Server hosting birthday and 4.86 development

[Cannon]

I noticed today that we have had our current server for one whole year. I wanted to take the opportunity to thank the people who have donated to keep this place running. Every donation, no matter how small helps. Thanks guys!

On other news, the development of Discovery Freelancer 4.86 is speeding up. PvP balancing is largely complete and almost all updated ship models that were planned for 4.86 are in the development build. There are still system changes, bug fixes and submissions to integrate and we hope to complete this soon. Infocard writing is somewhat behind but we are not worrying about this until the system integration is finished.

As of today, we have 83 open tickets out of a total of 198. Many of the open tickets are waiting for integration and QA rather than implementation.

I've noticed on the forum that a number of people have said that "discovery will never use stuff from other mods". This comment is not accurate. What was meant is that our Dev team will never steal content from other mods. We sometimes use content with permission but we prefer to develop content ourselves so that ownership issues do not arise.

As people constantly ask me about these, I can confirm that the following features are actively being worked on or are already finished.
- Player constructed and controlled bases
- Player controlled commodity and equipment dealers
- Player docking on ships
- Cloaking devices
- Jump drives
- Different cruise speeds for ships
- Control of lights on ships, hud colours, shields and group targeting
- Turret zoom

Some of these features are similar to other mods but I think we have a better implementation. I'm not aware of any other mods that allow players to construct their own bases.

Here's a sample of some of the new commands:

There are a lot of other features we would love to add but we have to focus on getting 4.86 out and so these might have to wait until 4.86 update 1 or 4.87.

Have fun.