BitPlanets changelog: 20190208

New ship design.

I'm planning to add a skins for the ships so you can change them during the game. We will have around 10 of them by the end of the month.

New ship designs

They don't look that nice yet, but a design is working on them so hopefully we will have some nice shinny ships!

New info box panel

Added a info box panel on the top left side with important information such as: match timer, resources per minute and number of streams. If you are not playing it will have a message explaining that you are a spectator.

Added a info box panel on the top left side with important information such as: match timer, resources per minute and number of streams. If you are not playing it will have a message explaining that you are a spectator.

Scoreboard and chat redesign

Minor redesign of the chat and the scoreboard to be more readable when the player color is too dark.

Minor redesign of the chat and the scoreboard to be more readable when the player color is too dark.

Improved server stability

This was a big one, took me a few days. Thanks to all the new players the servers started to crash because of the overload. That's a nice problem to have. Initially I had to hack it together in a few hours, but then a proper solution took a few solid days.

Each room is basically a new server and when it the server starts will ask one of the servers to get the next task required. In this case a task is to create a new room so players can play. In this way, every time I start a new server it will automatically appear as an available room to play. For now we only have 2 servers, but I'm planning to add a few more, probably add 2 more by the end of the month.

Support on Patreon with some cash!

As you might know, the game has no ads and makes no revenue, but servers are burning some cash for now. I'm adding Patreon to see if I can raise at least some money for the existing and new servers.

Other minor changes

  • Disabled planet creation when you are not playing: this was an issue that Son of Atom mentioned and has been fixed. You were able to create a new planet next to somebody, spawn, upgrade and kill all his planets or damage a lot.
  • Ship streams are limited to 60 for performance reasons, later you might upgrade and increase this limit.
  • Started work on adding more ship skins. Soon you will be able to change ship skins.
  • Upgrades now show as "x per minute" instead of "x per cycle", which was confusing.
  • Background is now black.
  • Fixed room selection that was loading for long time.
  • Friendly names for loading screen.
  • Show loading while is loading correctly, there was a minor issue.
  • Added patreon for support.

Originally published , updated February 08, 2019