Welcome back for Devlog #4!

It's been a little while since our last update, but as you'll see in this Devlog, it was for good reason.

I'm a firm believer that a strong motivator for consistent, quality work is a genuine interest and understanding of the problem being solved by a project. In the case of Canis, I was an avid ARC Raiders player, which meant I could gameplay test constantly during my own play sessions and keep a continuous log of improvements to make based on my own experience and learned intuition as a player. Since the release of the new ARC Raiders map, Riven Tides, I've played the game far less and instead got sucked back into playing World of Warcraft: Midnight.

This change in my own game preference led me to dive deep into one of Canis' roadmap items, supporting new titles outside of ARC Raiders. This was more than just a simple feature add, it required a large refactor of some of Canis' core systems, hence the extended period of silence from the devlogs. But after a few iterations and a lot of buggy dev builds, I'm happy to announce the official launch of World of Warcraft: Midnight as a supported game within Canis!

New Feature: Multi-Game Support

For existing ARC Raiders users you will see no change to your interactions with Canis, but if you now go to the Star Chart you will see that it no longer goes right to the ARC Raiders star chart but now shows WoW as an option, and a + button for leaving feedback on any other new titles you want added to Canis! For new users, when you first interact with Canis you will be prompted to select your current game so that Canis knows which galaxy you are charting and can pull in the proper entities. Changing games is as easy as telling Canis to "Switch to X game" via voice, or from Discord use the /game active command.

The multi-game support was built with the explicit goal of not just enabling WoW be added to Canis, but also to streamline the process of adding new games enabling us to add titles to Canis at a much faster rate. So while getting WoW added took about a month, we now have a system which we believe will allow us to add new titles in as little as a day! So as new game requests come in via feedback, or new titles launch, Canis will be waiting and ready to chart your discoveries.

One of the main ways we are enabling fast turnarounds for new games is by doing a form of lazy-loading of the game's entity list. What this means is that on addition of a new title we have a game data seeding process that creates a collection of a game's core entities and locations, necessary for Canis to be useful for users. But the collection does not attempt to be exhaustive, especially for titles with very large datasets, such as World of Warcraft. The idea here is that we can provide the initial core dataset we know will be useful, but don't waste resources trying to guess exactly which NPCs, items, quests, etc, players will care to ask or note about. This does not mean that certain entities are un-linkable! Our lazy loading system monitors user queries and notes to detect when a new entity, not currently in the game's dataset, is mentioned. This background process has the ability to autocreate entities when it has a high confidence of an entity's existence. Or in the case of a low confidence entity identification, Canis now has an unresolved entities page for every user which asks for confirmation if a detected entity is indeed correct and should be added to the game's entity set.

To ensure no abuse of this system, all added entities (both automatic and user confirmed) do not propagate to the public star chart right away. They will first exist only for the user and their Crews until an Admin manually verifies and promotes these new entities to the public star chart. This new lazy loading system will allow us to expand much more rapidly and help ensure that we are only charting entities that the community cares about. Canis will DM you on Discord each time a new entity is auto-added or placed in your unresolved entity queue so you will always be aware of how you are helping to chart the stars.

Additional Improvements

Addition of native Discord /commands

Up to this point interacting with Canis via text in Discord required that users @ mention Canis in their server. While this user experience is serviceable it does not utilize some of the native functionality of Discord apps which Discord users are familiar with. We've remedied this and now support /commands for all of Canis' core functionality. You can now have Canis join or leave your voice channel with a simple /join or /leave and can take notes directly with /note. For a full list of the new /command support check out the updated commands page.

Improved Wake Word Detection During Long Play Session

User feedback and our own testing identified an issue of consistent voice channel reconnects during periods of extended silence. We've identified this issue as a bug with our health monitoring system, which was mistaking long periods of silence as an indicator of a broken voice connection. This has now been resolved and you should no longer see Canis consistently leaving and re-joining your voice server during longer play sessions.

Removal of Query Limit for Beta

Since launch there has been a monthly limit on the number of voice queries a user could make. This limit was put in place to ensure no abuse of the system and to limit any financial liability on our end. We've made some cost optimizations and put more intelligent rate limiting in place to ensure Canis can't be spammed with bogus requests that we are on the hook to pay the provider costs for. With these changes in place we now feel comfortable lifting these request limits and allowing un-metered access for the duration of the Beta. As we gain more insights into usage patterns we will use this data to help determine what features should be cost-gated to allow Canis a steady enough revenue to keep the lights on while ensuring a fair and pleasant experience for all users.