Solar-Sim Devlog

Most of the updates made over the past few days to Solar-Sim were “behind the scenes” types of changes. Here’s a highlight of them:

• Fixed the /group command so if you’re grouped and you type /group with nothing after it, it doesn’t send a blank line to the group chat window anymore.

• Added /groupinfo command, which brings up the Group Information screen. A future update will bind this command to a hotkey (such as F2).
• Renamed “Combat” chat window to “TBD” (to be determined). I want to make this chat window go away, but Multiverse hard-coded the number of chat windows in several places, so this task will take more time than its worth right now. I’ll come back to it later.
• Started to investigate voice chat. I updated the server’s firewall so the voice chat server actually works, but I’ve disabled the default voice chat channel for now. The intended direction for this is group members will get their own voice chat channel (which is why I messed around with the group code).
• Added /help command. I’m not happy with the current format, and this may eventually change to pop up a window.
• Character names are now checked for uniqueness and profanity. This change consumed the bulk of the last few days, as Multiverse doesn’t ship with any code to accomplish this. 10+ years of running a M.U.D. has taught me this is a necessary feature!
• New player ships don’t spawn on top of each other anymore. New players are randomly distributed in an area very close to the Sun. A future change will likely expand this area so ships aren’t packed so closely together.
• 4 spacecraft are now tracked by Solar-Sim. These are:
  1. Deep Impact

  2. Stardust
  3. STEREO-A
  4. STEREO-B

  All 4 of these spacecraft currently share the same 3D model. Each spacecraft is shown larger than Solar-Sim’s 1mm:25km scale… otherwise they would be too tiny to see.

Much more work is needed in the area of groups and voice chat. I was hoping Multiverse’s code in this area would be OK as-is, but I’d say these 2 features aren’t production-ready yet. Chat channels could also use some TLC… the “Local” and “System” tabs you see in the chat window aren’t used for anything (again, this is how Multiverse currently ships).