Forums » Suggestions
Game Development Direction - Current Goals
This thread is intended to briefly encapsulate the current "broad" development goals of the game. What this thread contains should be carefully understood:
1) THIS IS NOT A RELEASE SCHEDULE. Content appearing on here only means it is "an area of development interest". It doesn't provide any certainty that anything here will be "sure" to appear in the next month, or the next decade. Game development is uncertain and chaotic.
2) Nothing here is guaranteed to ever ship. Again, these are areas-of-interest. Development is often experimental, and sometimes experiments end up with disappointing outcomes, like "we could add this feature, but the increased server costs would be too high", or whatever else.
3) This thread will hopefully be updated occasionally with major changes in development direction. But that may not happen very often. We're often working on the same large-scale set of goals for at least a year at a time, so don't expect content here to shift frequently.
This list is simply an attempt to share a "vague set of goals and directions" with those users who are willing to read it with "friendly interest", but without becoming so attached to any particular priority or content that they become unreasonably angry when it doesn't show up on some specific time-frame (this has happened before).
After a quarter-century of development, we know enough to know what we don't know, and "certainty of development and release scheduling" for this product is definitely one of those things.
This game is a very complex service, which requires administrative attention seven days a week. Some weeks, months and years are worse than others. There are a lot of different types of issues that delay development, particularly with a small team.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Current Areas of Development Activity and Interest - As-of February 16th 2023
(This is NOT listed in any particular order of priority, nor does absence from the list mean we've forgotten something, or are deprioritizing it. This is NOT an all-encompassing list.. I just don't have time to do that)
Server Scalability - This has been on-going since 2021, with many drastic improvements, but some areas still need to be shored-up to deliver more complex scenes, better bot behaviours, and larger battles, along with potentially supporting very-large player counts. This also includes projects related to server redundancy, resiliency, fault-tolerance, and a ton of complicated "server back-end" areas that are too involved to describe here.
Player Administration - Also an on-going project for several years, but there will be another major revision to the "/report" system, with a lot of newer mechanics. This is actually pretty complicated, the design work is involved, as are the administrative tools. There is a very strong need for these improvements, however, to reduce the impact of "abuse administration" on developer time, and potentially allow the administration to more easily scale to additional people.
Abuse and Attack Mitigation - One aspect of this is the upcoming changes for ToR, Proxy and VPN support, along with policy statements around DDoS threats. We would rather be working on gameplay, but.. uhh.. "people be asshats"? There's a fair amount of careful thought and testing that has to go into all of this, most of which will probably never be made public.
Exploit Mitigation - It's tough to release a new economy if people are still exploiting systemic problems. Or, at least, releasing a dynamic economy will just make things worse. So, more time going into analysis of player behaviour, various analytics and responses, identifying likely problems. Again, we'd rather be making new stuff, but "MMORPG". And no, we can't just "ban all the bad people". That just makes "the bad people" harder to detect.
Windows Client - There is going to be a major update of the Windows Client. Dropping 32bit support has been mentioned elsewhere, but we're also completely re-working the installation directories, install experience, game-launcher interface, and many other things.
All Clients - Some good technical improvements (like loading time) have been prototyped on Android and will be back-propagated across to other platforms. Some platforms are more complicated to change than others, and testing is involved and time-consuming.
Renderer, Graphics Updates - The Vulkan renderer will be standardized a lot more, and updates will make "extreme density sectors" more feasible across more types of hardware. There'll likely be updates to the client graphics in general, and perhaps other areas of the "A/V" client experience.
Updated User Interface - Some versions have some pieces of the new UI, but it will be completely fleshed out across the entire game, with (hopefully) a significant rethinking of the User Experience. This is inter-dependent on other UIs still in the works, like the "Player Administration" stuff mentioned above.
Updated New User Experience - New tutorials and general "gameplay flow" for new users. Smoother, more fun, less reading involved, with emphasis on UI: PC (mouse/kb), Touch, 10-foot (gamepad + TV) and VR (controller-based).
Game Localization - 20 additional languages across all platforms. The fonts are rendering properly, but we cannot finish the translations until the actual UI and game experience is updated. This work is on-going though, new missions are being translated every week. You probably just don't notice.
Latos Economy Expansion - As mentioned earlier, this is hung up a bit while we've been dealing with potential exploitative challenges and systemic aspects of the game that are susceptible to automation and multi-boxing. This dynamic economy is intended to underpin half the "point of the game" (mining, crafting, PvE, some PvP, etc), so having it not be broken is important.
Universe Redux - A very long-standing project. The Unknown System is a testbed, but I'm waiting on renderer improvements before we can go at this more intensely. Also bears directly on the "Server Scalability" topic above: NPC pathfinding is simpler with 100 asteroids, as opposed to a million asteroids, or 100,000 pieces of debris that may dynamically move around.
New Enemies - We would like to see some more types of persistent enemies and related gameplay appear. This kind of stuff can be added without having to wait for the Latos Economy, which is good. I am not calling out specifics at this time, but you can imagine things like "rare" specialty-NPC adversaries, settler transport convoys in distress, various and sundry types of "situations".
New Persistent Events - We're evaluating making more persistent Events out of content that Phaserlight is currently running, as we did with the Corporate Sector Run (race). But, honestly, this kind of thing could expand to a lot more than just small-scale events, to things like "giant NPC incursions" or whatever, but that bears on the "server scalability" work above. This all sort of "blends" together with the "New Enemies" stuff above; related, but not always the same.
Fixing Problems - I've been trying to push a lot of energy into fixing long-standing problems, over the last couple of years. Some of it requires some other area of development (like a new UI), but we're trying to track down and fix issues that are reported, whenever we can. You don't see convoys behaving quite as idiotically around stations anymore, and we've addressed a lot of config-saving and gamepad issues that have plagued people for years. This covers all areas of the game, and is on-going.
But What About Other New Content?? - Yes, we're going to do content drops whenever we can. We're also trying to integrate more plugin-style improvements into the game client directly, and lots of other tweaks. But, fundamentally, we need to do a lot of the probably-less-exciting "moderation, maintenance, and scalability" stuff listed above. After all, while shiny new stuff is great, it's also important that the game actually work.
That's what I have for now. As always, while the-above has been our direction for some time, I reserve the right to make sudden weird turns on a dime, based on some new opportunity or potentially beneficial situation (or, unfortunately, a significant unforeseen problem, which seems to be far more common).
1) THIS IS NOT A RELEASE SCHEDULE. Content appearing on here only means it is "an area of development interest". It doesn't provide any certainty that anything here will be "sure" to appear in the next month, or the next decade. Game development is uncertain and chaotic.
2) Nothing here is guaranteed to ever ship. Again, these are areas-of-interest. Development is often experimental, and sometimes experiments end up with disappointing outcomes, like "we could add this feature, but the increased server costs would be too high", or whatever else.
3) This thread will hopefully be updated occasionally with major changes in development direction. But that may not happen very often. We're often working on the same large-scale set of goals for at least a year at a time, so don't expect content here to shift frequently.
This list is simply an attempt to share a "vague set of goals and directions" with those users who are willing to read it with "friendly interest", but without becoming so attached to any particular priority or content that they become unreasonably angry when it doesn't show up on some specific time-frame (this has happened before).
After a quarter-century of development, we know enough to know what we don't know, and "certainty of development and release scheduling" for this product is definitely one of those things.
This game is a very complex service, which requires administrative attention seven days a week. Some weeks, months and years are worse than others. There are a lot of different types of issues that delay development, particularly with a small team.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Current Areas of Development Activity and Interest - As-of February 16th 2023
(This is NOT listed in any particular order of priority, nor does absence from the list mean we've forgotten something, or are deprioritizing it. This is NOT an all-encompassing list.. I just don't have time to do that)
Server Scalability - This has been on-going since 2021, with many drastic improvements, but some areas still need to be shored-up to deliver more complex scenes, better bot behaviours, and larger battles, along with potentially supporting very-large player counts. This also includes projects related to server redundancy, resiliency, fault-tolerance, and a ton of complicated "server back-end" areas that are too involved to describe here.
Player Administration - Also an on-going project for several years, but there will be another major revision to the "/report" system, with a lot of newer mechanics. This is actually pretty complicated, the design work is involved, as are the administrative tools. There is a very strong need for these improvements, however, to reduce the impact of "abuse administration" on developer time, and potentially allow the administration to more easily scale to additional people.
Abuse and Attack Mitigation - One aspect of this is the upcoming changes for ToR, Proxy and VPN support, along with policy statements around DDoS threats. We would rather be working on gameplay, but.. uhh.. "people be asshats"? There's a fair amount of careful thought and testing that has to go into all of this, most of which will probably never be made public.
Exploit Mitigation - It's tough to release a new economy if people are still exploiting systemic problems. Or, at least, releasing a dynamic economy will just make things worse. So, more time going into analysis of player behaviour, various analytics and responses, identifying likely problems. Again, we'd rather be making new stuff, but "MMORPG". And no, we can't just "ban all the bad people". That just makes "the bad people" harder to detect.
Windows Client - There is going to be a major update of the Windows Client. Dropping 32bit support has been mentioned elsewhere, but we're also completely re-working the installation directories, install experience, game-launcher interface, and many other things.
All Clients - Some good technical improvements (like loading time) have been prototyped on Android and will be back-propagated across to other platforms. Some platforms are more complicated to change than others, and testing is involved and time-consuming.
Renderer, Graphics Updates - The Vulkan renderer will be standardized a lot more, and updates will make "extreme density sectors" more feasible across more types of hardware. There'll likely be updates to the client graphics in general, and perhaps other areas of the "A/V" client experience.
Updated User Interface - Some versions have some pieces of the new UI, but it will be completely fleshed out across the entire game, with (hopefully) a significant rethinking of the User Experience. This is inter-dependent on other UIs still in the works, like the "Player Administration" stuff mentioned above.
Updated New User Experience - New tutorials and general "gameplay flow" for new users. Smoother, more fun, less reading involved, with emphasis on UI: PC (mouse/kb), Touch, 10-foot (gamepad + TV) and VR (controller-based).
Game Localization - 20 additional languages across all platforms. The fonts are rendering properly, but we cannot finish the translations until the actual UI and game experience is updated. This work is on-going though, new missions are being translated every week. You probably just don't notice.
Latos Economy Expansion - As mentioned earlier, this is hung up a bit while we've been dealing with potential exploitative challenges and systemic aspects of the game that are susceptible to automation and multi-boxing. This dynamic economy is intended to underpin half the "point of the game" (mining, crafting, PvE, some PvP, etc), so having it not be broken is important.
Universe Redux - A very long-standing project. The Unknown System is a testbed, but I'm waiting on renderer improvements before we can go at this more intensely. Also bears directly on the "Server Scalability" topic above: NPC pathfinding is simpler with 100 asteroids, as opposed to a million asteroids, or 100,000 pieces of debris that may dynamically move around.
New Enemies - We would like to see some more types of persistent enemies and related gameplay appear. This kind of stuff can be added without having to wait for the Latos Economy, which is good. I am not calling out specifics at this time, but you can imagine things like "rare" specialty-NPC adversaries, settler transport convoys in distress, various and sundry types of "situations".
New Persistent Events - We're evaluating making more persistent Events out of content that Phaserlight is currently running, as we did with the Corporate Sector Run (race). But, honestly, this kind of thing could expand to a lot more than just small-scale events, to things like "giant NPC incursions" or whatever, but that bears on the "server scalability" work above. This all sort of "blends" together with the "New Enemies" stuff above; related, but not always the same.
Fixing Problems - I've been trying to push a lot of energy into fixing long-standing problems, over the last couple of years. Some of it requires some other area of development (like a new UI), but we're trying to track down and fix issues that are reported, whenever we can. You don't see convoys behaving quite as idiotically around stations anymore, and we've addressed a lot of config-saving and gamepad issues that have plagued people for years. This covers all areas of the game, and is on-going.
But What About Other New Content?? - Yes, we're going to do content drops whenever we can. We're also trying to integrate more plugin-style improvements into the game client directly, and lots of other tweaks. But, fundamentally, we need to do a lot of the probably-less-exciting "moderation, maintenance, and scalability" stuff listed above. After all, while shiny new stuff is great, it's also important that the game actually work.
That's what I have for now. As always, while the-above has been our direction for some time, I reserve the right to make sudden weird turns on a dime, based on some new opportunity or potentially beneficial situation (or, unfortunately, a significant unforeseen problem, which seems to be far more common).
This is a list of historical "Request For Comments" type threads in which potential gameplay changes or ideas were raised for community feedback.
None of these threads represented "absolute certainty" as to how a concept would be implemented, that's why the feedback has value.
At the same time, the development-time and relative scheduling was also never certain, which is why some of these concepts have been implemented, but others had to be de-prioritized.
At the very least, they provide a window into the historical thinking and goals of the developers, and some hints at how things might continue to take shape, moving forward.
Request for Comments: Persistent Event "Missions"
Request for Comments: On the Future of Mining
Guild Recruitment and Future Player Influx
On Toxicity and the Future of our Community
Vendetta Online Lite subscriptions
The Concept of Conflict: Military Rank Structure and Advancement.
Request for Comments: Hierarchical Authentication and Ownership of Dynamically Conquerable Content.
Request For Comments - Should powercells cease to be generic items?
Request For Comments: Trading and Economics.
Request For Comment: Fogged sectors, getting rid of Ion Storms.
A Reshuffling of Trade Items: Request for Comment
On the Removal of Friendly Fire: Request for Comment
Request For Comment: Escort Faction Requirements
Faction System Changes - Request for Comment
Request for Comments: Changing how throttle and turbo work.
Eventual Behemoth Direction - Request For Comment
Request for comments on an Abuse System
Crafting: Implementation and Ramifications.
Non-RFC "random concept idea" discussions:
Pillaging of Conquerable Stations
In March of 2022 I tried engaging the playerbase in a discussion on the above topic. However, some people were so virulently unwilling to read the content being posted, or engage in a reasonable way, that the experience made me far less-interested in getting player feedback on future game changes (it was about a year before I posted another substantive thread).
This is the exact opposite of what the people berating me on the thread should have wanted. After all, a forum for player feedback should allow well-reasoned perspectives and logical ideas to be heard, and result in changes that are more amenable to all play styles. Reasoned disagreement is always fine, games are always subjective; but speak to the subject at hand, don't attack the individual.
The moral of the story being, if you want to engage on Suggestions, be sure you adhere to the Rules.
None of these threads represented "absolute certainty" as to how a concept would be implemented, that's why the feedback has value.
At the same time, the development-time and relative scheduling was also never certain, which is why some of these concepts have been implemented, but others had to be de-prioritized.
At the very least, they provide a window into the historical thinking and goals of the developers, and some hints at how things might continue to take shape, moving forward.
Request for Comments: Persistent Event "Missions"
Request for Comments: On the Future of Mining
Guild Recruitment and Future Player Influx
On Toxicity and the Future of our Community
Vendetta Online Lite subscriptions
The Concept of Conflict: Military Rank Structure and Advancement.
Request for Comments: Hierarchical Authentication and Ownership of Dynamically Conquerable Content.
Request For Comments - Should powercells cease to be generic items?
Request For Comments: Trading and Economics.
Request For Comment: Fogged sectors, getting rid of Ion Storms.
A Reshuffling of Trade Items: Request for Comment
On the Removal of Friendly Fire: Request for Comment
Request For Comment: Escort Faction Requirements
Faction System Changes - Request for Comment
Request for Comments: Changing how throttle and turbo work.
Eventual Behemoth Direction - Request For Comment
Request for comments on an Abuse System
Crafting: Implementation and Ramifications.
Non-RFC "random concept idea" discussions:
Pillaging of Conquerable Stations
In March of 2022 I tried engaging the playerbase in a discussion on the above topic. However, some people were so virulently unwilling to read the content being posted, or engage in a reasonable way, that the experience made me far less-interested in getting player feedback on future game changes (it was about a year before I posted another substantive thread).
This is the exact opposite of what the people berating me on the thread should have wanted. After all, a forum for player feedback should allow well-reasoned perspectives and logical ideas to be heard, and result in changes that are more amenable to all play styles. Reasoned disagreement is always fine, games are always subjective; but speak to the subject at hand, don't attack the individual.
The moral of the story being, if you want to engage on Suggestions, be sure you adhere to the Rules.