DEV BLOG: Crafting Economy, Instant Replay and UI

Information Dev's Corner
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Originally Posted to Entropia Universe Steam News, Play on Steam to get all updates straight to your library: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3642750/view/615431029997438884

Greetings Colonists,
We wanted to take a moment to share a small slice of some of the exciting initiatives our team is working on that are on the horizon, in parallel to our other upcoming releases.
[HEADING=2]Items and crafting[/HEADING]
One system we have started addressing that is particularly interconnected with items is our crafting system. We are excited to share some significant progress the AI team has made toward improving it.

Over the past couple of weeks, we have been working on an automated pipeline for identifying particular blueprints, items that are either impossible to craft or don’t contribute meaningful value to the game’s economic ecosystem.

We have been building a new version of a comprehensive relational database that more clearly maps all in-game items, their dependencies, and their economic weights. This enables us to programmatically detect various types of problematic items, such as dead-end crafting paths, “broken blueprints”, undesirable end products and much more.

This infrastructure allows us to rapidly iterate on blueprint adjustments, ensuring craftable items serve a stronger purpose in the player-driven economy. This work is designed to improve not only the crafting system but all other systems as well.

Before any changes are made to the items identified in our analysis reports, we’re also developing evaluation systems that provide more refined output before we make any real decisions.

We are looking forward to seeing how these refinements impact player engagement with the coming updates.

//Elias and Henning from the AI Team

[HEADING=2]Instant Replay - Sharing System[/HEADING]
We know many of you love capturing and sharing your most memorable moments in-game, whether it’s epic boss kills, valuable loot drops, or simply enjoying time with friends.

However, the current process can be cumbersome: running recording software in the background, editing footage, and uploading to external platforms all takes time and effort.

We’ve been making exciting progress on a proprietary instant replay system that would capture the last 30 seconds of gameplay, both video and audio, running seamlessly in the background. Think of it as our own integrated version of “shadowplay,” but built specifically for Entropia Universe and accessible directly within the game client.

The vision is simple: with a keybind, you’d be able to save those spontaneous moments, view, process and share them with friends or followers directly from within the game’s interface. No external software, no manual post-processing.

This system is still a work in progress and subject to change, and we’ll continue sharing updates on our development journey in future devblogs.

[HEADING=2]Modernizing Our Interface: Chromium Embedded Framework[/HEADING]
Our current user interface has served us well for many years, but we have identified several limitations, including lack of higher resolutions beyond 1920x1080, proper scaling/sizing, framework-level limitations, incompatibility with Unreal Engine 5’s native systems and more.

We have now entered a testing phase for Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), a modern, industry-standard framework used in numerous contemporary games. Our internal tests have been very promising, and we’re excited about the potential CEF brings for delivering crisp, high-fidelity interfaces while accelerating our development process enormously.

As a first subject to this change, we’ve been developing a completely new interface for our upcoming Voting system using this framework. We’ve also established a new proprietary coding standard for UI development using CEF in particular.
This is already showing significant efficiency improvements, which previously took us weeks to develop now takes a couple of hours.

This is an important milestone in our efforts to modernize the game and prepare our systems for Unreal Engine 5. We look forward to sharing more progress in the upcoming devblog.

Thank you for your continued support. We’re excited to keep you updated on these developments as they progress.

The Mindark Team

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0.0

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UE5 skeptics in shambles

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Sharing is caring

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Exciting

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ayo they finally mentioned UE5!

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What does this mean for UI updates, will all the UI get updated to the new UI framework before UE5 update, one UI element at a time?

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Colour me cautiously hyped.

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I’m all for improvements and am not the type that complains at the drop of a hat about everything MA does, but this reads as if the team isn’t even aware the UI just had a major revamp not long ago. It comes across as a corporate announcement saying “Our next big new thing this round is going to be . . . basically the same big thing we worked on last time, but we’re going to make it sound new and fresh like it’s a brand new item to work on.” That’s just a constructive suggestion where that sentence referring to the old UI and others would have made sense a few years ago before the redesign, but saying that now signals a lack of awareness of what’s actually been done in the game. Maybe that isn’t actually the case for the development team, but language really does matter when it makes it sound like something new has been with us for ages. It would be better to have said you’re continuing the previous work, etc. to avoid how it’s portrayed right now.

Either way, we’ve gone through a lot of UI updates in the past few years. I know each time Little Big Mining Log has had to work on scrambling to update because of constant tweaks to the radar or claim deed interfaces as well as fonts almost for each release, so maybe that’s where I’m a little wary of portrayals that we’re embarking on a new venture into the UI. It would be nice if the UI wasn’t being constantly tweaked when it’s from the perspective of community tools, so usually larger less frequent updates are more helpful in that regard.

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Just to quickly clarify for you on one thing - this is referring to the fundamental framework or “technology” of the user interface. When we refreshed the UI last year, that was still based on the same framework, meaning the same fundamental issues still remained (for example, lack of scaling for 4K displays, fixed size UI elements, forced to have “basic” UI (no ability to use modern UI design elements), no ability to update UI elements without a patch, etc).

This update is talking about changing the underlying framework to enable much more functionality and quality of life expected from modern games, as opposed to a purely “cosemetic” change. This will allow our UI to do so much more in regards to pure functionality, integration with external sources and more.

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Broken blueprints have been a problem for such a long time, I’m happy to hear that MA is finally going to “potentialy” address this in the “near” future.

Like any other announcement made, I will be cautiously optimistic and plan for a 2035? deployment?

What about Land Plots? What’s going on with those?

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Sounds like a major crafting overhaul might be coming, it’s about time since there’s a lot of dead BPs and mats in the game. Are there going to be new items too? Like a new line of craftable weapons or something? Another issue with crafting is that while dead BPs are still dropping, it’s not possible to loot some BPs that are in active use and in demand since they were removed from the pool. Maybe take a look at this as well?

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translate- you will do it(players)and we-MindArk- see if it works, like every single time.

with ai?
but most of all what will be broken after.

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WTS 1000 PED TT of old Limited BPs @ boxes…

Also UE5 in december confirmed.

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Provide a clear page on the website of any bps you change, and I’ll take it in good faith that you are trying to improve things genuinely. Any continued lack of transparency moving forward will now be met with a bigger ‘disconnect’ on the part of the playerbase I think. I, for one, have had close to enough of the various un-/semi-documented changes to things around here, such as newer bps (and availability/cost) changing in patches after just days.
Am I confident? Nope.
Is there progress in some areas of transparency? Yes, such as the new inventory tracking system. There are changes I’d make to how shop inventories are handled, for example, but we are getting some improvements on how we can manage our data. For bp libraries, we still have to rely on often out of date external sources, however. Now really is the time, MA.
Am I confident? Nope.
Is that a consistent theme? Yes.
What can/will be done about it? Big difference between can and will. Please shorten the gap massively.

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sounds like we are finally moving out of closed alpha

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Ok I read enough today.RIP

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It’s worrying the MA team need AI to know what is going on in their economy. I think it’s about time you employed someone who’s job it is to track what’s going on, and not rely on AI - i’ve seen your attempts with that already.

And this is the second time you have admitted you don’t know your own in game economy. Just put some thought process into it. Hell from the sound of it my spreadsheets have a better idea than your team do. It’s not bloody rocket science

Just get on with it, and stop relying on useless AI

Rgds
Ace

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This is literally one of the things AI is fantastic at. Using AI for the things it excels at is wise…

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Fantastic news, some great stuff going on here! Im excited to see it all roll out. But even bigger hype for me is seeing UE5 mentioned not once, but twice! ?