Lars den Herder

I've been working on XenoThreat, trying to get that up to speed with 3.18. It's a lot in 3.18. Persistence is the big one, the big fundamental change. Making a dynamic event work in those situations, it's a lot to do.

I imagine just little things like, now it tracks mission progress. I've seen people on PTU say, "I did a mission a week ago and I came back and it was still listed there."

Well, mission persistence isn't something that we have properly in 3.18. It's more that so much has changed since XenoThreat last ran. It touches every system. Every system has persistence in it, or not in it, or whatever amounts of it.

Wasn't there a bug previously because of persistence, where if the Javelin was destroyed its records stayed there and then the other Javelin was trying to come in? We had that with the AI reinforcements that land: if you blow that ship up, the other one's just like, "Well, I'm still going to try to land there," even though you still exist. It's a fun thing to battle.

We will be seeing the changes mandated by persistence for the next two years. Everything up to this point was made for the game in a certain state. And now with persistence, there's changes to the AI, like, "Hey, if there's already a crashed ship there, maybe we don't land there."

It's also quite challenging to work on a game that has persistence turned on by default. Because what we do is we run servers locally and test our stuff. But if you shut that server down, it persists. So when you run your server again, it's still there, and all the stuff is exactly as you left it. Sometimes that's annoying because you're looking for a fresh state, but it isn't. That's persistence. And so you're like, this is like making games again. I've never made a game where I have to worry about persisting things from my previous run. You really do have to think in a new way to work in that situation. When you're fixing bugs, you have to be really mindful of that, because you're thinking, okay, is this bug still here because it's persisted? Because I had an issue with that. I was setting up some elevators, and the bug was there. I fixed it, and then I ran the server again, and the entity had changed. I fixed it, except it persisted in the broken state. So I was like, okay, fine, this is only a bug in this moment. So if I purge the lot and go again, it really is fixed. But it's challenging, but it's kind of fun.

It also messes with our debug tools. These are all good things, by the way; this is just the war stories. When we're playing, say I'm testing a UGF mission, or I'm waiting for the shuttle because I'm testing something, and then Liza's like, "Hey, you got a second?" or Jane's like, "You got a second?" and I go over to them. And then I come back and I haven't turned god mode on, which will stop me from dying. And all of a sudden, my food and my hydration levels have gone to zero. So my guy is having the worst time of his life. He can't see anything, I can't hear anything. And then I'm like, ah, I put on god mode and then I do my bug. But then every time afterwards when I log in, my guy is still dying of hydration permanently until I actually purge the server and restart.

I think the funniest thing that happened to me was during time trials prototyping. Because persistence was coming in and I didn't realize what it was going to do, I'd logged out mid-race, went away for my lunch, and came back to record a video for an internal review. I thought I was doing really well in this race; I was on time for the Platinum. And then all of a sudden, my wreckage was just at the end of the race, and I just smashed right into myself, which ended my race prematurely.

On Kareah, we were actually debugging it and all of a sudden we fly in and there's three of the chief of security. They're super bosses, they're super tanky. So I come in there with a pistol just to test something, and there's three of them, like, "There he is." And I just got lit up instantly. That's a problem.

Salvage missions at the moment. We wanted a way to show the new salvage mechanic. So I'm currently working on some different legalities and versions. There's a legal version where we have a new company that's being made, I'm not sure if I can call it that, it's called Adagio, and they're literally just salvage contracts. They have a bunch of salvage and they sell you the rights to a piece of salvage. You pay X amount of credits or UEC, and then, "Here's your lot number." You can go get it there, and then you fly over and it's yours to keep. And it's kind of in the safe area at this point, like a Lagrange point where they kind of towed it there. Then there's the illegal version, where basically another illegal corporation, a new one called the Tar Pits, hear about salvage and they're like, "Well, you can go there, but we know that security forces are going there to investigate what happened. You have an hour, good luck." And then you basically have to race there. And once you're there, you have an hour; you have a timer on screen. And if you're staying there too long, well, then all of a sudden fighters come in, or other investigative forces. If you're in a Vulture, for example, well, that is not really good at combat. And we're actually trying to get a mission giver, which I won't spoil who it is, so have fun trying to discover that. But a new mission giver, we're going to give him or her some love. And they're going to actually do a kind of mini rush where it's like, "Well, there's been a massive battle somewhere in the middle of space. There's a lot of money to be made, but it's an open contract. So here you go, but you might find people." And then we're really trying to have emergent gameplay, community focus. So it could be three Vultures all happily salvaging away, and then an org is like, "Yeah, this is our salvage now," and they come in with a Reclaimer and a whole combat suite. It's like, "Okay, kids, move aside. This is ours now."