Dev Blog: Interaction, Admins and Vehicle Skins

**Pollux**

Hello all,

Welcome to our first dev blog, focusing on a few key features we've been working on for our relaunch. We're going to be focusing on features that look good enough to show off, so this blog isn't an indication of everything we've done over the past few months.

Topics:

Everything shown here is still work in progress and may change on release.

What took so long?

We've had a lot of complications behind the scenes, such as our new server being unstable and the inventory refactor facing several blockers. Initially we decided to delay the dev blog until we can feature the new inventory system as a headline topic, this proved to be a mistake and we're not going to be doing it again.

To go into more detail, we received our new server at the start of last month. During our testing we found that pings were significantly higher than expected and we also had the server go down a few times. This delayed our server move and resulted us spending a lot of time investigating to try and resolve the issue. We're now happy with the stability of the server, however, we have more work to do when it comes to ping and hope to do further tests once we start team-wide tests later on.

With inventory we faced issues when it comes to stackable items. The new inventory system essentially has two different types of items, stackable and unstackable. Stackable items work similarly to how items do now, with unstackable items having the ability to store unique data and much more. We're confident we have a solution for this and are currently in the process of re-working parts of the system to accommodate this better, as the system wasn't originally designed to support stackable items at all.

While it's disappointing that we weren't able to meet our original timeframe, inventory is by far the biggest change for the relaunch with it changing hundreds of files within the game mode. Once completed we'll be able to spend resources finishing up the rest of the changes we'd like to get done and begin testing. Going forward we're going to avoid delaying the dev blogs, and instead talk about issues we're working through if we're unable to feature a key topic. Dev blogs are a new thing to us, there's definitely a lot we've learned here and we hope to improve going forward.