Devblog 27th June 2017

Greetings, citizens ~

 

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

 

Server Performance

 

While looking into server performance, we noticed an issue with NPC Fleet Management: something is preventing the proper clean-up of spawned fleets. This has been causing some of the larger servers to experience mysterious performance issues recently. If you have a server and are encountering high response times for ship creation, or server-related ping spikes, this issue might be the cause. We are working on a fix for this, and are monitoring the problem. In the interim, you may want to manually wipe all NPC-Fleets from your server from time to time (once per week should suffice). You may do so by running the following command:

 

/despawn_all FLTSHP all true

 

However!  Please warn your players before running this for the first time, as it may result in the server becoming unresponsive for several minutes. (Instances of cleaning up 150k to 300k ships are not uncommon, and that takes some time to process.)

 

SQL in StarNet

 

In one of the previous updates, we added the ability for server admins to query the server’s database directly via SQL.  This is an incredibly powerful tool, and many server owners have taken advantage of it to create fancy features on their websites, write fine-tuned automated scripts, gather game metrics, etc.  However, this functionality required us to inject the command directly into the console, and parse its reply -- not the cleanest or most direct approach.  StarNet, our dedicated tool for this sort of thing, also lacked the permissions to do this.  The next release will rectify this issue, giving StarNet the permissions it needs to both run SQL queries and get their output directly.  This should give admins cleaner, easier access to the internals of their server’s database.

 

 

What’s next?

 

Following our current release cycle, we’ve started releasing dev builds. These are generally buggy, unstable builds that give players early access to new features. For more information, refer to: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-release-cycle-news-posts.28895/#post-338214

 

As soon as we’re happy with the development builds, we’ll release an official preview build. We will be following the procedure outlined in the document above, then after a round of both Schine and community testing, we’ll do a public release. After that, the next push will be for a playable dev build showcasing a prototype of the new power system. We want to get this in the hands of the community as soon as it’s ready, and are looking forward to your feedback. When the power system is completed, we will take a look at weapons, combat, and other utilities and give them a balance overhaul, as well as add new exciting features.

 

As always, thank you for playing StarMade!

 ~ The Schine Team