I am way overdue on a Patreon update, so thought I would let you know I am still here, plugging away!
Personal Stuff
The summer came and went in a blur (again) .. they feel far too short up here in Toronto, and I spent way too long in my chair working on fixes and enhancements. It does get a bit “habitual”, to the extent that I have now set myself a daily “watch a TV show while using the treadmill” challenge, which has been great in allowing me to catch up on some great series that I never had the time to watch before. Today is day 120 without missing a day, and I am in the middle of season 5 of The Expanse. Fantastic show, go check it out if you havent seen it yet.
Change Review
You probably get an idea of the amount of work that has been put in by all the updates you have received, but If you want to see the details, take a look at the release notes on the Discord, or on the EDCoPilot wiki here : https://razzserver.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=release_notes
My areas of focus over the last few months have been
1. Added the Colonisation Progress tracking logic, to help players see what they have on their carrier and what is outstanding to be delivered to the depot. Recently I have made the commodities and the locations clickable on that panel too, for easy lookup / course setting.
2. Rewriting the Music Player - The old logic was overly convoluted and hard to debug when it played up. The new version has some nice enhancements such as different playlists based on if you are OnFoot, in your ship, or in your SRV, and fade in/fade out of tracks when themes are switched.
3. Time Trials – in July I added the ability to race ships over planet surfaces. This is actually quite tricky given the speed of the ships, and I had to implement new “gate lines” as waypoint types. The first course is at Turner Metallics Inc, and requires a small or medium ship. It’s a challenging course so be careful! After that course was added I spent quite a bit of time adding condition checking to support The Spiraliser course, which was a tough course to get to work correctly given it has lots of turns and short distances between some of the waypoints.
4. Improving the stability of the app and adding more exception logic – aiming to reduce the number of occasional crash errors and attempting to fix things itself when it detects issues with data, user preferences, environment.
5. Behind the scenes I have been restructuring some of the code. The original code was very linear in nature, and I am gradually migrating some features to be object based, which helps to simplify the code and maintenance needed. I have a long way to go, but I will gradually tackle it as I go through and enhance the features. My coding “style” has definitely changed since I started writing the app 7 years ago.
6. The new commander rename-for-ARX feature actually caused some complications, as extra logic is needed to detect a rename and to continue using the old commander name’s stats for the new commander name (and not just treat it like a new commander).
As is always the case, I have a long list of items I want to add or improve upon, and I do appreciate all the suggestions that get provided on the Discord. I may never get to them all, but there are some great ideas in there, and I hope to at least implement the best ones.
I do have a shortlist on where i would like to focus next, but i am going to keep that close to my chest for now, in case priorities (or whims) change!
Supporter Thank You
I just want to take a moment to once again thank you for your encouragement and generous support.
While I’m not permitted to profit from the app under Frontier’s Terms of Service, your donations have covered its ongoing operating costs and allowed me to upgrade some of my equipment and software this year.
I also support other community members on Patreon, including Spansh and Inara, both of which are data sources for the app, along with a few of my favourite content creators.
Most importantly, your support made it possible for me to donate $2,000 to the Neil Squire Society, a Canadian charity that provides assistive gaming technology for people with physical disabilities (similar to SpecialEffect in the UK).
Creating and maintaining this app has been and remains a rewarding retirement project, and it’s truly heartening to know it’s helping others as well, and that users are getting so much enjoyment from it.
Thank you all for being part of such an amazing community.Fly safe, Commanders!
Razz