Preparations for the gateway release continued this week.
You can find the full issue of the development log here.
It came up in the Discord, so here again: the new upkeep is:
4 POW, 10 SOL, 40 SPT, 40 SEA, 10 ALR, 4 WRH
I have lots of questions about the process of constructing a GTW that the wiki doesn’t explain. Where is the best place to ask those questions?
The forums are probably the best place. You can either ask them here, or create a new topic for it.
Ok, here goes:
What happens to the store for gateway construction if the contracted constructor stops playing? Can others contribute to the store to complete the project? Can the material in the store be recovered?
Would it be possible to get some more information in the GTW view - name of the player contracted to construct it / completion progress (at least a percentage but preferably a list of materials that have been added)?
I asked the governor at Gasworld to start a GTW construction contract for me with a 365 day deadline. He claims it will not let him do anything above 99 days. Is that a bug or is he somehow not interacting with that field correctly? Also, can these contracts be extended if they are about to breach?
If an infrastructure contract is breached or terminated during construction, the player responsible for the construction remains access to the store. Once the store is empty it is being removed.
In case a player gets inactive during construction, the situation is more complicated. It is not possible to let another player continue the construction process. This was a deliberate decision to reduce the scope a bit. We assumed that gateways are such important projects that the possibility that one of their constructors stops playing would be rather small. If that happens anyways, please contact us, and we’ll find a solution.
Do you want to see that information as a member of parliament, or in general?
That seems to be a bug. We’ll change the max allowed days to 365. Yes these contracts can be extended.
…If that happens anyways, please contact us, and we’ll find a solution.
Yes, it should be a rare occurrence. It just seems wrong to me that the fix for this (or any issue that might come up during normal gameplay) is “the devs will manually correct it”. It’s better for the players if we can self-correct and better for you guys if there isn’t extra work popping up.
Do you want to see that information as a member of parliament, or in general?
Unless there is a rationale for keeping it private, I would prefer that it is publicly viewable. It would be nice to know when a GTW is close to completion so I can start planning to include it in my flights or maybe contact the constructor with an offer to help finish it off.
That seems to be a bug. We’ll change the max allowed days to 365…
Thanks. I’ll let him know. BTW, I don’t know if that issue was specific to him or certain planets. I had tried creating a constructor contract on a planet where I am governor and that let me do 365 days.
If any player could see a read-only version of the gateway construction store, that would be really cool. Not sure if that’s feasible.
Second best would be showing the Progress % (which is visible in ASTS) inside the GTW screen, under that “under construction” message.
A few people have pointed out that the “Operational State” is misleading there.
Generally, people trust the screenshots I supply of the construction progress, but I could imagine situations where it would be nice to verify progress somehow.
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I did suggest some sort of gateway progress info to Molp (both of the options you mentioned). He has taken it under advisement.
On a separate note, I think the upkeep requirements should be reivisited. It would make more sense to have the quantities relate to the amount of use that the gateway gets in the same way that the POPI buildings do. As the upkeep cost would be relatively expensive at a location that only does a few flights a day, having a binary on/off dependent upon adding 100% of the upkeep goods discourages building gateways anywhere other that high traffic areas (i.e. the inner core). To get more people going to the outer regions we need gateways to make those trips more viable.
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Why is the Infrastructure Naming motion so limiting? It seems the only valid option is that the first character of each word must be a capital letter and the rest of the characters must be lower case letters. No numbers, no symbols (not even a hyphen), no spaces, no other capital letters. Makes it very difficult to be descriptive. This is what I had to come up with for a planned link to yi-265j - “Gasworld To Y I Twosixfive”. The default gateway names have numbers, hyphens and multiple capital letters so this seems like a flaw in the motion rather than a limitation of valid gateway names.
The reason behind it is, that it shares some of the same data structures as planets and systems. When we built these, we only had planets and systems with user specified names. We really need to adjust that and allow more lax naming rules for gateways.
Speaking of gateway naming - an [infrastructure naming] motion was passed for the Gasworld gateway yet the name still shows as “GTW-IUG-870” instead of “Gasworld To Y I Twosixfive”
This could be a glitch as, in an attempt to identify valid naming criteria, two motions were created and passed around the same time.
I really would like to rename this gateway. I’ve tried three times now.
The current motion should go through. I think I found the issue. The name field in the motion allows 42 characters, while the server only accepts 24 for a name. The motion then fails silently during execution.
Thanks. Figured it was something like that which is why I tried a shorter name.
Guess I need to have someone name the planet so that I can give the gateway a name that makes sense.