Build 17

[rob]

Hi all,

Tim and I just pushed build 17 live. Many of the changes came about as a result of your feedback. Thank you so much!

* Fix wrongly positioned prism poofs for other players
* Add "/who" to list all players logged on
* Add "/goto <player>" to teleport to another player
* Make /drive accept a case insensitive substring
* Remove North-pointing arrow in non-swirly world
* Eliminate holes
* Remove chat box border
* Have chat scroll up from the bottom
* Use page up/down to scroll chat
* Move gridshard and xp indicators to top of screen
* Decrease socket gridshard deposit radius (so you don't deposit on spawn)
* Add drag rotator: click self and drag to set tank facing
* Eliminate all but 1 extractor and 1 lab; make all sockets white
* Add tooltips to lenses, crystal splinters, gridshards, xp and resource/research indicators
* Rescale XP cost for each level; get levels at 10k, 30k, 60k, 100k, etc -- a triangular series

We tried to save the account table but it seemed not to have worked. Let us know if your account is somehow preserved.

As always, we treasure your opinions and bug reports. Thanks for playing!

Rob

[rob]

Oh yay, my account was saved on my home machine! Hmmm...

[amitp]

Oh my … you took lab/extractor/resource simplification to the extreme!

[rob]

Tim's working on a couple of potentially interesting changes in this area. First, he's inverting the reward scale for prisms: the lowest level prisms will give the biggest bonuses, with each subsequent level of prism giving smaller and smaller increases. This will keep the "oldbies" from having a massive combat power advantage over newbies, which is important in a game with a single battlefront that everyone fights at.

Second, he's implementing six new buildings ("resonators" -- anyone have a better name suggestion?), which will provide global upgrades (to all players) for each of the six traits that are buffed by prisms: range, speed, damage, rate of fire, hit points, and shields. The buildings are to be color coded to match the prism colors; the new buildings and their sockets will be trapezoidal.

As more and more "resonators" are built, the buffs from these buildings should dwarf the buffs received from prisms. These buffs are for the current server only. And when a "sector is reconquered" by hitting research level 10, the resonator buffs will reset along with the map, as resonator buff level is the sum of the levels of the appropriate resonator buildings on the map.

An idea we kicked around yesterday (but did not commit to) is having a new column of prism slots unlock with each level. We thought it might be cool when you level up to get a new toy (new tank class) as well as a new task (find 6 prisms for the new slots).