas exchanges between rooms were being wasteful with redundant calculations and memory allocations.

Hey Folks! Our 2-day vacation was a big success. Not a single computer screen for the duration. Fresh sea air, mountain hikes, good food...really nourishing stuff. I should probably do that more than once or twice a year :)

Hey Folks! Some pretty significant improvements to the plotter today, plus derelict spawning fixes, and scanner research. And a heads-up that I'll be OOO tomorrow and Thursday.