The ever lovely and talented Malukah kindly made time in her busy schedule to provide me with some vocal samples, and now we finally have a singing voice for the ladies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG-SYBzaWeM
If you’re somehow not familiar with Malukah’s work, I highly recommend you check out her YouTube channel where she has done a multitudeofcovers and originals, all of which are very good.
Everyone on the team has been working super hard on various mechanics, including ocean biomes and reworking the tech system!
Today I’ve been working on a sub-biome for the snow planet, a bio-luminescence environment! These snow covered plants and trees will glow and generate light:
Everyone on the team is getting together for thanksgiving dinner, we hope all our american fans are having a good thanksgiving!
Until next time!
[DAILY BLOG] Weekly Update Round-Up! 24/11/2014
Sorry this is late! I was dealing with Englandflu on Friday. Englandflu is no joke.
Evening folks! I imagine most of you have seen Supernorn’s post from last week about the sweeping additions to our crops and food recipes. Working off the robust documentation that was put together by Rosiedeux, I spent a couple of days last week mapping out precisely what buffs each cooked item would bestow. A daunting task, considering there is about 200 of them at present. I’ve ultimately settled on a system largely governed by the ingredients that make up each item.
In our new structure, our ingredients have a “weight” assigned to them, based on their value. Crops that take a considerable length of time to grow are almost guaranteed to have strong buffs associated with them, while fast-growing crops and ingredients you purchase will typically have weak ones.
As an example, potatoes are one of the first slow-growing crops the players will get their hands on. When used as an ingredient in a recipe, the resulting food item is almost guaranteed to provide a 20 point buff to maximum health. Typically the highest end ingredients will provide either a single strong buff, or a pair of moderate buffs.
In recipes that have you combine multiple ingredients together with the same buffs, their effects in turn will combine, either increasing their immediate effectiveness (rate of healing, energy regeneration, etc), or extending the buff duration. This means that the more high-end ingredients that are involved in a given recipe, the more substantial the buffs will be. Attentive players who get to know the effects of certain ingredients may even be able to assess the precise buffs a recipe will have, before they’ve even made it.
It’s worth mentioning also that most food buffs are able to stack with buffs provided by stims or capsules found in the environment. For instance, a bon bon will imbue the player with a 25% running speed buff that lasts 30 seconds, during which time the player could use a green stim to have their overall running speed boosted as high as 75% until the respective buff durations end. If you need to get out of trouble quickly, this could prove a valuable escape option.
These changes to our cooking system also necessitate a change to our cooking table interface, albeit a relatively small one. The categories of main, side, desserts, and drinks were not especially helpful to begin with, and in a new system where players want to know at the very least what type of buffs they can expect, it made more sense to provide categories that reflected that. We’re still leaving the discovery of precise effects to the players, but the categories now cover health restoration, maximum health boosters, energy regeneration, maximum energy boosters, mobility buffs, and the mysterious “other” category. Please excuse the placeholder graphics that I haphazardly put in there. We’ll hopefully get one of our artists onto creating nicer icons soon.
So with that whole structure all planned out, I’ve spent most of my time today making all the food items actually functional, providing their intended buffs, and available to prepare at the cooking table. I’m about halfway through all the recipes at this point and hope to get the rest finished tomorrow. The next step after that will be going through and structuring the progression of recipes. The intent is that players will start with only a couple of basic recipes, but as they discover new ingredients and cook, more recipes will be unlocked. The most potent recipes will likely be off limits until you’ve either worked your way up through cooking experience, or until you’ve earned them by completing specific quests.
I’m going to leave you tonight with a glimpse of some of the cool stuff Tiyuri’s been working on. These bad boys are going to tie into one of our quests. How, exactly? Who can say? ;)
Oh dear lord, I don’t think I’ve made an update since…
Sep 8th???
Oh, ummm… I uh, I think we’ve done some things since then, yeah, let’s check git…
1482 2964 71136
1482 is a lot of commits, okay, I’m sure I can find one thing to talk about at least, it needs to be super duper important too. What to post, what to post..
I’VE GOT IT
I give you the beachball:
And the paper plane:
In all seriousness we have all been working crazy hard trying to get the next stable update out, and have been making really really good progress. It’s just that some of us forget to do an update for a while. Since I posted last I’ve finished the new status system, the new liquid system, and I’ve done terrain gen stuff, lua bindings stuff, networking stuff, tech stuff, bugfixing stuff… lots and lots of stuff.
While Kyren has been laying some groundwork to allow proper terrain generation for Ocean planets, I spent the week implementing a new monster type to live in them: large, aggressive fish! I’ve spent a lot of time in the pool testing and even though they’re simple, they’re a lot of fun to fight and should make Ocean exploration satisfying and dangerous.
Today I’ve been working on a new sub-biome that you’ll encounter: A swamp environment.
I’m currently working on some biome specific plant life and fauna, including some huge swamp trees! There’s still a lot of assets to create for the biome, but I’m pleased with how it’s looking. I’ve added the pine tree from the garden biome for size comparison:
The rest of the team has been working on finishing up Tier 1, balance testing, fixing bugs etc.
In addition to this, a lot of work has been going into crops and cooking recipes! No doubt you’ll be hearing some more about these soon.
Hey there! Have we met before? Today I’ve been working on adding detail to the first mission you’ll find in the game. Kyren has added a mission tab to the AI window so you can access them from your ship. If you’re in a party when you are deployed, your friends will go with you so you can play through together! After all, spacefaring is an experience best shared with good company.
This will be in the Nightly soon enough, if you’d like to take a sneak peek! What could be lurking down there in the dark anyway?
What a week this has been! lots of progress has been made, but I’m only going to focus on a few things for this update. As mentioned by Armagon in his earlier post, the food system is currently undergoing a huge rework. Everyone should say hello to Rosiedeux, who’s been working diligently on reworking Crops, Recipes, Craftable foods and more!
Now you’ll encounter more crops on the starting planet, meaning you’ll be able to collect ingredients and create food much earlier in the game. This greatly expands into the later tiers, allowing you to craft more complex foods by combining multiple ingredients.
A big change to the game is that alongside bandages, you can heal by eating food! Certain foods will heal you more than others, and higher tier foods will give multiple status effects, such as jump and run boosts!
To prevent buff spamming, the “well-fed” status effect will appear when you eat a food item, temporarily restricting you from eating more until it wears off. As an example, Fish & Chips will increase your max health by 20 points (until the ‘Well-Fed’ status wears off), while restoring 3.5 health points for a period of 60 seconds. Keep in mind that these will continue to be tweaked as they are added to the game, and will vary massively depending on the complexity of the food item.
Rosiedeux has mapped out which biomes and tiers you’ll find specific crops and ingredients in, including their buffs and durations. I won’t spoil anything by revealing all the details, but we now have around 200 recipes and 35 crops. Armagon is now going through the process of adding these to the game, while myself and Rosiedeux work on spriting the new ingredients. We’re also planning for you to be able to purchase more complex and rarer ingredients from the Infinity Express store at the Outpost. Crop Seeds will also potentially be available at the Terramart.
In Other News:
There’s been a lot of work going into the quests and missions system. The team has been working very hard on it, and you’ll hear about that shortly, but I will share this little thing:
I spent some time today tweaking and prettying up the parallax layers for the desert biomes. I’ve felt that some of the backdrop art could look much better, and I spent some time replacing a particularly ugly one with a new backdrop piece. I’ll be doing several variations of these to spice things up a bit!
So I started work on adding shield generators to the existing dungeons at the end of last week. I’ve gotten a few done so far. Some have been relatively easy to handle, chiefly the dungeons that already had places naturally suited to the addition of a shield generator, with appropriate obstacles in place.
Others have involved a bit more work. With our dungeons now having wire functionality, I was able to do a lot of the stuff I’d wanted to do with the Apex test chamber dungeon since I first started it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKreFcHvtQ
To give a better idea of what you’re looking at in the video, the player entering the facility will need to power things back up before they can progress any further. There is now a shield generator, but you aren’t going to be able to get to it at first. Two sets of doors restrict your access and you’re going to have to find the two switches that open them. Each switch opens one layer of doors. Only when you’ve activated both will the shield generator be exposed to you.
Presently in our nightly the shield generator just gets turned on and off by player interaction, but the intent is that you will have to smash them yourself. Once the generator is disabled you gain access to one last reward room where you might find something quite nice inside! Disabling the generator also restores the player’s ability to take the dungeon’s objects and blocks, as well as their ability to place blocks inside it.
This all is fairly simple when you describe it, but making it actually work has been a bit of a nightmare, since I have wires that appear in different rooms in random locations so I had to wrap my head around how best to use the logic gates, which I’m still relatively new to using. I had to make sure the brushes worked dungeon-wide and the pieces that were needed always appeared. I mean, take a look at this!
There’s still some functionality I’ll need before I can truly finish the dungeon as I originally envisioned, chiefly the ability to have traps and hazards controlled by wires. I ideally wanted the teslaspikes to only turn on when the player walks into the room (so you don’t know what the room is like until you get there), and to turn off when the switch at the end of each path is thrown (so you can travel back to the entrance in relative safety). I’ve already worked out precisely how I’m going to do this when the trap wiring functionality is added, but as this is more of a polish thing, its going to have to wait for now.
It’s been fascinating to see how something as simple as having a light turn on and off under specific circumstances can be incredibly involved. Still, it’s great to have this kind of control over the wiring system now. I don’t expect every dungeon will receive this treatment but I thought you might find it interesting to see how I’m using it so far. For now I’ll continue to update the other dungeons with our shield generators.
It’s been a busy week already, and it’s only Wednesday!
We’ve completed most of the content and basic configuration for the first few tiers of the new biome and crafting progression, so we’re now working through the game one tier at a time to fix bugs, balance numbers, and generally tie everything together. There are a few more biomes to add (particularly at high tiers) and some exciting things like missions that we’ll be working on as we go along, but this mostly involves intensive playtesting and cleaning up all of the new (and old) issues we discover.
GeorgeV and the other artists continue to add more content, including a few more items to liven up the Garden biome. Armagon is configuring weapons and adding shield generators to dungeons. I’ve been fixing bugs and improving biome configurations. We’ve also gotten a good start on numerically balancing the combat and crafting for tier 1 (and discussed how this will relate to the overall progression). Too many small improvements to list!
Kyren also just finished a revamp of the liquid system. The main visible difference is that liquid is no longer compressible, so the total amounts of liquid in large pools will make much more sense, but the rendering methods are still the same. The more important benefit of this is that large quantities of liquid will now settle much more quickly and won’t lag out servers, so we can now start real work on ocean planets.
We’ll be posting more about Oceans and other biomes soon, once we get into the relevant content tiers, but I did just a bit of preliminary testing with Oceans in the new water system and I’m very excited about the prospect of filling them with life!
Today I spent time working on the starting planet’s garden biome. Those of you playing around on the nightlies might have noticed it needed a little bit of love.
The first issue was the lack of variation in foliage, so I spent some time drawing some additional pine trees. Metadept tweaked the biome settings to generate more flowers and bushes.
The second thing was the parallax background. The rolling hills were beautiful, but it looked a bit flat with the trees only available in the foreground. I fixed this by adding a few parallax layers with pine trees of various scales amongst the hills.
Lastly, the mountain skybox. I spent some time making it look unique, with tiny pines, grasslands and flowing rivers.
Here’s the culmination of these tweaks below:
The rest of the team has been busy working on bug fixing, starter quests (including quests that generate when you pick up certain items) and the game’s first mission. I expect you’ll be hearing about these in the near future!
Last Wednesday I decided to spend some time on caves as part of my work improving the terrain generation. Starbound’s cave generation used some very simple algorithms that worked reasonably well but weren’t very exciting, and I wanted to try my hand at an improved cave generation algorithm. So, I wrote a new generation method and reworked the existing ones to get more interesting results. The short version is that caves are more frequent, more connected, and more varied. If you want the long version, keep reading for a technical explanation!
I’ve been calling the new method “karst” cave generation since it loosely mimics natural geology by generating caves in layers. The algorithm itself is fairly simple, relying on a combination of several Perlin noise sources with different configurations. All of the noise is applied vertically, so it’s possible to use only one-dimensional noise sources. For Starbound, however, I’m sampling in two-dimensional coordinates around a circle with circumference equal to the world width, which creates a noise pattern that smoothly wraps around the world seam.
The first step in the algorithm is to pick layers to place caves at. This could be a simple probability applied to each Y position in the world, but I’ve chosen to enforce a minimum layer resolution in order to avoid clumps:
Next I use a Perlin function with a high period to select where on these layers caves should be generated:
Then I apply a second Perlin function with a moderate period and amplitude, as well as some positive bias, to vary the caves’ ceiling height:
I use another, similar function to vary the floor depth, with a lower amplitude to make the caves easier to walk in:
Next, I taper the endpoints of the caves to avoid the harsh edges, based on the original noise function being below a cutoff point:
At this point it looks a bit like real caves, but they’re very horizontal and boring, so the next step is to apply another function with a very high amplitude and period, which gives the caves slopes and makes the layers cross over each other:
This is looking much better, but is still very horizontal, so we mix in some large, tall chambers using a different configuration of the same algorithm:
…and finally mix in some normal worm caves to further increase verticality and connectivity:
The final result is a good mix of caves that feel natural and provide plenty of opportunities for exploration as well as some hazards (sudden drops and chambers of enemies) to keep things fresh.
In this example there are a LOT of caves in the world, and I’ve been tuning the configuration to get slightly fewer caves but still retain the right amount of complexity. I’ve already been having a lot of fun testing it, so that’s a good sign!
Sorry for the lengthy post, but hopefully some of you will find the explanation interesting and maybe even useful in your future projects.
G’day folks! Today I’ve taken a bit of a break away from getting more of the new biome weapons and drops working, in favor of working on a number of smaller things that I’ve needed to give some attention to for a while now.
Many of the game’s trap objects were broken when the status system overhaul hit, resulting in players no longer taking damage. Some of these objects were already a bit broken to begin with (electric-sounding instakill wooden spikes, anyone?) so I gave the traps we had a bit more TLC today.
Now their damage levels are a bit more reasonable across the board (though they could still be subject to change down the line), they make more appropriate sounds when you hit them, and what was probably most time-consuming was fixing all their hitboxes to more accurately reflect the areas that are actually dangerous, including when they are flipped.
Previously most had their hitboxes generated automatically, often extending into empty space around the object that should have been safe for the player. It’s one of those subtler details that one would rarely think about when playing games (unless they’re done poorly), but it’s pretty important to get right when you’re the one making them.
As a small aside, those of you more familiar with the game’s objects may have noticed that the propeller can be placed on walls and ceilings now. The more I looked at it, I figured it would be nice for the airship-enthusiasts in our player base to have more options. The spinning propellers are still dangerous though, so be careful where you place them!
I also did a little tidying with the interface to make sure all the new status effects were displaying the appropriate graphics when inflicted upon the player.
In a bit of more exciting news, Metadept has pretty much wrapped up work on the shield generator for our dungeons (which I spent some time testing today). Essentially these generators will exist somewhere within the dungeons, restricting the player’s ability to build, place, break and wire objects within that space. That is until the player locates the generator and disables it. This will mean players can no longer circumvent all obstacles by building across or digging through them unless they’ve already been lucky enough to find the shield generator before-hand.
Setting up the existing dungeons with this new functionality will likely be my focus for the next few days. This will mean creating shield generator rooms for each one and getting them to spawn reliably. This can sometimes be difficult when you want to have them appearing in randomized locations (and preferably some distance from the entrance).
If things go the way I’d like, it’s my intent that each shield generator should have some form of obstacle to make shutting the generator off challenging or risky in some way. This could be as simple as the generator being locked behind doors that are only able to be opened from elsewhere in the dungeon, some strong enemies might be guarding it, maybe a little tricky platforming and problem-solving, or perhaps a combination of all of the above.
After working on terrain and cave generation last week, I’m now configuring biomes and treasure pools to include all the new assets that GeorgeV, Armagon and the rest have been building. It’s actually been a lot of fun to test, and I’ve enjoyed discovering many interesting little spots:
Regular readers of the blog might remember my previousposts about adding more terrain variation to planets. Well, that’s what I’m working on this week! Rather than talking much about it I’ll just show you a few samples of new terrain patterns:
Spikes!
Canyons!
Ledges!
These are still WIPs, and I’ve got more ideas to put in, but so far it’s adding a lot of interesting variety to planets and I’m excited to continue working on this for a bit.
I’m sure you can guess what I’ve been working on. Yup! Still adding new weapons and loot! While I’m keeping some stuff a surprise, over the past few days I’ve implemented a few fun craftable throwing weapons. Here’s a peek at a couple of them!
Thorn Grenade “A makeshift nail bomb. Scary what one can achieve with a fruit and small explosive.”
You may recall there was a nailbomb grenade in the game, however I personally found it not particularly useful due to the fact it operated on a timer and it was almost impossible to get the nails hitting where you wanted them to. This devilish combination explodes on impact, spraying twice as many thorns, making it pretty lethal if you land direct hits, particularly if the target was already in the middle of a large group.
Throwing Bones “Nothing screams archaic like throwing bones at your enemies.”
Finding old bones may now prove beneficial in more ways than one. This item when thrown releases three bones in an arc that bounce a couple of times before breaking apart. This makes it entirely possible to sling them considerable distance across the landscape, if the terrain is in your favour.
On Wednesday we finally merged the massive status system changes, including the new status effect system, into our main development branch. Those who are following the nightly builds have probably noticed some major differences, lots of improvements, and a few things still missing. The past couple of days have been spent finding and fixing bugs, adding missing Lua bindings, cleaning up old status effects and adding new ones. GeorgeV, Necotho and Armagon continue their development of more biomes and biome items, and we’ve been coming up with lots of good ways to use the new status system and status effects to make biomes and their items feel unique and interesting. Next week we’ll be reworking the food and hunger system in ways that make it less of a chore and more of a bonus. More on that soon; have a great weekend!
I’ve carried on as usual with implementing the multitude of new weapons and items, many of which are taking advantage of our status system rework. I thought I’d try something a little different today and see how quickly you guys can identify what one of these weapons is from the sound it makes. I think this one is gonna be quite popular with PvP-oriented players. Click here to hear it!
It’s been a fun implementing these new items, and the list is expanding all the time. There’s even stuff like this!
One of the features that we’ve wanted for a long time is a better way for modders to make their own GUIs (graphical user interfaces). Currently, all of Starbound’s interface windows are configured in JSON, but their appearances are largely static and they can only respond to user input in a few fixed ways. On Friday we had been discussing this in the ##starbound-modding IRC channel, trying to figure out the best way to make objects with dynamic displays and lamenting the fact that there wasn’t any good method currently available. So, over the weekend, Kyren took the initiative and made one, which I finally got a chance to test out this evening!
The system she built allows an object to open a configurable interface window when the player interacts with it. This window can contain all the usual window elements, but can also include a canvas widget which gives a Lua script direct access to primitive drawing operations and user input. These ‘scripted consoles’ can monitor and respond to keyboard and mouse input, and draw their own lines, polygons, images, text, etc. Essentially this allows all kinds of custom interfaces and even simple games to be built as mods and run within Starbound!
One of the most obviously fun uses for this is to make in-game games. Here’s a truly awful implementation of Pong that I threw together as a test:
Unfortunately we don’t have the time to go wild on this just yet, but this is a good first step toward a much better GUI system in the future. Some other examples we came up with include controlling turrets in a base, hacking puzzles for missions, and numerical keypad locks for doors. I hope to have more time to develop these at some point. In the meantime, however, it’s available for modders in the nightly build, and they’re already going crazy with great ideas. For example, Neurisko is starting on a full-fledged programmable computer made from scratch:
…and that’s just the beginning! What kinds of things do YOU want to make?
Hey guys, noticed there wasn’t a post made yesterday. Sorry I didn’t get this up sooner!
Here’s the quick rundown of what folks have been working on:
- Metadept has been working on the GUI stuff, following on from his Tuesday post. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the community does with this functionality once he’s finished.
- Kyren is working on something cool that we’ll (hopefully) have something to show for later today, provided things goes smoothly.
- George has continued his work on filling the biomes with more stuff, which ties into…
- Yup, I’ve still been working on making lots of the new loot and weapons actually function. I’ve spent a chunk of time recording new sounds for these things too.
For those of you who read my post on Monday and took a stab at identifying what the audio sample I included was; if your guess was that it was a paintball gun, you were right!
There are six colour variations you can get, each painting the enemies you hit in the corresponding colour for a few seconds, making it super clear when you’ve successfully hit them. Novel in the grand adventure, but potentially really cool for PvP servers. You’ll be able to find the blueprint and the unique resources to make it in one of the mini-biomes.
Later folks!
That's all, folks! Have a nice weekend! :SBHorse:
[DAILY BLOG] Weekly update round-up! 10/10/2014
Hello! Friendly reminder that if you don't see the dev blogs cross-posted here, you can always find 'em right on our website.
Since kyren is getting close to completing her massive status system rework, I’ve spent the past couple of days helping her design and test the new Lua APIs, fix bugs, and preparing to integrate the changes back into our main development branch. One of the most apparent changes is that status effects are now driven by Lua scripts and have access to a wide variety of API functions, making them incredibly flexible and fun to work with. Today we’ve just been testing out features and exploring what kinds of crazy stuff we can do. Here’s one example, a sword with high knockback that makes monsters bounce:
Or how about a “nitroglycerine” effect that causes the player to explode when they fall too hard?
Obviously we’re also reimplementing and improving the existing status effects like fire, poison, and slows, but it’s been a lot of fun testing out the new possibilities! I think a lot of these crazy ideas may make it into the final game in some form or other, to give it a bit of a roguelike flavor.
Apologies for this going up the following morning! The Chucklefish team went out last night to celebrate the arrival of our newest member Rosie (not to be confused with the office pet of the same name) and I forgot to write this when I got home, so that’s on me!
In any case, I’ve been continuing my work with George in setting up a bunch of new weapons and fun loot for the biomes. The status system rework from Kyren and Metadept is almost done, so in the meantime I’ve been working mostly with our existing status effects, in some cases combining them for fun results. It can be a deceptively involved process, particularly if you want to make some nice particle effects to go along with it.
I’m really looking forward to when we can begin implementing some more unusual status effects, like the ones Metadept was prototyping. Then we can really go to town with making fun and, most importantly, unique weapon drops.
Nothing too exciting to post today. We’re getting very close to merging the new status changes into nightly, so kyren and I have been reimplementing lots of the old effects and responsibilities of the old system, and fixing plenty of bugs along the way. It’s going very quickly, which is a good sign because it means the new status system is very easy to work with. Today we rebuilt healing items, beds, liquid status effects, cleaned up some unused and misconfigured effects on objects, added several new functions and missing functions to the API, and added a much better system for light sources on Networked Animators (the class used to display pretty much everything on entities). I made this ridiculous effect to test it out:
Some of the recent new additions George and I have been making to the game’s loot pool are made because they’re cool. Others are silly and fun. Then there’s stuff like this that straddles the line.
Seems like a surefire way to win a snowball fight!
Sometimes you’ll find items like this in biome-specific chests, but most of the time you’ll only find blueprints, and its up to you to get the necessary materials together. Typically it will require a component you can only get from that biome.
There’s more to come!
Also! In case you missed it, we've got Steam trading cards now! Collect 'em all to craft Steam profile backgrounds, badges and emotes. You'll get about one card drop per hour of play.
Here’s a few small peaks at some of the work we’ve been doing.
What’s this? Well, I’m not telling you.
You can build a lot of stuff with tar. It is very versatile. Try making some armor!
We’ve been working hard coming up with new content to help fill out the tiers. These are some simple examples. Expect to find better fleshed out biomes and sub-biomes with more biome-specific rewards.
Today I’ve been implementing a block protection system, so that we can have special dungeons and missions where you can’t place blocks or break through walls until deactivating a Shield Generator somewhere inside. The way this works is: each tile in the world has a ‘dungeon ID,’ which is a bit of a misnomer since it’s also used to specify tiles that have no dungeon, tiles modified by the player, and a couple of other things. Specific dungeon IDs will be protected for a given world, in a list that can be modified from server side Lua scripts or by using an admin command. I’m sure people will find interesting uses for the system beyond its original purpose, like building a planet with tests of skill and then enabling protection to make them a challenge for other players to overcome. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
So you may have noticed over the last few days our artists have been slamming out new content, all in the name of fleshing out the biomes and giving players some interesting incentives and rewards for exploring them. Presently, a heavy focus has been placed on each biome having its own unique resources and loot in the form of costumes, tools, and weapons. Its all in the name of variety!
The task of making most of these new items actually function has fallen to me. I’ve been going through all of them, ensuring they behave the way you’d expect, making sure hitboxes on the projectiles are all appropriately sized, that sort of thing. There’s also a bunch of new recipes being thrown into the mix, so a number of items that you previously could only acquire through drops are becoming craftable. If you’re lucky enough to find some of the consumable weapons (throwing daggers and axes, for instance), you’ll be rewarded with blueprints that will enable you craft them anytime you want, so long as you’ve got the resources necessary to do so.
Some of the new weapons the artists have slung my way have been challenging, but fun to make. One of the new weapons George teased in his tar biome post is a spear that lobs balls of tar when you attack. The tar itself doesn’t do much damage, but it can slow down your enemies, making it easier to keep them at bay while ducking in and out for your melee hits. Having spent so much of my time lately working with our weapon and projectile systems, I’ve learnt a great deal, and its always encouraging when you manage to get things working the way you intended.
Taking advantage of the liquid collection that the upgraded matter manipulator brings with it, you can now bottle your own water, among other things. Once a liquid is bottled you can consume it to receive the effects. For example, some liquids have curative powers when ingested. If you fashion yourself a bottle out of glass, you can collect the liquid with your matter manipulator, bottle it at a cooking table, then use it when you find yourself in a pinch.
As an aside, you actually drink your beverages now! I can’t tell you how many times I winced when listening to my character “consuming” a bottle of whiskey with a distinct crunch. That stuff makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it.
This whole process of configuring everything has been difficult at times, but it’s rewarding when it goes well. I expect to continue with this kind of work over the coming weeks, but in my position I can be made to change gear at any time. Ahhh, the joys of game development!
Good night everybody!
:pizzaslice:
[DAILY BLOG] Weekly update round-up! 25/09/2014
Whoops! Yesterday I drank too much coffee and did loads of things, but remembering to write the weekly update round-up was not one of those things.
I’ve spent the past couple of days getting the tiered novakid weapons into the game, both functioning and craftable. Some of the guns are still a little on the big side, so they’ll likely undergo adjustments, but it’s nice to have something for the novakids to use besides that rusty old revolver.
Beyond that, I’ve been planning the structure for the Glitch mission, which I’m pumped to start working on. It’ll likely be very script-heavy so it’s one that may have some roadblocks to overcome before I’ll be able to finish it. I can at least start building the environment in the meantime.
Apologies for the lack of update yesterday! The team’s really been kicking the pace up a notch with sweeping changes across the board. I’ve been constantly sidetracked from the Glitch mission to do a bunch of configuration work, fixing a handful of UI elements, updating objects and adding a few new sounds to boot. That said, the mission is pretty thoroughly mapped out in my concepts now, so I have begun building and been chipping away at it whenever I’ve not been on some other task. The case being that this is a Glitch mission, it of course involves a castle.
I’m trying to establish a greater sense of scale than the generated glitch castle dungeons, so expect it to be quite open. It’s a bit bare since it’s still in early stages, but hopefully this peek at the castle gardens will give you some sense of what I’m going for. What exactly will be happening at this castle? I’ll leave you to speculate!
In case you missed it, Tiyuri posted over on our new Chucklefish blog earlier today. If you’ve had concerns about the longevity of Starbound lately, I suggest giving it a read. We’re not giving up this project of passion any time soon, and we’re gunning to get the next stable update to you as soon as we can. Thank you everyone for your continuous support and patience.
On Friday I decided to make a small change to the treasure table format. I got a bit carried away and ended up spending a bunch of time over the weekend to clean up, organize, and rebuild ALL of our .treasurepools files, which I finally finished. It was a lot of work but the results make treasure much easier to work with and a much better system in general, so I’m very happy to have completed it.
For a bit of technical detail: our treasure pools are specified as weighted lists of items. The weight associated with an item determines how likely it is to be randomly selected, relative to other items in the table (not an absolute percentage chance). This means that adding new items to a table changes the likelihood of each of the other items in the table being selected. As you can imagine, this makes it very hard to edit and balance the tables! The engine change I made was to allow treasure tables to reference other treasure tables. With that functionality implemented, I rebuilt our tables by splitting loot into categories. For example, here’s the new table for a single general treasure item, such as you might find in a plain surface chest:
[see post for example]
As you can see, the probabilities are now specified for general categories of items, each of which has its own separate treasure pool. Now, when we add (for example) a new weapon, the probability of getting SOME weapon will stay the same, as will the probabilities of other categories within this file. I’ve also split several of these categories up into sub tables, divided them based on threat level, and massively reorganized things to make them easier to work with. The end result is that we can now move ahead with our work on biomes and progression (more on that later in the week!) without creating huge amounts of redundant configuration files and future work in the process.
As per usual, I’ve been juggling a few tasks the past couple of days.
Work has continued on the Glitch mission I told you guys about last week, though a gameplay decision that came about midway in its development has made me have to re-think the overall structure a bit. It turned out that having a larger scale structure didn’t necessarily equal more fun for the player. None the less, it’s coming along nicely and I’m looking forward to getting into scripting it. The old structure will likely end up being utilized elsewhere down the line.
As part of our restructure of the tiered progression, the mining experience is currently under the microscope. You may recall some time back, Metadept was experimenting with the matter manipulator as an upgradeable tool. Many who have tried the nightlies have likely experienced this in the form of the completely unbalanced and relatively weak starting iteration. The reason we haven’t addressed this yet is because we decided it didn’t make sense to focus on balancing the tools until we had tackled the larger task of rebalancing all of our tiles.
Every tile in the game has its own set health that governs how difficult it is to break. Since we’re having biomes split up by tier during the initial progression (note that all biomes will be available with higher difficulty levels at the end-game), it meant we needed to balance the large number of materials based on their biome and their place in the overall progression. At time of writing we have 140+ different types of tiles that each needed to be assessed and reconfigured, so most of my time the last couple of days has been tied up with this task. For now it’s looking good, but it’ll likely require adjustments as we test.
In the wake of the matter manipulator becoming the primary mining tool, it bears mentioning that the pickaxes won’t be going away altogether. Instead they will remain in the form of rare drops that, depending on your luck, could end up being one markedly more powerful than your matter manipulator at the time. The trade-off is that they will no longer be repairable, so you’d want to save them for the toughest of blocks.
The next step is going to be balancing the matter manipulator and its upgrades. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop!
Have you ever dreamed to decorate your house with reeds? Sleep on reeds, sitting on reeds, or even eating on reeds? Starbound will make your dream come true!
As you know we are working on new minibiomes now. Next step (for my part) will be more oasis things, a bedouin outfit, and a throwable coconut.
