1. When capturing a planet leave it so you can click space and still have the assault. Is there any logical explanation why this isn't how it works?
Yes - sort of. SL has a number of odd caching behaviors which made much more sense in the time period it was written for, and with a more substantial load. Modern caching methods have improved, but the code has been left as it was. Forgetting which ship you had selected probably fixed some caching bug or other.
2. IRC or anything chat based really. I can find you one to put it if you would like. Would be good for the game to encourage conversations, keep things interesting and keep people active.
Yeah, I should set this up again - keep thinking to do it. Don't really want to administrate an IRC server too though - stuff about channel ownership and control, services (ideally syncing with SL accounts), etc. My plan was to eventually integrate live news and chat into the website - though that would be a bigger project than resurrecting the newsbot and setting up a simple IRC server.
3. News should be a rolling 24 hour cycle. If someone probes my planet at 11:59 I will never know. Even if I log in at 12:01 without downloading
yesterdays news...Every day. Also in news nearby should tell you what planet was found, even if just in personal news.
News is stored in RAM only - another example of caching behaviors which make less sense now than at the time. As a result, if the server has to restart for any reason, the day's news prior to that point is often lost. The table is flushed to archive files as part of the nightly maintenance - but yes, making news more consistent and reliable is a high priority.
Not sure what you mean about the latter.
4. Copy and Paste Coords into I-flight and Hyper. Please.
Yes, I could use JS to expand the field and copy extra data over or move to the right with every color or just use a single input with the colon format instead - a large part of what has prevented this from being implemented is user interface concerns. This is important, but unclear how best to implement.
5. Change color of ships and planets for clan members.
Eventually, yes. Minor quality of life, probably relatively easy to do.
6. Market should be by 100,000 as in to sell 15mil of something you would put 150. Not 15,000,000 just an annoying thing as you cannot post other amounts than 100,000.
This is a user interface issue - how to communicate it clearly. The design was modeled after the ship to planet and ship to ship resource transfer, so I wanted to keep the entered units the same. The horizontal space was already pretty overused, or I might have a JS computed column or something - not sure how to best communicate it.
7. Add a spot on the planets page that shows total resources on all planets so you know what you have without having to do all the math or take a guess.
Sure, should be easy enough with the below, and useful.
8. Make planets page all one page. No real reason you should have to page through when the max is 50.
Seems feasible. I think one reason 25 is used is so the design doesn't stretch too badly, so your menu is always nearby. I'll have to test it and see if it doesn't look too horrible - modern screen resolutions are quite a bit taller than they were.
9. Add a like button to posts that will list who liked it. Anything to add interactivity.
The forums need a fairly substantial update. I'm really not sure if I should keep maintaining them or try to migrate to another solution which already has nifty features (with non-JS fallbacks) which I would integrate into the SL design. For example, how many people use the BBCode support SL has?
10. Button for nearby all. Having to click on 50 planets and do nearbies adds nothing to gameplay and makes it less fun with no real purpose.
It's feasible, though it'd be one of those credits sinks, as others have noted. Displaying the information nicely could prove a problem, if you would care which planet has which nearby.
11. Allow people to buy stock planet names/names of planets Aliens invaded names for credits. Have it so it either spawns X number of planets or in cycle for an
amount of time. Would be another source to burn through credits. Would help market and maybe your pocket book.
Can't have this without human moderation, can't have that without some kind of moderation qualification system, which I'd like to build some day. Certainly I'd like to someday track down where Zygi got his planet names list so I can figure out what thematically appropriate names to add to it which might have been overlooked. Seems to lean pretty heavily on Greek gods. Ultimately, I can't think of many names I'd feel comfortable approving which I wouldn't put on the rotation for free anyway, when I have some time .
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SkyLords Head Programmer
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