Groups

A player can only exist in one of the following groups at a time:

All Players Group– Players in this group will be matched with each other as much as possible to ensure as many human players can meet and play together
A player’s Friend List and Ignore List is used automatically to indicate preferences in match making so that friends will be matched instead of others if a choice exists(though this is a fuzzy system so there are no guarantees)
E.g. In a nearly full session a player with more friends in the session than that of another arriving at the same time would mean the first player getting in and the second spawning a new session instead
Players can use an option to indicate they would like friends of friends to be included in the preference system described above (which basically expands their friends list for the purposes of preferences under the hood only)
Players playing on ‘Iron Man’ mode will only be matched with other ‘Iron Man’ mode players



Private Group – Players in this group will only be matched with other players in the same private group
Players can create their own private group and invite people into it
To help facilitate inviting players into a private group, players can be indicated as friends in game and can be selected easily for sending invites out too
Any player can be invited into a private group regardless of friend status so player name searching and direct in-game selection is possible
A player who accepts such an invite will be removed from their current group upon the next hyperspace jump and be placed in the private group of the inviting player
A player who refuses such an invite will remain in whatever group they were already in and the option to ignore future requests from that player during the current gaming session is presented
Players can only invite other players of the same type (normal, iron man) to a group
Players can save private group settings including players to invite to allow quick selection and set up of groups
A player can set an option to allow friends to “quick join” into their private group
They can change this option at any time
Players will be able to see on their friend list that other friends are in private groups and that some may have a symbol indicated they’re free to “quick join” into the group without needing an invite
The “quick join” option can be extended to allow friends of friends in freely also
A player wishing to join another player’s private group will have to message them asking for an invite as there is no way to formally request admission into the group
Players will thus typically set the “quick join” option if they don’t want the hassle of their friends having to message them when they want to join in with the group
Only the original private group creator can invite others into their group. They can also do the following:
Kick other players out of the group
Disband the group resulting in all the other players entering their own individual private groups with “quick joining” disabled (gives them the opportunity to play solo or decide to join the all players group)
Pass their leadership and thus all these options to someone else in the group
Upon disconnecting, logging off or leaving the group automatically passes leadership to the oldest private group member, i.e. the first player to accept an invite into the group that is still present
When creating a group the player creating it can decide how the group will react to crimes committed by players while in the group
The player can decide to either count only crimes committed against other players, or against AI ships
The player can decide if a player who earns a bounty is either kicked back into the all players group, or can be kept in the private group




Solo Group – Players in this group won’t be matched with anyone else ever (effectively a private group with no one else invited) with the following properties:
Players in this group are effectively indicating they want to be left alone and not disturbed by anyone else
By default group and friend invites are ignored but this can be enabled if desired
By default a player’s online status is hidden (set to offline) from others but this can be change if desired
A player in this group can still see when other friends come online and can message them
A player in this group can still receive messages from friends (possibly revealing the fact that they are online by virtue of return messages but still indicated as being offline)

Hi everyone,

beta update 1.02 is being uploaded and will be available for download within the next 30 minutes. Here is the change log for this update:

- Fix for rare infinite loop in missions on start up
- Fixes for type 6 repair, cockpit now has marketable data and won't crash. localised the cockpit and the radiators
- If the launchpad returned by the ship is null (because the space station has disappeared), then we should assert - but not crash
- Fix crash in location data gathering
- Safer method for transferring values for damaged regions
- Made the space location component not crash if it has an invalid address, instead it will now wait until it get a valid address
- Fix bug in handling access token lock/unlock - could cause a deadlock
- Additional null proofing for launch bay components
- Possible fix for soft lock in hyperspace
- Show the hyperspace limits to inform the player while reviewing the mission details
- Paintjob tweaks for both Sidewinder & Eagle to match them more closely to the thumbnail images we have on the store
- Make double sure we have an object before applying a replication to it (Crash fix)
- Only check for correct authority transfer state if actually needing to transfer authority
- When a death message arrives for a subsidiary (which, for example, would remove the internals of a space station), if the object itself doesn't know what the response is then ask the subsidiary's parent if it knows
- Fix one of the crash paths dealing with inside/outside paths of the docking bay
- Make sure we get something useful from locking vertex and index buffers when creating stellar body geometry
- Add some extra logging when joining a private group
- More vanishing station-bits crash guards
- Stop the toxic cobra from crashing the game by starting in a redundant state in operations mode
- Missing black markets fixed
- Fixed incorrect paint job name
- OOM stability: when encountering an E_OUTOFMEMORY HRESULT on the render thread, flush the immediate context and reattempt the operation before we give up, since experiments show at least some drivers do not do this internally
- Server should not clean up (apparently unused) sessions that are still in the process of being set up: apply a minimum lifetime of 60 seconds before a session can be cleaned up
- Extra careful tracing of space station deaths
- Crash fix in Initialise Launch Bays
- Added more reporting for missions softlock issues
- Ensure the condition for checking a new authority is OK to take it match between the issuer and the checker
- Send HTTP status code in telemetry for failed game load

Michael