Star Explorers Testing Branch Updated to Pre-Release 0.0.6
Lots of new stuff is happening in 0.0.6, including, but not limited to, the following:
New fungus and plant variables. Different liquid and atmosphere types will influence what kinds of fungus and/or plant-life will exist on a planet.
There are no new plant or fungus models, but the way they form and combine has been altered, so you may discover fungus trees, or branching fungus in your travels, among other things.
Fixed a number of small issues.
New spaceship rooms. Here is where I have spent the most time. I will let the screenshots say the rest.
Star Explorers Testing Branch Updated to Pre-Release 0.0.5
Fixes
The last few updates have brought along their share of bugs and other issues, I spent a lot of time repairing those.
1. Star Names - Star names now appear at the man console at the ship's helm, in addition to the star chart. There was a problem where they would not appear correctly if you had not visited the star's sector (either with your ship or in the star chart) and it would show up as "NOT IN DATABASE." This should be corrected, and the star name should appear correctly.
2. Planets crash when loading - After adding sand planets, I introduced a bug that would prevent certain other planets from loading. I was able to identify the cause of this and resolve the issue.
3. Sideways rain - After updating the way rain works, I forgot to update the actual rain model in the Steam version, so rain would have appeared incorrectly. This should be resolved.
New Features
1. New landscaping - There are six new types of "landscape" objects. These are the large scale rocky outcroppings that appear on some planets. The image above shows one of the new types.
Here are a couple more images of the various new types of landscape...
Natural arches...
Craters...
Star Explorers Testing Branch Updated to Pre-Release 0.0.4
More New Features are being tested...
I was able to identify a problem with some textures on alien UFOs. Occasionally, the levels would appear with dark areas. It turns out some of the textures I was using were formatted incorrectly, so it was actually pretty easy to fix once I found the problem.
Crashed UFOs
Probably the most dramatic change is the existence of crashed UFOs on some planets. You can enter these destroyed craft and explore then, just like the ones in outer space. You won't find the crew on board, but you may come across some other surprises.
Star Chart Upgrade
The star chart now remembers your last position when you switch back to the ship's helm. This should improve the ease of navigation a lot. There is a bug in the star chart too, if you switch back and forth between stars and sectors, or between planets and stars, occasionally the star chart will have an error, and will not know what to focus on.
If this happens, just switch back to the last working focus (i.e. if you were looking at sectors, and then switched to stars, then switch back to sectors). You may have to re-click the star or planet you are trying to zoom in to. I will continue to troubleshoot this issue, but it does not seem to cause any game breaking problems.
Sand Planets
Sand planets already existed in Star Explorers. However, they will now have some different aspects that set them apart from other planets. The new sand planets will be flatter than others, and they will be lacking grass, trees and plants, though they may still have surface liquids and aliens if conditions are right. They also will be lacking caves, but they can still have ancient ruins or crashed UFOs to discover. This is just to add a little more variety to the game's possibilities. I plan on adding more planet and terrain types in the next update.
Star Explorers Testing Branch Updated to Pre-Release 0.0.3
New Features are being tested...
Aliens on UFOs should now be persistent between visits. So if you meet an alien, and it has an item or a quest, you should be able to come back later and purchase that item, or fulfill that quest.
Star and planet names now appear at the ship's helm. Previously you had to go to the star chart to see the names of stars and planets. This should make navigation much easier than before. You do still need to visit the star chart to enter custom names for stars and planets.
Here you can see the selected star is named "Big Red."
Mercuria, a desolate world, orbiting a dead star in a far off corner of the galaxy.
I already announced this, but I wanted to show you some of the new cave textures that you may encounter in your travels. The caves now reflect the surface type of each planet...
Star Explorers Testing Branch Updated to Pre-Release 0.0.2
The 0.0.1 release had a few missing files, models, textures etc...
No new content has been added since the 0.0.1 release, but now that content should work.
Star Explorers Testing Branch Updated to Pre-Release 0.0.1
Okay, I have come up with an absurd naming convention. I can't call it 4.x, because the newest version is not compatible with the earlier 4.x games. I don't want to call it 5.0 yet, because that is what it will be called when it is ready. So I'm calling it the 5.0 Pre-Release 0.0.1 and that's what's gonna happen.
Anyway, what's going on here?
There are some major improvements happening. First, I plan to focus on fixing and streamlining content that already exists. Then I have plans to add lots of new content. So far, I have accomplished the following:
Improvements:
Improved Load Times - Loading times for planets, caves and space has been cut by about a third (so it should take 2/3rds of the time it used to).
Improved Frame Rate - Planets, especially those with grass and more dense surface features should see an improvement in performance. I plan to do more with this in future updates.
Geysers should now become invisible on foggy planets when you move away from them. Also, geysers should no longer switch on and off when your character jumps from one side of a planet to another, it should be more smooth now.
Lava Smoke should also stop jumping as well.
Radiation clouds should form more randomly, they used to form in horizontal lines.
Nebulae in outer space would freeze your spaceship's lasers, this should no longer happen.
Sonic Cannon Fixed - the weapon should now work ... sorry it did not do anything for some time.
New Content:
Storm Planets
Some planets you land on will be Stormy, with severe high winds and other dangers like tornadoes and crystal rain. This was added after learning about some real life exo-planets that have similar conditions.
Volcanoes
The old volcanoes have been replaced with bigger and better volcanoes. These will do damage to the player if they get too close, and they also spit out exploding globs of lava ... watch out!
New Cave Textures:
Now caves will have different wall textures based on the surface type of the planets they appear on.
UFOs
I have focused more of my attention on UFOs, which have undergone some major changes. First, UFOs will now form a permanent part of the Star Explorers galaxy, leaving a star system, and returning to it, should reload the same UFO(s) in the same condition. Friendly UFOs now exist. You may approach and board these UFOs with no trouble, and interact with the aliens aboard. Aliens are now on UFOs, previously, only robots "lived" on UFOs. Derelict (damaged) UFOs now have a different look, with all sorts of holes and stuff (see image below) UFO interiors now have better collision detection, so going up stairs is much smoother than before.
More to Come:
UFOs are not done, I still have to make sure the aliens aboard will reload with the same items and quests, like they do on planets. Alien AI on UFOS still needs some tweaking too. I also want to offer at least three different types of UFOs, one for each alien type, and have some more interesting differences between an undamaged UFO, and one that has been damaged.
I also have a number of ideas about terrain, animals, plants and other stuff. I look forward to diving in to this game again, and I hope you will join me for the ride!
Update 4.6.5B
Star Explorers has been updated to version 4.6.5B.
This addresses a couple issues.
1. Sonic Cannon - this weapon should be working again. Somewhere along the way it stopped working, and I am not 100% sure why. I was able to track down the cause though, I think it was actually way back when I updated the game's engine from A7 to A8. Sorry it took so long to fix ... I do remember someone mentioning it a while ago, but sometimes these things slip my mind!
2. Invisible Barriers - One of the recent changes that should help the character getting stuck in caves actually introduced a new problem. It was causing the character to get stuck on outdoor terrain! So I have been able to identify that one part of the last update was not actually essential to the issue, and was responsible for causing this secondary issue.
The good news is that the character should no longer get caught up in any invisible barriers.
Happy exploring!
Star Explorers Updated to Version 4.6.5A
A new feature has been added that *should* help solve the problem of getting stuck in caves.
Occasionally, trying to jump over stalagmites can get a player stuck between the stalagmite and the top of the cave. I've attempted to solve this a few times, but each time it turn out that the problem does not quite go away.
Now you have two options if and when this happens. First, jumping (space bar) will slightly reduce the character's bounding box, and potentially allow you to escape from this situation.
Crouch
I've also added a crouch command - currently set to the CONTROL key. This will similarly reduce the height of the character, and allow you to crawl out of those tight situations.
I wish I could say it is absolutely fixed, but it is nearly impossible to test every possible cave formation. Hopefully it will resolve enough of these kinds of situations to make the problem insignificant!
Star Explorers Updated to Version 4.6.5
Thanks to the wonderful and growing Star Explorers community, I was able to identify and fix several small bugs, including a game breaking bug that somehow avoided detection for many years! It was game breaking, but it was actually very small and easy to fix, so remember, if you find any issues, please report them here on the forum. Sometimes it only takes 10 minutes to fix something that might seem really challenging at first.
Save Game in Star Chart
Surprisingly, if you saved the game while viewing the Star Chart, it would not load properly the next time you try to play. This was a huge problem, but maybe it only effected a tiny set of players. Anyway, it only took 10 minutes. So please report bugs :)
Damage Panel
Somewhere in the process of adding wide screen support, the damage panel got neglected and no longer scaled to the size of the screen. This has been fixed.
Missing Towel
If you put the towel in your ship's inventory, it would show up with the wrong icon. Nothing major, it was just a matter of fixing the pointer to the correct icon. Now, rest assured that if you put your towel in storage, know you can get that soothing relief you long for when you return from a challenging mission!
In the near future, I plan to put the pre-release 5.0 beta up on the testing branch for the more adventurous players to test. I'm still working on finalizing my other game Paradox Vector, but once that is done, version 5.0 will have my full attention - as much as humanly possible. Thanks for your continued interest in Star Explorers!
About Star Explorers and the Upcoming 5.0 Update
Many people may have seen the latest Star Explorers trailer on the Realms Deep 2020 hosted hosted by 3D Realms. I wanted to offer new players some history about this game, and what to expect in the coming months.
Star Explorers began way back in 2013. It was an idea that has come a long way, from something purely in my imagination, to an actual game that many people have played and enjoyed. I wrote about these early days developing Star Explorers in much detail, including some of the early pitfalls and struggles that accompanied making such an ambitious game as a solo developer.
Yes, this game does get compared to No Man's Sky quite often. However, if you read the article, you will see that it was not a clone or copy of that game (which is amazing in its own right) but something that was invented simultaneously. It is a much smaller scale project, and I think it fills a considerably different niche in terms of space exploration sims. Some players have expressed their personal opinion that Star Explorers is actually a better game than No Man's Sky, but as someone who can't really be unbiased, I will let the players decide whether that is true for them or not.
About the New Content
The 5.0 Update is still a ways off. However, there have been a number of recent improvements that players should be aware of. Before I discuss that, I offer a warning. My games, though usually enjoyed, have often been described as "rough around the edges." It is a label that I once found funny, but now I appreciate that I need to move beyond, if my game development adventure is going to continue to grow. Star Explorers is indeed rough around the edges. There is a bit of a learning curve, and it has some features that could use a lot of streamlining.
With that said, I have recently included an in-game interactive guide for new players, that should introduce you to most of the game's major features. It will help new players understand the overall gameplay loop, while keeping with the open ended nature of the gameplay as much as possible.
Also, ultrawide monitor support was recently added, along with an improved screen resolution dialogue, something a long time coming. New features will be announced in more detail as they are released.
The Testing Branch
When I am working on new features, I often upload them to the "testing" branch so they can be tried out by curious players before they make it to the default game. I plan to upload the latest version to the testing branch soon, as I am preparing and testing all the new features. Feel free to try it out once it is available, but right clicking on Star Explorers and navigating to "Properties > Betas" and choosing "testing" from the drop down menu."
Right now the testing branch has the same game as the default branch, but you should see an announcement about it in the near future.
Looking Forward
Star Explorers is my dream project. As a game developer and artist, this is the project I love working on, and hope to continue developing long into the future. It's not always easy though. Work, family and other issues are always there to prevent me from being able to improve the game. There is a small community here and on the discord server that help to provide testing and feedback, but more are always welcome!
I have other game projects, including the nearly finished Paradox Vector, that I hope will provide enough funding to make this a sustainable business. As players, I feel like my fate is in your hands, and is directly related to how much you like or dislike my games, If you do like what you see here, and want to see more of it, please consider helping me out by doing one or more of the following.
Leave a review about why you like the game. Reviews help to draw new players, and often highlight things that I can then focus on improving.
Leave constructive feedback in the Discussions forum. Steam has a great tool for discussing and providing feedback to developers. Please consider using this if you find something you don't understand, or feel might be a bug. I can usually fix problems once I am aware of them, but in a procedural game it's hard to test every potential outcome without a lot of people playing the game
Join the Discord https://discord.gg/b4tkySN if you prefer that setting to leave feedback or ask questions.
Tell your friends and share! Word of mouth is the best way to bring attention to a solo game developer like me. Without a big marketing budget, it is very challenging to get the word out. But having a group of players who are excited about where the game is heading can help a lot.
Anyway, I do hope you all enjoy Star Explorers, and I look forward to getting the next update out as soon as possible!
