Starmade
StarMade Dev Blog 15 March 2018
Development
Weapons Update
The first prototype is about 1-2 weeks away. We will going to do a full news blog for all the changes and additions when it hits to give players something to explore and test for themselves, since trying it out is always better than just reading about it. The goal in the weapon update is to make ship battles more interesting and give armor, weapons, effects, as well as all combinations a valid purpose. For that, all weapon types, as well as armor and effects have undergone some major changes while still keeping their basic principles. As an example, we increased the destructive power of cannons immensely by adding an effect that would emulate explosive damage. In other words: cannon now make big holes. Also, the new minelayer support weapon will be introduced.
Stay tuned.
HUD Improvements
Now that the base functionality of Power 2.0 is in, we're actively working on improving the flight HUD to represent all ship vitals better and integrate newly required information (consumptions/efficiencies). The changes may not be mechanically or thematically drastic, but a concerted effort is being made to improve the legibility above all.
Bi-weekly Development Q&A
We answer a lot of questions in our weekly Twitch stream as well as in other locations such as the forum, tester slack and private conversations with some of our members. Feedback from this has been invaluable, however, one concern has been that these conversations are not easily accessible. To address this, we’ll be creating a thread on SMD every two weeks to gather questions for a bi-weekly development Q&A. Our answers will be posted in a news thread on SMD, Steam and potentially other locations. Hopefully this will provide a central location for further information, without having to go through stream recordings or spread out conversations.
We’ll still be interacting over the board in all different locations, as well as this development Q&A
Our first Bi-weekly Q&A can be found here: Schine Bi-weekly Q&A - 15th of March
Community Translations
With the release of Power 2.0, over 3K translations strings have been modified and 1K new strings added into the game. With only 5.4K strings in pre Power 2.0 StarMade (now sitting at 8.4K), over half of all strings have been changed in some way. Our community translation project has been hard at work since the release of Power 2.0. We’d like to mention a couple of our standout translators in these last few weeks.
@oasisdog (Japanese) has been translating StarMade into Japanese since November of 2015, during his translation time he’s translated a total 7659 strings (64,439 words), almost solely translating all of StarMade’s text into Japanese. He’s been diligently keeping Japanese up to date with all our updates. Since the release of Power 2.0 he’s brought Japanese back up to 100% translated (42 percentage point increase).
@ua2hk (Chinese Simplified & Traditional) has been translating StarMade into Chinese Simplified & Traditional since November of 2017. In total he’s translated 6889 strings (64,439 words) and made significant contributions to both language projects. He’s brought Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified up 40 and 20 percentage points respectively since the release of Power 2.0.
Both have made amazing contributions to StarMade, allowing many more people to experience our game in their own language. We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to our translation project, it’s sometimes tough work translating schema’s English ;)
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
StarMade v0.200.332 - Reactor System
This update contains some fixes for problems with the last update, as well as a new advanced system for reactor design.
Reactor Dimension
Our goal with this system is to make every entity shape equally viable. Stabilizer care about the distance between themselves and their reactor, which encourages you to build in one dimension. We worked on a method to allow this distance to be influenced indirectly by the size and placement of additional stabilizer groups. This mechanic does not change your existing ships but it allows you to now put the reactor in different positions with multiple stabilizers closer to it.
How it works
A reactor has 6 relative sides (Front, Back, Right Left, Top, Bottom) and we simply provide a bonus to your overall stabilization for every additional side that contains a stabilization group.
The maximum bonus provided by a side, is set in the config so we can balance it if needed. You don’t immediately get the maximum bonus though, as that would be exploitable.
To calculate the bonus of 1 of the 6 sides, we take the stabilizer group with the most efficient of that side and compare it with the most efficient group on the entire ship. If they’re equal sized, then you get the full bonus, else only a fraction.
The bonuses add up where the maximum one would be used if you use all sides with equal stabilizer groups.
Max bonuses:
1 stabilizer side used: -> normal efficiency at 100% of regular distance
2 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 50% of regular distance
3 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 33% of regular distance
4 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 26% of regular distance
5 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 22% of regular distance
6 stabilizer sides used: -> normal efficiency at 20% of regular distance
This will not mean that a cube ship will be able to place stabilizers at 1/6th of the distance when using all 6 sides for bonus, but you will be able to place them a lot closer to make that shape comparable with a long ship in terms of efficiency, and therefore viable. The same goes for any other basic shape.
The examples below normally require 100 meters distance between the reactor and the stabilizers. All 3 examples have the same stabilization and regeneration.
1 group of 200 stabilizers at 100 meters.
2 groups of 100 stabilizers at 50 meters.
4 groups of 50 stabilizers at ~25 meters.
Stabilization Axis
The bonus system works on fixed axis for simplicity. However, it is possible to modify this axis freely. There is a new tab “Reactor” in the advanced build mode, which lets you do that. These are also applied and saved by individual reactor.
You are only required to modify it if your stabilizer groups are in the “corners”, as then the game can’t really decide to which dimension it belongs to.
Fixes and Additions
Work is continuing on the weapon update. There will be some news soon amongst other things on new mechanics making armor a lot more viable.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
StarMade v0.200.311 - Power 2.0
The power update has been finally released.
Features
Power 2.0
If you kept track with our last few dev blogs, you will already know how the majority of it works. We did change some features along the way to resolve the issues that were brought up and it might not be a bad idea to go through it once again.
There is an all new power system in this build. Old ships are still loadable and fully usable but the old power and its related blocks are disabled in shops, creative mode and factories. They can be re-enabled in the block editor if needed (set inShop to true) or you can still access them through the admin command /give “player_name” “block_name” if you’re an admin or in single player.
There is an option in the ServerConfig to completely disable the old power system should a server admin want that. It’s advised to not switch from allowed to disallowed and back again constantly though.
If old power is allowed, the system will detect which version to use based on the structure’s root entity (mothership, station or planet) and check if that has any old power blocks. All structures will be counted as “new” power until you place down an old power block at which point they will convert to the old system.
Anything that still uses the old power blocks, will stay like that till the very last old power block is removed. Make sure to clean out your old power before adding the new power components to your ship.
Motivation
The main motivation to update the power system comes from a few basic issues that the old power system has.
There is a lot more in this update than just the power system itself. Additionally, a change of this system allowed for a massive code overhaul of some very fundamental systems. Not only will that reduce bugs, it will also speed up the process of finding any remaining issues, as well as adding new features a lot faster, easier and streamlined.
Consider this update as a way to prepare the game to enter a phase of rapid development. A lot of foundation had to be made so that adding new stuff wouldn’t cause a problem in the end. While we could have skipped this step, it would have probably cost more time after just adding new features, so we went for the option to fix the foundations first, and then add new stuff, as well as finish other incomplete features.
Power Basics
The new power system is relatively simple but has a lot of depth if you are going for optimal building. However, it can be difficult if you build ships with the old power system in mind and expect similar results. Ships will perform similar as before, yet power regeneration and consumption values were changed drastically and simply can’t be compared easily with the old power system.
Our main goal was to make the power reactor components smaller, making sure that anything that uses power is also kept at a relatively small size.
The only way that this is possible, is if there isn’t a reason to fill up a ship with it. We went through a lot of iterations like restrictions compared to dimensions as well as mass, but all of these had major problems that would enable players to just circumvent the restrictions and fill a ship with systems regardless. Our system should be working with as few special cases as possible.
Reactor <-> Stabilizer
The system we went for is a combination of two blocks:
The idea is that a reactor needs to be stabilized beyond a certain value to function properly and that the stabilizer blocks have to be a sufficient enough distance away of the main reactor to be effective. That distance is measured from the stabilizer block to the approximate shape of the main reactor.
The bigger the reactor, the more stabilizers you need and the further away from the reactor they need to be. This puts a minimum span on each reactor size, ensuring that a ship cannot be filled up with reactors entirely.
You get 10 blocks worth of free stabilization for any reactor, so that really small reactors don’t need any stabilization blocks to function. Small ships can be a little bit more compact, as you also need to protect 1 less vital component on your ship.
A reactor is fully operational with a stabilization of 25%, however there is a risk to that. A stabilization below 100% will cause the reactor to suffer from damage penalties. From very little at around 99% up to three times damage taken from all weapons at 0%. The concept of building with low stability is very risky but can of course have high rewards.
Energy Stream
Additionally, there is a non-physical connection between your stabilizers and your reactor. A stream can be hit by any weapon projectile, and apply a temporary power regeneration nerf to the reactor. The duration of this nerf depends on the amount of damage that passes through the stream. Protecting these streams is just as important as protecting your reactor and stabilizer components, not only from enemy ship fire, but also from boarding parties.
A stream’s path can be bent and redirected with one or more Stream Node blocks. These blocks can be connected to each other to build a custom path by linking with C + V. Any stabilizer group will connect to the closest Stream Node and follow its path back to the active reactor.
Consumption
Another important goal was to update and make power consumption more consistent. All power consumers now consume power over time and not instantly on use. This means that there is no instant power drop, and significantly reduces the need to have large amounts of power in storage.
All weapons now consume power when reloading. They also require a lower amount of power per second to keep themselves loaded, as they lose charge over time. If you can’t provide enough power to reload, the weapon will just reload a bit slower. It will only appear discharging if you cannot provide the lower “resting charge”. This means that you can now build weapons far bigger than your reactor technically supports, which will make for some interesting gameplay decisions.
Usable modules like thrusters will, like the old system, only consume power when in use. Some modules that are only active for a certain duration, only require power to charge it up and none when it’s active.
Power Consumption Priority
Additionally to this new consumption system, you can now also customize the priority in which power is consumed. You prefer being able to fly and having shields over your weapons recharging? You can set that now by just dragging your preferred priorities in the new power reactor panel.
Rail Power
One major problem of the old system was the way it handled rails and system inheritance. This is now streamlined and pretty straight forward: Only the mother ship’s reactor can be active. Its docks and turrets are also part of the priority list so you can make sure that your turrets always get power if you want, or you can prevent them to consume so much power that you cannot maneuver anymore. A docked ship’s reactor will go back online once it undocks.
Chamber Tree
Chambers are an all new feature that will help specialize your ship for certain tasks. All stand-alone effects, all “one-block” functionality and some “one-group” systems have been incorporated into this system. Effect blocks can still be used as-is in combination with weapons, however it would be advisable to not use them too much as they will change within the weapons update. (more information will follow shortly)
The chamber system can be understood as a physical skill tree that is on your ship or station. As an example, while a weak version of the jump drive is now available by default, you can use the chamber system to make it possibly stronger and suit your needs. You can reduce its power consumption, increase its recharge speed, change functionality such as allowing it to hold multiple charges at the same time, etc. Each change, represents a node in the tree and which parts you want is up to you.
Other chambers now include cloaking and jamming. There is also now a way to set artificial gravity, as well as set warp gates to an arbitrary position in reach, that doesn’t even have to have a warp gate on the other end.
To build chambers, you have to place down the basic chamber type and connect it to your main reactor through a chain of touching Reactor Conduit blocks. After that you can select a specification in the Reactor panel or simply press ‘R’ on any reactor component to bring you to that menu. In there you can see how your chambers are currently connected with each other. You can specify what each chamber does.
Adding additional blocks to an already specified chamber will automatically increase that chamber’s size. The minimum size requirement for chambers to function, depends on the size of the reactor.
All of this system is based on a new feature we call the “Effect Config System”. The ECS was implemented to allow for any effect on an entity from any source. At the moment, the only source used is a ship’s own chamber tree, but in the future this system will be used for several other things, including changing sector/system/region conditions depending on where you are in the galaxy (for example nebulae disabling all sensors, etc).
We also implemented an easy to use GUI to mod it, as well as insured that it is very scalable as it syncs between client and server with only a few parameters.
Multiple reactors
Multiple reactors are possible and encouraged as not only do they provide a fail safe system, they also enable ships to carry multiple sets of chamber trees and of different sizes. Stabilizers can be reused for multiple reactors, but keep in mind that the stabilization distance is calculated based on the biggest reactor.
Switching reactors can be done in the reactor panel. A switch is instantaneous but there is a cooldown to switch again afterwards.
One major advantage of multiple reactors is also, that only an active reactor can be scanned.
Reactor HP
A ship’s HP is now determined by the active reactor and its chambers. Reactor HP is tracked for each reactor separately, but only the active one applies for your ship’s health. The reactor tree is consistent and keeps tracks of which blocks have been damaged. If your Reactor HP ends up too low (<20%). Reactor HP will affect more of your ship in the near future with the weapons update.
You can chose the reset the HP to their new maximum to stop overheating, but you only do that out of battle as any damage will reset the timer. This consistency will also eventually lead to a repair mechanism that can replace destroyed reactor blocks.
Local Shields
Shields were always a big pain to balance out especially when rails came out, as they always covered the whole ship, no matter where the shields were placed or where the ship parts were located. This, paired with no extra power cost with capacity increases, not only encouraged players to excessively use shield capacity blocks, but it also enabled far away “islands” to be fully shielded, something that has much more of an impact with the new power system. Shield sharing within rails also was the cause of major exploits and confusion when building ships.
Shields no longer apply on your entire ship through inheriting. Now each shield recharger group has its own radius that it will shield blocks from damage. Any shield capacity group within this shield bubble, will auto link to that recharger group and provide it shield HP.
The radius of a shield recharger group, depends on its size.
You’re able to have more than one of these shield groups on your ship as each one has its own recharge and shield HP, allowing you distribute its strength to different parts of your ship and in different proportions. These spheres can overlap partially, but as soon as the recharge group (the center of a sphere) is placed within the influence of another sphere, it will disable itself. If a block that is within the radius of multiple shields is taking damage, each shield will receive the damage.
Stealth vs Recon System
This new system is incorporated in the chamber system. You can setup your chambers to gain stealth/recon strength. When your scanner or stealth drive is active, this strength is applied to your ship or structure.
The system compares your current scan strength with all nearby entities (and vice versa for stealth strength -> scan strength). Depending on the difference between you and a target, you’ll get different results. If your scan strength vastly outweighs the target’s stealth strength, you see every bit of information possible and also counter all of the target’s active stealth drive effects. Cloaker and jammer are now addons for the stealth drive, so these can be countered by scanners still provided your scan strength is high enough.
System Integrity
Unrelated to power, to combat general exploitation of shapes of systems, a new mechanic has been introduced: integrity.
Essentially, if a group of modules is below a certain density, it will receive additional damage when being hit. Generally this will not affect most builds, as long as there are no overly long lines or giant plates of systems being built.
For each group of systems, there’s a starting value of 200 integrity which will go up or down depending on how many blocks each block touches within that group. The penalty only applies if your integrity goes below 0, so small ships generally don’t have to worry about it at all.
The integrity mechanic applies to all usable systems, but not hull.
There are a few special groups worth mentioning:
User Interface Changes
There was a large amount of GUI items to add for the new power system, along the way we’ve changed other ones too:
Ship Information Panel
The information panel you see in build mode has been updated to be more dynamic, and to be less in your way. Each section gives you information of a specific system and can be minimized, allowing you to customize the amount of info you see on screen. The entire panel can be minimized too if needed.
Any large value that doesn’t fit will display as a tooltip if you hover over it.
This panel also has more functionality tied to it, such as faction module options and AI options.
HUD Context
Even if set to “none”, you will still a few power related ones in build mode as they are need to know information and doesn’t get in the way either as it depends on the block you’re looking at, and the one you have selected on your hotbar.
Manual Turret Aiming
Turrets have now the option to be manually controlled. To do that, just set the checkbox in the bobby AI panel. Then you can assign the control for all manually controlled turrets on the hotbar of your mothership. As long as the icon isn’t selected on the hotbar, the turret will be using normal AI targeting. If it is selected it will switch to manual aiming. Additionally, using right shift to look around when manual turret aiming is selected will enable you to aim in all directions (right shift will be the old normal behavior if manual turret aiming isn’t selected).
Repulsor Block
A new block has been added that enables you to build hovercrafts and other contraptions. This block essentially works like a directional magnet that always pushes yourself away. This block is based on the physics system, so you will have to find the right balance for your ship. There are some options in the Thruster configuration for it, too.
Storage/factory pull/push limits
You can now put individual limits on how much a storage can pull of each item and how much a factory can produce. This should make managing factories and inventories a lot easier. Keep in mind that factories will also pull enough resources for one extra production step.
Graphics Config Presets
Since StarMade’s graphics config in its development state is a bit hard to manage, we added simple config presets for all kind of systems. All old options have been moved into an advanced config tab and can be accessed and set as they could before.
Config additions
A large amount of config values were added to the blockBehaviorConfg and effectConfig, giving you the ability to modify and change system values completely. This is not only to enable basic modding, but also for us to explore and experiment with different setups in the game.
Optimizations
Several optimization have been made to different parts of the game.
Planets have been made smaller by default to not have them impact performance until they are replaced completely.
Bug fixes
Known issues
Exploits or any other method of abusing mechanics can also be reported here, as bug tasks are private on creation.
What’s next
Now that everyone is able to use Power 2.0 in a state that it’s supposed to be, we’ll continue to tweak it when balance or mechanical issues arise.
While the QA team keeps a watchful eye, the rest of us will work on the next update to revamp Weapons and possibly some support tools.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
Information on our weapons update can be found near the bottom of our news post here: http://www.star-made.org/news/starmade-v0-200-311-power-2-0
[Pre-build] StarMade v200.250
Greetings citizens, ~
Finally, we’ve reached the point where we enter a pre-release state. This means that all the needed features are in, and preliminary bug fixing is done. There will still be issues, and while it should run fine, we strongly advise to backup your universe or try it out on a separate installation. It can be downloaded and installed from the Pre branch.
With more exposure, it will be easier to find those less critical issues and ensure stability before we can release it to everyone to use.
If you come across anything new that doesn’t work or you believe you’ve located a new bug, report that here to help us out: Report a Bug (Release Candidate)
If you’re not too sure about it, feel free to contact @Lancake in a private conversation, or leave a comment on this thread.
While we wait for people to try it out and report issues, we’ll continue building on features for the update after this.
---
What follows, is a quick overview of what’s new compared to release. We’ll make a more in-depth version for the actual release.
A quick overview of major features and changes:
- adapted font size to be readable
- new structure build info panel
- more context based information
- HUD context filters: all, most, some, crucial only, none. Crucial only is advised for experienced players.
- right click reset brush size
- removal prompt for storage/faction/shops/shipyards/warp gates in use
- setting waypoint to faction members from within members list
- shift click hotbar remove for creative mode + keybinding creative mode (if allowed)
- catalog blocks menu has a toggle to show resource cost
- chat GUI update (more coming in next update)
- reactor GUI, graphics and block textures
- new module use system (faster and a lot less error prone)
- new power consumption model (faster and less error prone)
- fixed major memory leak for servers
- fixed framebuffer VRAM usage
- reduced general VRAM usage (by more than half depending on Anti-Aliasing)
- network optimizations
- gui drawing optimization
- beam optimizations (more than double performance)
- several memory allocation optimizations
- normal mapping tangent space fix
- general chunk loading and validation optimizations (vastly reduced amount of calls)
- several block editing optimizations
- several group speed calculation optimizations
- optimization for chunk request queuing
- grouping calculation cancelling to increase performance and responsiveness during battle
- combined-module power consumption processing optimization
- usage of some more advanced shader functions for graphics cards that support it
- faster debris handling
- new power system
- new power balance
- chamber system
- effect system
- effect functionality (~130 effects for entities)
- structural integrity
- new shield system
- recon vs stealth system
- factory production cap
- storage pull limits
- manual turret aiming
- graphic presets for simpler option management
- repulsors
- new HP system
- reworked overheating conditions
- several menu fixes
- server message fixes
- fixed placing blocks when the ship is moving
- several other bugfixes
As you can see, a lot of optimization was done so make sure keep your eye out for graphical glitches, block grouping bugs and block destruction issues. In case you’re interested to see which issues occurred in the past, this task https://phab.starma.de/T2720 holds a link to many of them. It can give you clues about any other issues that were missed.
Also, keep in mind that we’re working on the weapon update too, the current offensive effects are not fully supported as some will be changed or removed only a few weeks after. The combination system will stay, but the combinations themselves can change drastically.
We’ll make sure to post a dev blog about weapons specifically after the next public release.
Power System
Please keep in mind that all config values are not 100% final yet. In case you encounter any oddities where specific mechanics are too strong or weak, please mention those and make sure to include a blueprint of the ship or structure where that is clearly the case.
There is an all new power system in this build. Old ships are still loadable and fully usable, but the old power and its related blocks are disabled in shops, creative mode and factories. They can be re-enabled in the block editor if needed (set inShop to true) or you can still access them through the admin command /give “player_name” “block_name” if you’re an admin, or in single player.
There is an option in the ServerConfig to completely disable the old power system should a server admin want that. However, once a universe is started with the old power disabled, this option cannot be reverted, as that would lead to incompatibilities with the Structure and Reactor HP system and can lead to overheating of many structures.
If old power is allowed, the system will detect which version to use based on the structure’s root entity (mothership, station or planet) and check if that has any old power blocks. All structures will be counted as “new” power until you place down an old power block at which point they will convert to the old system.
This is mainly for game worlds to be fully functional and for players to get accustomed to the new system without rendering all their creations suddenly completely non-functional.
How to use the new system
This system makes ships work a lot differently. All ships made in the old power system, will not translate well into the new system. Simply swapping out the old power blocks with new ones does not make that ship functional again. Instead, we advise you to remove all power blocks, shields, thrusters and usables to start from a clean slate.
The best way to keep track of your power is to check the detailed power consumption in your reactor panel frequently (‘insert key’ by default, or use the radial menu with tab, or press ‘activate’ key when looking at a reactor block)
On the surface, the new system is really simple. You have your main reactor blocks which add power recharge to your ship; only a single reactor group is active at any given time. Power capacity itself is fixed and low, as all weapons and systems use power over time.
Weapons need a minimal amount of power to function, and require a lot more while they’re reloading. If you don’t have enough recharge, it will simply charge it slower.
Other systems such as thrusters and jump drives, only use power when they’re in use.
If your reactor group is small enough ( < 10 blocks), they work just fine on their own. You don’t need any additional blocks to make them function.
However, larger reactors have deteriorating stability. They will not gain power recharge unless you fix their stability. For that, you need to place down stabilizer blocks. These blocks will work at most ranges, but to be efficient, they need to be placed a certain distance or further from your reactor. This distance increases with your reactor size, so make sure to keep an eye out for your stabilization when adjusting its size. The hud context in build mode will tell you exactly what that distance is and indicate the efficiency of your stabilizers; it also shows additional information based on what you’re using.
While reactors have to be built grouped, stabilizers can be built distributed anywhere on your ship. If you have other inactive reactor groups, then all stabilizers look to the biggest reactor, and their resulting stabilization will be used.
You can also build multiple reactors and switch between them. A reactor switch is instantaneous, but there is a cooldown to switch again, and it also takes time for chambers to become active.
Power Consumption
As said, all modules now consume power over time. Additionally. You now have full control over what is going to be consumed first. Open the reactor panel (‘insert key’ default, or use the radial menu with tab), and you can prioritize certain systems. This means that they will get power first in case your total power consumption is above 100%. So if you prefer your shields and thrusters to work over your giant cannon, you can do that now. It also regulates power that goes into your docks or turrets, giving you more control over their power consumption.
Most systems have a linear power consumption increase that depends on the group size. The few systems that have no group size, instead of scale with the mass of your ship.
Docks
Docked reactors will switch off on docking and all power needed is drawn from the mothership. This means that turrets cannot have any power reactors on their own when docked. We will change the behavior a bit more in the weapon update to increase performance in battle and to add more versatility to docks and turrets.
Structure HP -> Reactor HP
Ships now use reactor HP, which is based on the active reactor and the chambers connected to it. If you use multiple reactors, you can switch to a backup before your current reactor ends up overheating. As for the overheat mechanics, they’re similar to what you’ve known with structure HP, but each reactor tracks its own HP.
Reactors can only be scanned when they are active, so having a backup in another part of the ship can greatly increase survivability.
Chambers
Chambers are an all new feature to customize your ship with. We added over 100 different effects that you can activate with chambers. For this, an all new effect system was implemented to enable fast and save management over network.
Chambers can be imagined as a skill tree. Each reactor only has a limited chamber capacity which chambers consume based on their type and level.
The difference to other skill trees is that here, you are physically building the tree yourself. You need to connect groups of chamber blocks with reactor conduits to the main reactor or each other. Then you can open the reactor panel (‘insert key’ default, or use the radial menu with tab) and specify what exactly you want in your tree. The possible options will adapt based on what you build.
There are eight general chambers currently:
- Defense
- FTL
- Logistics
- Mass
- Mobility
- Power
- Recon
- Stealth
Some functionality is now available by default, like the jump drive and the scanner. Chambers can be used to make these a lot more powerful.
Stealth and Recon
Each ship now has a recon strength and stealth strength only if the respective scan/stealth drives are active. The more recon you have over an enemy ship’s stealth strength, the more information you get about that ship. This ranges from simply seeing a cloaked ship to being able to see a ship’s reactor and weapons fully outlined. For the weapon update we plan to add more to it and tweak it were needed.
Respectively, to cloak or radar jam you need a higher stealth strength than the other ship’s recon strength.
Shields
Shields have been reworked into local shields. They now have a radius and only cover the blocks within. This includes docks. Only shields on the mothership will work to prevent abuse and maximize performance. The radius and recharge is based on the main recharger group, and so is its power consumption. The origin of the radius is the center of mass of that group and its capacity is determined from all shield capacity groups that are within the radius (up to 20 groups max). If a local shield radius falls into another recharger group, only the bigger recharger group will stay active. Shield damage that falls into blocks covered by multiple local shields will do damage to all of them.
While adding an interesting mechanic, this system is mainly to avoid building ships in ‘islands’ that are very far apart as you would need multiple groups to cover them, making it more expensive and power intensive to maintain the same shield HP for each of them than you would get if it was a single more concentrated shield group.
Integrity
This is a measure to prevent exploiting certain system shapes without constricting free building too much.
This mechanic will likely not be relevant for most builders. It is to prevent building ships that are too spaced out, mainly abusing line patterns. Most systems will now have an integrity value. This values starts fairly high and is modified based on how the group is built. If any block does not touch enough other blocks of that group, it will lose integrity. If it touches enough (up to 6 max), it will gain integrity. It can be set to scale differently in the config, allowing us to make sure normal builds do not get affected. This means while single lines are now impossible to build while maintaining a positive integrity rating, anything “dense” enough is still ok.
Thrusters count their integrity all in one, meaning that a checkerboard pattern will be the fastest way to lose it.
Shield integrity is based on the lowest integrity of the rechargers and capacity groups within that local shield.
For weapons and other computer + modules, it’s a separate integrity value for each group although this will be tweaked in the weapons update.
If integrity of a system is below zero, hitting that system will cause additional explosions across all groups of that same system. If a shielded ship with negative shield integrity is hit within its shield radius, the same will apply to the shield recharge groups and its capacity banks.
Repulsors
This new block enables you to hover a certain distance away from anything physical. They act as an output for your onboard thrust, and require you to distribute an amount of thrust to them in the thrust configuration menu. They work well in any gravity field and when balanced right, allows you to hover any entity.
Manual Turret aiming
Turrets can now be set to manual aiming. They will then automatically try to align themselves with where the pilot of the mothership is looking at. This includes looking around while using right shift (or double tapping right shift to make it sticky). You can of course also fire your turrets in this mode with the new usable in your .
Factory/Storage upgrade
Factories can now be set to limit production. The factory will also stop pulling resources when that happens, only keeping enough in storage for one extra production step.
Additionally, storage blocks can now be set to limit the amount of blocks to store per type, to stop pulling once that is reached.
We will continue work on refining the GUI and fix issues/exploits that come up that need fixing for an actual release. Some content such as the tutorial videos and block descriptions are still being worked on, but will be available on the actual release.
The weapon update is next and is going to bring more balance and exciting additions to the system. We’ll be making a dev blog about most of its content
Thanks to everyone helping us and thanks for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team
StarMade Dev Blog 17 November 2017
As a lot of you probably know, we are in the process of refining and testing the power update. Dev builds are released almost daily and things are coming together nicely.
We have no intention to rush the release as a large amount of existing systems need to be tested multiple times. While waiting on test results, development can already continue on parts of the future weapon update. Most of its mechanics will already be done by the time the power update is out and should make it likely to release both updates within this year. We definitely want to start to work on the universe update in 2017 still, and we are excited to share the details with you right after the weapon update release.
Within all of those updates, we will also continue working on stability and performance, especially further work to remove lag spikes or loading issues, including improvements to planet sectors. For now, we’ve reduced the default planet size further to decrease their impact on servers as an interim solution till they get replaced.
The new power system will be able to run alongside the old power. This means that ships spawned from blueprints will still be usable. However, the old power blocks cannot be crafted or bought in shops unless the server owner reactivates them, building new ships with old power is therefore discouraged, but of course not disabled. As both old and new power can co-exist, we’ve altered the config system to support multiple styles of the same value for system balancing. This should help to make the transition as smooth as possible.
A ship will be considered new power by default until an old power block is placed, in which case it would revert to the old power system, including structure hp and shields.
Having the old system run alongside the new one of course added a bit of workload, but we think it is worth it to be able to compare both types in-game, showcasing the differences for any player.
In addition to a new power system, several other features and changes were made along the way, which will, along with all the nuances of the new power system, be described in more detail in the coming pre-release news.
A quick outline of those features besides the power system, and the chambers is:
~ Config manager system: Can be used to attach properties to any entities (e.g. sector with more damage)
~ Repulse Block: can be used to construct hover structures
~ Reactor GUI with graph view
~ Normal map tangent space fix
~ Updated HP system
~ Block ID cleanup
~ Some updates and fixes for the Block Editor UI
~ Multiple values per blockbehavior config value
~ Turret aim mode: manually aim turrets from your mothership
~ Rewritten structure information in build mode with quick access to a lot of functions (faction, renaming, docking, AI)
~ Local shields: rewritten shield system to cover a radius rather than global to balance shield coverage between multiple docked entities
~ Stealth/Recon: New system for players to hide or gain information about their opponent
~ New warp interdiction system
~ New ship jumping system
~ Highlighting feature of any system (for recon)
~ Stability update: completely rewritten design for usable systems in entities
~ New undocking behavior
~ New dock sharing behavior
~ General GUI improvements and fixes
~ GUI updates in preparation of a scaling system
~ Refined debris creation to not be laggy in hotspots
~ Extra safety checks for block removal (storage block, shipyard, faction module,...)
~ Updated context help, ability to filter (all, most, crucial only, none)
~ Beam shader change and fix for beam sprite rotation.
~ Ability to save and load inventory hotbar layouts
~ Several fixes for bugs and bottlenecks
If you want to check out our latest dev build. Make sure to do so on a fresh installation, or make sure you’ve got a backup of your worlds to fall back on.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team
Devblog October 13th 2017
A week ago, we started uploading public dev builds containing the new power system. These are unstable versions and should never be used on your everyday StarMade installation, yet they do allow you to play around with work in progress features for the upcoming release. You’re most likely going to suffer from data loss on the tested world so make sure to use a separate install for only these dev builds.
We would normally not ask to check out these early dev builds. However, considering the nature of this update, we would appreciate it if you left constructive feedback on these early in-game features to give us time to adjust them.
We’ve already read the feedback left here and that gave us a good idea on what to still work on or redesign. Currently we’re working out some small but important changes to address your concerns.
We could also use more feedback on the user interface and the information it provides, where it should be streamlined to ensure a better build and flight experience.
Balance concerns or suggestions should be mentioned too, the configs change almost every dev build though so make sure to mention the version number you’ve tested with.
If you find any bugs, report them here (only fill in areas that are relevant) or leave a comment in this thread if you’re not too sure about it.
We’ve also created a thread where you can leave chamber related suggestions (thread)
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
Devblog 21st September 2017
One of our recent streams showcased the new Power System we’ve been working on. This is the dev blog that follows up on that. In case you’ve missed it, we’ve made a stream highlights video you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn9XRI5PVQ8
Power
Most of what we’ve shown works exactly as described here: StarMade Ship Systems 2.0
The difference now is that we have a fully functional system in-game. What follows is a summarisation of everything that was mentioned in the stream. Keep in mind what was shown is an internal dev-build. This is a Work-in-Progress, everything is subject to change. The user-interface is for development and debugging purposes only, it requires a lot of improvements to be user-friendly.
We started with showing how to make a simple, functional reactor that provides power.
There are two block types involved, the reactor blocks on the right and their counterparts, the stabilizers on the left. Stabilizers are not required for small reactors, but are necessary for improving the efficiency of larger reactor setups.
As you can see, the stabilizers are colour coded to visualize their efficiency. Full green (most efficient) > full red (least efficient) and everything inbetween a mixture. In addition to coloring, a numerical value for stabilizer efficiency appears when looking at each block and we’ll make sure to add more context based information where needed. The distance required between these two groups depends on the size of the active reactor, and if you build stabilizers below the optimal range, they’ll lose efficiency, and you need more of them to stabilize the reactor.
The power reactor blocks can be linked to chamber blocks with conduits. There are a number of chamber types, each one of them offering effects and additional mechanics to enhance your ship/station with.
In the above example, we’ve linked the power reactor to a mobility chamber and can choose a number of effects as the first node of the mobility tree. These chamber effects can also be applied on a sector level, a crucial component for our universe update to add more interesting areas to galaxies, such as nebulae and gas giants.
Some chambers are a prerequisite for others; here we need to get an upgrade to the jump drive charge time before we can add an auto-charge mechanic to it.
These chambers use “Chamber Capacity”, a point system that is the same amount for anything that has a reactor. Each chamber has its own capacity cost, limiting the amount of active chambers you can have at the same time.
Minimum chamber size is based on your reactor size. They use a “step” system where the minimum chamber size only increases when your reactor size reaches the next step/threshold. This allows some reactor size adjustments without requiring you to change all of your current chambers. At the top of the reactor menu you can see both current reactor size and number of chamber blocks needed per chamber to function.
Something we added recently is a chamber upgrade system. Instead of making an entirely new chamber group to get a buffed version of an effect you already have, you can now simply upgrade that chamber to the next stage in the reactor menu. A Level 3 top speed chamber would have been three separate chambers before, but now you can simply upgrade it on the spot. Note that you do not need extra resources to upgrade its level, only additional Chamber Capacity.
You’re also able to switch reactors on the same ship, allowing you to have multiple chambers and power configurations with added redundancy, at the cost of extra mass and resources.
Switching reactors does take time and can leave you defenseless when done at the wrong moment.
For now, we can only switch reactors through the reactor menu, however we’ll add more options for that later in development.
The next new mechanic we demonstrated, was the power priority system and the power consumption change. Any system that consumes power has two states. A resting state where it’s not being used but can still require some power to keep itself charged; as well as a usage state, where it’s consuming power over time to reload/reset till the resting state is reached again.
For weapons, this means that you will require some power regen to keep any of them charged and ready to fire. After you’ve fired it, you’ll use more of your power reactor’s regeneration to reload the weapon.
If a system receives less power than it needs, it will still recharge but at a reduced efficiency. In case it is truly devoid of power, it will stop functioning entirely.
You can determine which systems get priority over others by simply re-ordering systems in a menu. We’ve also added a power priority option for docked ships and turrets.
Something we’re still working out is the damage system for reactors. Although conduits are required to build a functional tree, losing them in battle will not result in losing the functionality of its connected chambers.
Instead, we’re opting for a generalized Reactor HP system, similar to Structure HP we have right now. Different reactor block types will offer different HP, and losing HP will result in chambers shutting off at certain thresholds.
The last feature we demonstrated was the built-in ship systems. Any ship with a reactor now gets access to a mediocre jump-drive and a scanner. The jump-drive’s strength/speed currently scales with its reactor size and the ship’s mass. With chambers, you’re able to add extra functionality to your jump-drive such as auto-charge, power consumption efficiency changes, jump distance and amount of jumps a single charge can hold.
Jump inhibitors are similar but need a specific chamber first before it is usable. One of their final upgrades would be a jump interdiction field, dropping nearby people out of warp.
Warp gates get similar chambers, where one of the last upgrades would be the “free target” mechanic. This would allow ships passing through a warpgate to jump to any location in a set distance, even if there is no linked warpgate there. The warp gate will try its best to send you to that destination but would avoid stars and planets, even stations if there is a jump interdiction system.
Radar jammer and cloak are also built-in now but require a chamber before they’re usable. They’re combined into one functionality called the “stealth drive”, and has a limited usage time unless you upgrade it with another chamber.
You can still counter the stealth drive with your scanner, although now we use a strength system to determine what happens. Depending on the difference between your scan strength and the stealth drive’s strength, the stealth drive stops functioning completely, or partially, or is not affected at all.
The scanner, besides anti-stealth and long-range map information, also receives extra functionality for combat information. Depending on its strength and your target’s defensive measures, you gain access to different levels of vital information.
We’re still working on balance, but an example shown in the stream was system group highlighting.
Additionally, we’ve added a new config editor for chamber effects, and updated the normal block config editor for the chamber blocks, allowing anyone to tweak or add their own chambers.
Repulsors
While working on the power system, we had the idea to add a new functional block to the game, something that was extremely fast to implement (although not as fast to balance). The new Repulsor block uses your onboard thrust to provide a push force on itself, allowing you to effectively hover your ship in a gravity well. We demonstrated this on a planet. They also work outside of a gravity source as then the repulsors function slightly different to make sure they also push you down when you’re getting further away from a surface.
Repulsor settings can be changed in the thrust configuration menu, and the repulsors themselves can be toggled on/off on your hotbar. Their strength depends on how much of your thrust you divert to them.
We’ll most likely add logic control to them too.
FAQ
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
Devblog 13th September 2017 (Power Stream!)
Over the past few months, we at Schine have been planning, documenting, discussing and developing a new power system. After a lot of work, we’re now ready for the first public showcase, live on our Twitch stream @ Thursday 4 PM EDT, September 14th (8 PM UTC). You can catch us on Twitch here. We’ll be putting stream highlights on our YouTube channel, and a complete overview of the new power system will be posted soon after.
We’re not able to set a date for the first dev build just yet, but we are working to get it out as soon as possible.
There’s still a bit of work left with GUI, textures, general stability, configuration, and balancing. After the power stream, we’ll be organising a power meeting to go over the demonstration done on Twitch and finalise some more details. In the last week, kupu has been working on some awesome new textures for power blocks, and Lancake is tweaking power details.
Other than power, planning is going on behind the scenes for the universe update. We’re still in the planning process, but aim to begin working on the weapons update (first stage of universe overhaul) directly after power.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
StarMade v0.199.654 - Exploit fix
Last week, we learned of several exploits and how to reproduce them. To prevent further harm to servers, we've made a hotfix to address them. As a general security measure, we are also not going to list them here.
If you have any more information about other exploits, or that were only partially addressed, please report it here. Note that reported bugs are always private from the start and only a few Schine members are able to see them.
As mentioned in the last dev post, the power update is coming along swiftly, and will result in a dev build in about 2-3 weeks.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
Dev Update August 20th 2017
Just a quick update on the current progress: Due to all the work in the previous months, the power update implementation is going fairly swiftly. The basic mechanics are in. There are still a few things missing, especially in terms of effects, GUI and usability, but it’s coming along pretty nicely. Then, we will do some preliminary testing as well as writing some test configurations, since the whole system is based on a new config and effect environment. All values of the new system will of course also be user-customizable.
Expect a first prototype dev build in ~2-3 weeks.
As promised, the first versions of this system will be able to run alongside the old system. For testing purposes, only ships that have a new main reactor block will switch to the new system.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team