✨ Improvement
Ship Movement
Other captains’ ships on the system map now move the way they should. If you have ever flown alongside someone and watched their ship lurch, pause and lunge across the screen, that was not their piloting, it was the way your screen drew them. Each time a fresh position arrived, their ship was yanked towards it from wherever it happened to be, so it sped up and slowed down in little pulses and never quite looked like it was flying. Your screen now keeps a short memory of where each ship has been and glides it along that path at a steady pace, turning smoothly through corners instead of snapping. Ships also report their position more often while moving. The one cost is that the ships you see are drawn a quarter of a second behind where they truly are, which no eye will pick up, while the jerkiness was something everyone could see. Parked ships still hold their spot and their heading, and jumping out of a system still clears you from everyone’s map straight away. If you had the game open when this went live, a quick refresh of the page is all it takes to get the smooth version.
Galactic Exchange – Planet Goods
A small one for the traders. On the Galactic Exchange, the Planet Goods tab used to label every row “Planet Goods”, which told you nothing you had not already clicked on. That column now shows the class of planet each good comes from: Desert, Gas, Green, Ice, Ocean or Toxic, in the same colours you see on the planets themselves. Every class yields four goods, so the tab reads as six neat families. Where those planets are, and what to do with what you dig up, is still yours to find out. The Lexicon and the game’s own info screens have the rest. Thanks to Fitzbacon for pointing out the column was wasting its space.
R&D Slots
Releasing a rented R&D slot now asks you first. Click Release and the button turns into a plain question, no refund, release the slot, yes or keep, and only Yes does it. More than one captain has rented a slot for 250,000 credits and let it go seconds later with a stray click, and a released slot does not come back. Now it takes two deliberate clicks to lose one.
Game Updates
You no longer get thrown out when we update the game. Until this week, every server update logged the whole galaxy out, and everyone online had to type their password again before carrying on. That is done with. When an update lands now you will see a brief black flicker while the server comes back, and then you are exactly where you were, still logged in. It is a small thing in itself, but it is also the groundwork for a busier galaxy: logins now live somewhere the server can share, which is what lets us grow the game without you feeling it.
🚀 New Feature
The Trade channel now takes you straight to the goods. When a captain lists something for sale or posts a WANTED contract, the shout that lands in Trade chat is a link. Click it and the Galactic Exchange opens on that item, ready to buy if it was a sale or ready to sell if it was a contract. The Gate Authority’s own WANTED calls for the gate projects work the same way, and every shout already in the channel has been wired up too, so you can click back through the history. If the listing has gone by the time you get there, you land on the item’s page showing whatever is on offer right now, which is usually the next best thing anyway. One deliberate limit: while you are in a fight the links go grey and stay shut. The market does not open over a running battle. Thanks to Eridan Farnray for the suggestion, the latest of a few captains to ask for it.
🔧 Bug Fix
A few of you said the mission tracker’s new nearest first order and its “here” tags were wrong after a jump, and we could not make it happen on our side. Dirkish gave us the clue that led to the fix. Seemed more like a lag than anything. That was exactly what it was. The tracker only re-checked where you were every thirty seconds, so for up to half a minute after arriving it was still counting jumps from the system you had just left. Wait, or close and reopen something at the right moment, and it caught up, which is why it was so hard to pin down. It now re-checks the instant the system name in your header changes, so the order and the “here” tags flip as you arrive. Thanks Dirkish, that one sentence was worth an afternoon of testing.