Here we are in year 17. Our plans for next year are mostly an extension of our plans from last year, but I'm hoping to expand into several new areas. One of the main goals is going to be to increase community involvement in the game's development. We already have an active descriptions team and suggestions forum, but I really want to find ways for players to contribute concretely to the game. Suggestions are relatively easy to come by, but they tend to increase the workload as we have more tasks rather than fewer. I'd love to be able to offload things that can be done without a developer to the playerbase somehow, as there are many capable players who don't volunteer with the team for one reason or another, but would be open to implementing changes independently and submitting them for use. Last year we did this with the new CSS system and it led to Marsen joining the team as a very productive dev, so my hope is to repeat this for one or two additional volunteers this year. We'll be trying to make more posts in the Work for CPs forum, and we might even post specific segments of the game on github to open them to community improvement.

Our UI projects are returning this year, but we are adding an additional component to them. The Web Services API has long been a tempting feature, as it allows others to develop clients that interact with the SWC database, enabling rich faction website capability, but the current version has not been maintained in quite some time and is feature incomplete. As we are targeting several UI rewrites, to fix bugs and improve quality, we are working on a method for directly integrating the web services functionality in the hope that this means more will actually be implemented. Traditionally, developers have had to implement a feature, then write a UI, and then write web services, which led to web services simply being ignored most of the time, and one or two core devs focused on implementing all of them.

As always we are focusing on several core engine improvements to allow for further development and are going to be continuing the policy of introducing at least minor features with each change, illustrating what the benefit of a specific change was. The biggest feature goal remains ground combat, and almost all of our targets have an impact on its release, with the rest being either quality of life issues or roleplaying specific, such as the "game content" changes.

There has also been a mini-sync to address a few more bugs introduced last weekend. Update to revision 39808ea11c7b9ffca7e3b9100cae6ba08b08e724.
- Fixed bug with handle creation regular expression (#3960)
- Fixed bug with web services not accepting spaces in URLs (#3950)
- Manually ran FI, reset NPC population, and reset Alazhi deposits (#3956)
- Fixed travel timers being incorrect for people piloting fighters/freighters (#3940)