Big updates to the server side infrastructure.

• The clustering system is now fully functional and game servers are smoothly autoscaling based on load
• Server to server transitions are totally seamless now. A player is able to traverse across many servers without even noticing it happened.
• Lots of improvements to the client to server networking which fixed some misc bugs that could be hit.
• Control panels have been built around the clustering system so it can be monitored for any performance issues.
• Client log shipping has been added so error logs are sent to the server to help diagnose bugs.

Server side updates are coming along well, the new clustering system is starting to be reliable.

• A new rollout system on the server side has been added to seamlessly replace game servers with a new version without disconnecting or interrupting players.
• Some big fixes on the client side to address blueprint list not showing up correctly as well as fixed the asteroids showing while in the blueprint editor
• Fixed release issues that was causing incompatible game engine versions with the version of code running.

Its been awhile building out the new server architecture. Nothing has changed on the client side, but the server side has been totally restructure from a single monolithic game server to a clustered system capable of scaling to huge amounts of players.

This change was required now to implement the needed infrastructure to be built on for upcoming features such as planets which will span multiple servers.

There is still a number of bugs that need to be worked out with the current system such as failures connecting and some intermittent server lockups, but these issues are currently being resolved and should provide a reliable experience soon.

Upcoming features.

Work is being done on building out a planetary system. This is still in the early phases but I currently have a working proof of concept of a sphere based terrain system with mining. This will be the next addition once all of the server side regressions are fixed and the clustered system is completely solid.

The item system rewrite has been completed. This doesn't directly change the behavior of anything currently, but enables upcoming features such as different damage amounts and types on ammunition along with any other sort of unique data per item such as custom made missiles with different stats.

Next up for development is rewriting the asteroids and mining system to be much more in depth. The new system will see the simple asteroids that give a single type of ore changed into different classes of asteroids that have a distribution of a number of different mineral types, minerals will now be dropped from mining asteroids instead of elemental ores. Minerals will then be processed into intermediate ores that are then refined into ingots

= Major ship grid update =

• The ship grid system has been reduced from 1m to 10cm, this allows much finer details along with much better placement options for blocks.

• New blocks added. 10x10cm armor block, and 20cm long pipe piece.

• Major performance improvements to block placement. Blocks with a large cell occupancy were greatly impacted in the 10cm grid model, the cell occupancy check has been rewritten to be about 1000x faster for large cell blocks.

• Fixed a bug with with placement that would sometimes cause a ghost block not to be placed

== Features currently under development ==

= Items =

• The item system is being completely rewritten to support static and dynamic item attributes. The static system will enable giving items like ammunition, attributes such as damage to be able to have different amounts of damage based on the ammunition being used.
  The dynamic attributes allow for individual items to have attributes like for example a o2 tank with the amount of oxygen it contains.

= Asteroids =

• The asteroid and mining system is being replaced to provide a much more realistic and element distribution.

• Asteroids now will spawn and generate a random size, then it will pick a class of asteroid it will be. Then the element distribution will be based off of the class, and the amount of each element will be based off the size of the asteroid.

• Asteroids will no longer be a singular element type, and instead all asteroids will provide unrefined ore based on the element distribution the asteroid is made of. Unrefined ore is processed in the refinery to produce refined ores based on the element distribution of the asteroids that were mined. The new items dynamic attributes allow tracking individual elements in the ore as they are mined.

• A new scanning block will be created that will be used to scan asteroids to find the ones you want to mine rather than just randomly mining asteroids.

• Fabricator and refinery UI's have been reworked to show what is craftable with your current resources, the max crafting amount is set to the amount you can craft with the resources available

• All icons have been replaced with better quality icons

• New ores and ingots added; gold, silver, uranium

• Fixed a bug in the blueprint editor that caused multi cell blocks to be aligned incorrectly

• Fabricator panel has been added and is able to be used now. Its opened by interacting with a fabricator

• New ores added, lead and carbon. Lead ingots have been added as well

• Fabricator recipes added for bullet casings, gunpowder, 15mm and 30mm bullete tips, 15mm and 30mm ammunition. Ammunition is not currently used yet but will be expended by weapons soon

• Added a ship pilot console block to replace the orientation cube cockpit block, the console has a nice looking model now. Screen panel integration is not yet implemented on them.

• Moved the refinery panel out of the control panel and directly onto a interactable on the refinery block itself.

• Increased the area of interest around the player to 2 sectors so there is a larger area around the player loaded in
• Lots of work on the server to increase the main tick performance to handle higher entity counts without slowing down
• More work on the networking to ensure reliability of packets and keep from desyncing with the server
• Reduced networking syncing uneeded data
• More models are being created to replace the placeholders

• Changed the dimensions of the fabricator and refinery
• Added models for the fabricator and the refinery
• Animation system being developed to handle individual block animations. The first block to get an animation is the cpu core block.
• Fixed colliders mismatch on ships, they are back to working very smoothly again
• Rotations have been updated in the blueprint editor to be more intuitive. They still have a ways to go, but its better than it was before.

• Exhaust effect added to thrusters

• Added screenshots to blueprints
• Added blueprint list in the editor
• Added options to save create new/edit/delete to the blueprint editor panel
• Moved the save panel into a drawer on the side pulled out with the tab key
• Reworked the networking stack to handle higher throughput and better reliability
• Blueprints are created as revisions now with each individual save being a separate revision. Past revisions are not yet available to be reverted to, but will be in the future
• Confirmation window added to protect from exiting the blueprint editor with an unsaved blueprint accidentally
• Tags have been removed from blueprints as they were not really contributing anything useful

• Updates to UI windows to make them more consistent and easier to build on for future updates

• Fixed the part picker in the editor overflowing the UI
• Fixed misc issues with the UI for the ship control in the last version
• Changed camera speed in the editor for basic movement speed to be slower for finer control. Boost speed has been unchanged
• New 1x20x20 armor block added
• Added a model for the cargo container

• General cleanup and improvements on the code base in preparation for accessing inventories across docked ship.
• New block models are being created for the ship blocks. The first to be added is the ship core block, it does not have any functionality yet, but will soon. Can currently be placed on a ship

• Docking has been implemented for ships.
• Improved the ship orbit camera to orbit better to always look at the ship and able to rotate all the way around the ship, also can mouse wheel zoom on the orbit cam now.
• Working on adding item transfer between docked ships

• Added a new ship block the mega cargo container which holds 500k volume
• Fixed exiting ships to correctly place the player next to the ship rather than where they entered the ship.
• NPC ships are still being built out but are not quite ready to add into the game
• Docking joint physics has been reworked and docking will be readded soon

• Expanded sector loaded to fully encompass around the player, as well as hot loading sectors on the server side.
• Fixed a server lockup issue that was causing the whole server to lock up when a player transitioned into a new sector.
• Work on building out NPC ships has started but very preliminary

• Added a new interaction system so ship blocks can be directly interacted with
• Sign blocks can now be interacted with to edit the text
• Text added to show when a block that can be interacted with is in front of the player and will show the bound key to press to interact with it

• Fixed some bugs with the joystick controls with very high deadzones and some incorrect mappings
• Fully integrated the joystick controls so proportional control is now used
• Added a new ship block for signs. The text cannot be modified yet, that will be added in the interactivity phase.

• Added joystick support for ship controls.

• Physics performance has been improved substantially, about 180x faster which is making everything run much smoother
• Fixed issues with the weapon projectile collisions and block damage, it is now very consistent. Damage levels may still need to be adjusted though.
• Fixed regressions with the direction the mining laser and projectile weapon were firing they are now correctly firing forward again.

• Fixed downwards thrust direction not applying correctly
• Fixed issues with server sporadic crashes caused by concurrency problems
• Implemented server side metrics to better track whats happening on the server side to diagnose problems
• Fixed issue with session id refreshes causing timeouts

• Improvements to the magboots to more reliably lock and fixed bugs with the magboots
• Implemented full block rotations so blocks can be in any orientation
• Fixed bugs with the fabricator
• Implemented multiple types of play control to support space and gravity as well as locking to surfaces
• Work done to improve the reliability of token refreshes

• Added releases for windows.
• Added magboots to lock onto the hull of ships

• Adding performance improvements to the physics engine
• Improved client/server authentication management