Weekly Update #39

Hey everyone it’s weekly update time. Unfortunately there’s no new screenshots this week because our artists forgot to upload them, they’re all asleep right now, and I don’t feel like waiting until tomorrow because I’ll be distracted by the US election. Despite that good progress continues to be made by the art team. The large detail final geometry pass for stations is nearly complete which will be exciting to get integrated into the game. There’s still quite a bit of work left on the small detail geometry, particularly within hangar bays, but the bulk of the station pieces are geometrically completed.

The interceptor and corvette exteriors are also really coming together great and we’ll hopefully have some new screen shots to show off for the next update. Flavien, to his great dismay, was incapacitated most of the week due to illness so not much progress to report with the networking. The remaining piece of the pledge upgrade system, handling chargebacks, is nearly complete with (currently) only 1 outstanding issue remaining. There’s still a bunch of testing still to be conducted and then some legal work to do for a Terms of Service but we’re hoping to release it and put it behind us soon - especially because working on it is killing my soul.

While we had initially announced support for both credit cards and PayPal with the new pledge upgrade system it will only support credit cards and bitcoin at release. This is because PayPal’s integration is a bit of a nightmare and… it’s killing my soul. I’ll finish it at some point in the future after I have time to replenish my intestinal fortitude - unless a lot of people yell at me because they want to upgrade via PayPal. Funny how that works. Anyway that’s it for this week, sorry about the missing screen shots, we’ll get you all some new content during the next update for sure!

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Great update, nice and honest! Have fun with the election too…!

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Sorry to be specific - Do this include debit cards? As I don’t happen to own a credit card…

Well, I won’t mind if the artists upload some pictures while they’re drinkin’ their mornin’ coffee. Just…make sure they’re from Battlescape. Mornings can be quite confusing.

Indeed a simple and honest update. I like it.

It would be cool if you guys could let us activate the old oculus integration again with the next update. If its still in there somewhere of course and if it is not too much work. :wink:
I am looking forward to the next patch! Can’t wait for textured ships again in the future, the Planetexplorer Youtube Channel is in dire need of new videos, and with my new gtx 1080 it will be glorious. :smiley:

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Most credit card systems I’ve encountered also work with debit cards. Generally it can’t tell what kind of account the money is coming from, only that it arrives!

But we’d need @INovaeKeith to confirm :slight_smile:

First a disclaimer, I don’t know how exactly I-Novae upgrade system will work but I want to try to help out anyway.

In chat they said they will be using “Stripe” as backbone for their payment system.

Stripe has a help page about your very question:

These are the payment types the system could potentially support but I-Novae does not have to implement them all.

I think it’s relatively safe to say that if your card has a logo of any of the mentioned companies (Visa, Master etc.) on it it will work no matter if the account behind it is credit or debit. Though, If it is a, for instance Maestro card, it will most probably not work.

This applies to most of the internet. Have you ever bought something on the internet with any card you currently own? There are fringe cases where some countries have special systems that allow for other online payment system then “Credit Cards” but generally speaking if you checked out using the credit card option and it worked for one website it works for most.

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I’ll be surprised if there isn’t significant demand for PayPal.

I totally know what it’s like to have to work on something boring! Make sure you keep your enthusiasm topped up by working on something interesting for a day :slight_smile:

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As I tend to say “Take all the time you need” to implement paypal. If this includes taking a break from the soulcrushing nightmare that it seems to be, so be it.

… As long as those who use paypal won’t automatically miss out on upgrading to Dev Tier of course (that’s all I ask for) …

The demand for paypal is a double edged sword, on one hand people who don’t know any better want it, on the other using paypal opens you up to having all your money arbitrarily seized by the paypal gestapo never to be released again.

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Aren’t there good ruby gems for payment? Why not use the active merchant gem or a different one? Writing a paypal api client from scratch sounds unnecessary to me, especially because you would have to maintain it yourself when the api changes or is replaced.

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It’s just a guess on my side, but I think it is due to the merchant gems normally not offering pledge-tier-upgrade functionality that takes into consideration if the customer initially pledged on kickstarter or not.



Oh, interesting. Never knew that Paypal started out as a german secret agency in the third reich back then…

There is always an option of buying bitcoin with a debit card, there must be someone offering that service and then upgrading the pledge with bitcoin.

I’ve thought about this possibility too. However, I’ve not yet come around to reading into setting up a wallet, how to trade bitcoins etc pp. Given how this and last year bitcoins where stolen from users on multiple occasions, I am a bit reluctant to join in on bitcoin.

Some basic debit cards (ATM cards?) don’t have a credit card feature tied to it so it can be a little tricky without some kind of bank transfer system. I’m assuming that’s what Alvin is referring to.

+1 for PayPal (I had some bad fraud experiences with credit cards (locked, however no money loss) in the past and, compared, prefer PayPal over CC).

Well if I would have to use CC then I would consider it, but preferable PayPal (and at least I didnt find basic support for PP that hard to implement, but I admit that was quite a few years ago already and things might have changed).

Pretty sure you miss a lot of pledges if you only offer bitcoin (which still is a pain in the *** for most people) and CC which is not that widely used in every country.
Anyway glad that you’re working on the pledge upgrade system! Guess there are quite a few waiting to throw more money at you :slight_smile:

I can’t help but wonder if the stuff ‘killing Keith’s soul’ is caused by all the security protocols PayPal uses. Because I have read quite a bit about stolen bitcoin so it may be worth setting up PayPal as they have a pretty good reputation.

What on Earth are you talking about?

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:scream:

…probably making jokes again…