Hello everyone,



Phew! It's been a busy few weeks, but I've had a lot of fun implementing quite a few new cool things for all of you, if I do say so myself.

On to this week's changes:
- The backend for the ship customizations has been partially rewritten in order to make future expansions of the system a lot simpler. This was necessary to unlock the changes below, but will also make it a lot easier to implement other ideas that players have submitted for this system.
- Your ship customizations will now feature in various messages to do with your ship. How this works exactly, I will leave as a surprise. But what I will say is that captains should pay close attention to their docking, undocking, boarding and disembarking messages. They have become quite a bit more dynamic. Also psst, customization combinations matter 😉
- The attentive reader may have noticed undocking is on that list. There was no message for this previously for people seeing your ship undock. There is, now.
- Stations have featured viewing decks for quite some time, but you couldn't really view anything in particular from them. starting now, you will see ships dock and undock from the station you're on if you are on that station's viewing deck. Want to take that special someone up to see the ships fly by? Now you can.
- A new artifact, display_permit, has been introduced to up your limit of displayable ships from 1 to 2. It will be available in the store soon. Can't decide which ship to display? We get it, so we'll gladly make your life easier by allowing you to make that difficult choice twice 😉

Together with the changes from last week, all of this should make the ship customization system way more relevant and allow you to express yourself in new ways.
Please note that quite a bit of functionality needed to be revisited in order to make all this work. There may be bugs, customizations may not properly show up for you. Poke us if that happens, we'll sort you out.

In the mean time, our resident World Engineer Senzei has been working on some things of his own, namely:
- The way the damage for Scorch is calculated has been balanced slightly, and we are keeping an eye on any negative consequences this may have.
- You can now use AB to get info on any ability in the game, not just your own. Your own are preferred when abilities with the same name are queried, but you can specify by adding the exact skill and ability name just like you've always been able to.
- A new verb, PROPS, will give you info about props in the current room.

I will get out of your way to let you play with all the new things now. If duels need fighting, bug each other. If stuff breaks, BUG us.
As always, enjoy the game! 🙂

-Zersiax