Engineering Office Report #4 – v3.1.0 Release (Fleet Assets) and Deputy Engineering Officer

In the first quarter of 2024, the Engineering Office delivered three BFMS releases focused on quality-of-life improvements for existing systems, but today, I am proud to announce the release of BFMS v3.1, which introduces Fleet Assets, a completely new system within Bravo Fleet! Based on an idea borne over a decade ago, and built around mechanics that the Senior Staff have spent the better part of a year tuning, the Fleet Assets system fundamentally changes the agency you have over your commands and the aspirational objectives you have as you set out to write, to game, and to compete.

At a fundamental level, the four key pillars of this system are:

1. Prestige, a currency which is earned by almost everything you do in Bravo Fleet, and which can then be spent to make your command(s) exactly as you envision them;
2. the Fleet Marketplace, where you can spend your prestige on everything from changes to your command to adding additional commands and customizing your squadron;
3. your Prestige Ledger, where you can review a full accounting of all the prestige you have earned and all the ways you have spent it; and
4. the Logistics Office, a new office that is responsible for the administration of the marketplace and the health of the system.

Integrating with this new system are changes to Commands, Squadrons (now called “Personal Units”), Task Forces, and all the prestige-generating systems. A full list of these changes can be found below in the BFMS v3.1.0 Patch Notes section.

Additionally, in recognition of all your past accomplishments, all past awards, promotions, staff positions and Fleet Actions placements have been back-computed into your ledger, as have the debits for your current command(s). If you’ve been keeping busy with writing, gaming and competitions, you might want to head right over to the Fleet Marketplace, and if you haven’t quite earned what you need yet, fear not… you have the agency to earn and aspire to those goals (and the upcoming Labyrinth Fleet Action is a great way to really bank up some more prestige).

We’ve done our best to make this system intuitive and natural, but for more, check out Vince’s Fleet Command Report, and to get a full breakdown of the system’s mechanics, please see the new Logistics Office Policy.

BFMS v3.1 Development Lifecycle

Any time we change a line of code, there are multiple people involved. It starts with an objective and the creation of user stories to meet those objectives. Then comes architectural design, software development and code review. And then, last but not least, testing. All of these pieces have to come together just right in order to deliver something that delights.

As opposed to BFMS v3.0, which focused on building out new frontends for existing systems, for BFMS v3.1, the canvas started empty and our ambitions for this system were vast. This meant our development lifecycle was particularly involved, all the way to the point that last fall, we even built a calculator, wired directly against production data, that allowed us to look at what any change to the prestige system would do to the entire balance of the economy.

The release that went out today includes over 200 commits and more than 5,000 lines of code. Each commit had to be envisioned, designed, built, reviewed and tested along the way. Given this scale, I feel it only right to take a moment to thank those who played a key role in this process:

• Fleet Admiral Teylas Ramar (Vince) for spending the last decade refining this vision, and for keeping us driving to a north star throughout the development process;
• Admiral Liam Dahlgren (David) for his tireless work designing mechanics and crunching numbers to make sure that everything in the system was balanced just right;
• Members of the Bravo Fleet Senior Staff for their partnership and collaboration, chipping in ideas and refining this system until we got what we have today;
• Lieutenant Commander Mamof for being my partner in all things software development, building a number of key features and functions that are central to this release; and
• Captain Ryoko Takato (RaWolfe) and Commodore Alexandra Sudari-Kravchik (McGig) for their diligence in testing, putting every aspect of the system through the ringer to hunt for any bugs that might exist.

While we are incredibly excited for you to get your hands on Fleet Assets today, know that this is only the beginning for new core system. We have big plans as we look to the future, but we’ll save that for another day…

Deputy Engineering Officer

Before I get to the patch notes, I also want to take a moment to talk about staffing within the Engineering Office. This department is an oddity among our departments in that it requires a real world background in software development and systems infrastructure. It is not often that someone comes along who has the motivation and the experience necessary to make an impact within the department, especially right from day one.

That said, over the last few months, you may have noticed a new face popping up as it relates to engineering activities. Lieutenant Commander Mamof, a software developer by trade, accepted a position in the Engineering Office back in March, and since then, he’s been working tirelessly on both BFMS v3.1 and our recent upgrades to the Academy and the Infobase. As a solid partner to me and the rest of Bravo Fleet Command, and as someone who has already made a notable impact on our Fleet systems, it gives me great pleasure to announce that Mamof will now be stepping into the role of Bravo Fleet Deputy Engineering Officer.

BFMS v3.1.0 Patch Notes

Prestige System

1. A financial ledger system has been built to track member prestige, including credits, debits and orders, as well as transaction-level auditing.
2. A new dashboard has been built that provides members with complete accounting of their outstanding orders, executed purchases, and earned prestige.
3. An automated script has been implemented that awards time-based salary grants with idempotency to support rerun in the event runtime issues occur.

Promotions and Awards

4. The rank system has been updated to grant a lump sum of prestige, based on the level of the rank, when a promotion is granted.
5. The rank system has been updated to grant a weekly salary of prestige, based on the level of the rank, as long as a member is active.
6. The award system has been updated to grant a lump sum of prestige, based on the type of award, when an award is issued.
7. The lump sums for all ranks and awards earned previously have been retroactivitely granted. Weekly rank salaries for active members will only be awarded on a go-forward basis.

Competitions

8. The competition system has been updated to grant prestige to the competition host and all non-disqualified competition participants once a competition is completed and winners selected.
9. The competition completion screen for competition hosts has been updated to include the ability to mark competition applicants as disqualified when selecting winners.

Fleet Assets

10. A new marketplace has been built that provides members with the ability to spend prestige on fleet assets.
11. A marketplace order type has been created to purchase a new command for an open command slot.
12. A marketplace order type has been created to refund an existing command and replace it with a new command.
13. A marketplace order type has been created to refund an existing command and leave the member with an open command slot.
14. A marketplace order type has been created to purchase a class change for a command.
15. A marketplace order type has been created for members of the appropriate rank to purchase a bespoke name for their personal unit.
16. A marketplace purchase type has been created for members of the appropriate rank to purchase an additional command slot.
17. A special allowance has been built whereby a member may purchase their first command, if it is a California class vessel, for free. In the event they receive a free California, the ship has a refund value of zero if refunded to the fleet later.
18. All commands currently held by members at the time of this release have been retroactively debited from their prestige totals. Commands that were previously retired were not debited.

Logistics Office

19. An administrative panel has been made available for the Bravo Fleet Logistics Officer and the Logistics Office Staff to review and approve existing orders.
20. Roles with specific permissions have been created for the Bravo Fleet Logistics Officer and for Logistics Office Staff.

Commands

21. Commands can now be purchased through the marketplace, up to the number of command slots a member has. This starts at one for Midshipman, two for Captain, and goes up from there.
22. The number of command slots a member has is based on their rank and, at Fleet Captain and above, they can purchase additional slots directly via the marketplace.
23. Stations and attached ships are considered as utilizing a slot within the command slot system. RPGs and sandboxes have been excluded from the command slot system.
24. Command proposals have been removed for individual commands. All individual commands should now be purchased through the marketplace. Command proposals must still be used for RPG proposals.
25. Minor usability improvements have been made to the command page.

Squadrons

26. Squadrons have been converted into personal units, where a “Division” is defined as a unit with two to three commands and a “Squadron” is defined as a unit with four or more commands. RPGs and sandboxes are not considered within this.
27. Squadrons are now programmatically defined as the name of the flagship, followed by the role of the flagship, followed by the designation of division or squadron (ie. “Polaris Heavy Explorer Squadron”).
28. Members may replace the role of their personal unit with a bespoke name, while the flagship and division/squadron designation will remain consistent regardless (ie. “Polaris Advanced Research Squadron”).
29. If a member has a personal unit (more than one command), that personal unit is now shown on the member’s dossier under the commands tab. Additionally, a member can define a blurb to show up on their dossier’s command tab under the personal unit header by editing the new “Personal Unit Blurb” field on their profile.
30. If a member has a personal unit, that personal unit is now shown as a new section on the command page for every command within the squadron. Additionally, a member can define a description section to show on their command pages by editing the new “Personal Unit Description” field on their profile.

Task Forces

31. Task Forces accumulate prestige as a fraction of the earnings by their members, excluding earnings from weekly salary.
32. Task Forces receive additional prestige from their placement in Fleet Actions.
33. Task Forces may use accumulated prestige to purchase assets on behalf of the Task Force.
34. The Command Registry has been updated to remove registries from circulation that have been purchased by task forces.

Bug Fixes & Miscellaneous

35. Paragraph and new line behaviors in story writing have been improved.
36. Protections have been added to prevent user dossier crashes when the member’s primary character does not exist.
37. Protections have been added to command assignment email where, in rare cases, an unnecessary email would be sent.
38. A bug has been resolved for timed competitions where the start button could show, but do nothing, after the competition concluded.
39. A bug has been resolved with non-published award records.
40. Several overly restrictive permission checks have been loosed as it relates to the admin navigation menu.
41. Several counters on the admin navigation menu have been added/removed to improve usability for staff.
42. Several errors that previously output a white page now output a styled error page.
43. Bulk operations have been disabled from the admin panels.
44. Local development environments have been synced to the live environment.