0.0.15 Taming Aliens on Space

Animal Taming

You can now feed slimes, broods and make them your pets. Each player has a limit of 5 tames, and you can only one pet can follow you at a time. Whenever you take along a pet, it'll also help you attack any hostile enemies. There's a minor chance that enemies will hit back and attack your pet though, so you need to be careful. 

CryoTube

In case your pet dies, you can resurrect them in a Cryotube. Just bring their corpse and interact with the Cryo and they should resurrect and slowly recover their health.  CryoTube also works for dead rebel corpses, and just a little gif to show you how you can make them chase you again if you're masochistic or you just want some fun. 

Reducing Lag / GC

Firstly, Netcode. I actually had to rewrite a big part of netcode in order to reduce the number of objects being created, improve garbage collection on the server, and hopefully reduce lag, as garbage collection was happening 40% of the time in previous server performance profiles. World saving  has also been improved such that it no longer creates lots of intermediate json objects when serializing to disk. I've also implemented some object pools for certain entities and should help with GC pressure. Further lag reducing improvements would be done in the future. 

Other Bugfixes/Features

• Fiber plant would regrow when less than 100 in land
• Added Drill equipment for faster asteroid mining
• Bottle can draw water from liquid tank
• Mob spawns are limited by area per day
• Corpses decay in 30 minutes
• Turrets can attack through walls/obstacles
• Item Pickups decay in 5 minutes

Next Update: Solving Overcrowding

One of the biggest problem of the game right now is overcrowding - basically running out of place to build. Once a "sector" (map) is about 80% populated with structures, it becomes difficult for new players to establish a new colony and build their base. And a lot of times, the existing structures don't have any occupants in them, as original owners have left the game. And since there will be an accounts system soon where players could go back to their old bases, it'll be difficult to remove these structures to give more space to new players. If we make the map larger, we would encounter a new memory overcrowding problem where structures not being used are occupying server memory.

Potential Solutions

1. We add a decay to structures for guest players (i.e unowned for 2 hours). Players who have an in-game account will retain ownership of their structures even after logging out. Its possible that I might add a 7 days decay rule (must log back in within 7 days, otherwise structures would disappear), but it really depends on how well my second solution works
2. Sector/Map Unloading. Similar to how minecraft would make an idle chunk offload from memory and be saved to disk, we would "retire" idle sectors/maps and save them to cloud storage. Before joining a game, new players would then be first presented with a "sector browser/explorer", whether only live sectors are shown. Existing account holders, however, who have built wish to go back to their base, could simply "unretire" their sector/map from cloud storage, make it live so that others can join, and continue playing. Ideally, players would be able to see how populated each map is, and how many players there are, and the stats (i.e population, wealth) of colonies in the map.

Feedback

If you guys have any comments or thoughts about how to solve this problem, would really love to hear from you.