It’s been a little while since the last news update. However, we decided, that with a new flexible release schedule it would be best to do weekly news posts when possible from here on out. This is all detailed in a forum post here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-release-cycle-news-posts.28895/
What are we working on right now?
One major addition will be a new request system, that will give better overall performance and superior logic for requesting chunks allowing for larger entities. Fleet commands will be made consistent between server restarts, as well as improved local movement, and we will be looking to make fleet fight-or-flight behavior a lot better.
We are also working on other projects in the background, but we can’t reveal everything just yet. The level of planning and discussions has probably increased tenfold since StarMade’s next steps will be quite large, so what we can reveal right now is in the next section. Much of these discussions have revolved around our end goals document. We’ve been working on a public version that we would like to release soon.
Future Plans
Our current focus is on outlining the final gameplay elements of the game as a whole and making sure we cover the aspects of exploration, movement, building, fighting and developing your empire in an interesting and satisfying way for the player.
For this to work properly, we have to adapt our current universe layout. We are discussing and planning how the next version of resource distribution will work in the universe. The game’s present universe is very uniform and doesn’t lend itself to a more dynamic universe we would like to see. This leads us to discuss and work on two specific things. Where resources are and how, you as the player, use them. The current system we are designing will be moving to more points of interest and contention in the universe. Meaning only specific capsules and ores will exist in specific parts of each galaxy. The crafting system will also have to take this into account and will be revised the same way.
Our discussion internally is based around a concept of points of interest within the universe. A point of interest could be many things. It could be a sector, a set of sectors a planet or other stellar phenomena. All points of interest will/should have a gameplay purpose within the galaxy. These will become focal points for contention, and exploration. There will be more information about the specific locations and stellar objects in future news posts.
While we prepare for all of that, bug fixing will once again be focused to establish more overall stability this includes fleets and AI. Work is still moving forward on audio, and our new power proposal. Both which will have quite the impact on the universe, but more on power next week.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
StarMade v0.199.535 - Spring Cleaning
Greetings citizens,
The spring cleaning update is finally released. As you probably already know, we changed our release cycle to be a lot safer. You can check out our release cycle here (still a work in progress). For this update we focused on solving a lot of new and old bugs.
A few of the bugs were extremely hard to fix. There are also a few smaller features coming with the fixes.
Features and more noteworthy bugs
Fleets/ships losing entities After many iterations and tries, this error seems finally fixed. The main problem was a faulty database query when a fleet changed sector. It was supposed to bring all of their dock with it, but due to the bug only brought some of them. To catch this bug we implemented debug functions, so that fleets would be able to monitor themselves patrolling between sectors.
There is one leftover issue which is catched by a fallback method, and therefore doesn’t affect the game at all. It will just notify the admins with a small popup to send in the logs, since using a fallback isn’t the cleanest way solve this left over.
Thanks to all the testers and helpers on this bug! You really helped a lot finally squashing this pesky bug.
Collision solving for lagging sectors Server has a lot of problems when there were a lot of bad spawns caused by either a bug or intentional griefing. It goes so far that some servers has scripts to detect those sectors and despawn objects.
It comes down to that when multiple physical objects were in the same space, the physics would slow down the whole server. In the past this could happen with fleets spawning or asteroids in rare cases. These issues have been fixed. However, should it still happen, the game has now its own detection system, automatically warping objects to a save closest position after the sector was detected to lag from that object causing too much physics lag.
Rail logic switching Switching rails through logic interaction seemingly worked well but block data was not properly refreshed. You would end up with ghost connections and depending on building, could create an invalid link. A safety check done by the game would prevent any rail working on that entity because of it. This would most likely explain why quite a few rails stop working.
Rolling Ships Rolling ships has been significantly improved. By redesigning the algorithm used, rolling while looking around now feels a lot more natural and doesn’t do these strange figure eights anymore.
OSX Fixes We apologize for taking a bit longer to fix some of the more pressing OSX issues. Macs can finally use framebuffer and advanced graphics functions to speed up the game using the optimizations that come with that. Also some crashes with videos and some text input issues have been fixed.
If you find more problems that are OSX related, please report them and we will try to fix them for the next release.
Exploits We fixed a number of exploits. Thanks to all the players reporting them.
One of the more difficult things was implementing a system that would check connection validity without affecting performance, because it would be horrible to check every block that has a connection. The system we came up with distributes the load to check connections over time. It also only checks when the numbers “don’t check out”.
Optimization
The drawing for display blocks has been significantly improved
Logic activation sending has been improved significantly, reducing bandwidth and improving performance
Features
Fleets can now cloak
Fleets can now radar jam
Bobby AI can now be activated via logic
Size Restriction via GameConfig.xml
Admins can now restrict the ship and station size per entity they want to allow on their server. The exact syntax has been added to /data/config/GameConfigDefault.xml
Also there is a general size restriction in the server.cfg now. RESTRICT_BUILDING_SIZE will restrict building size to multiples of sector size. The value in the GameConfig.xml has priority if set.
List of Bugs fixed
Here’s the full list of all 85 tasks we’ve worked on:
Private issues are exploits or issues that, if known to the public, would cause a lot of harm. Even though we fixed them, knowing the steps to reproduce could give you ideas on finding a way to bypass the fix and still abuse it, for that reason we do not share.
We also did around 20 smaller fixes and issues reported directly by server owners. Crashes, database issues and performance problems were fixed along the way resulting in a more stable environment.
Thank you for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
Pre-build news, Release schedule documentation & Power Proposal
Greetings citizens, ~
Just a quick update. The current pre-build is pretty much ready to release. With to our new policy, we will let it run on the test server for at least one day and optimally longer to ensure there are no issues in the build that we are not aware of.
Expect the release sometime around Monday. Of course, you can already play it if you switch to the pre-branch. We do encourage users to test the pre-build, especially if you're running a multiplayer server. The more people who test and report when they find issues in the pre-build, the less of a chance we miss gamebreaking bugs! If you have the time and are willing, be sure to check it out. If you encounter any issues, report them here: https://phab.starma.de/maniphest/task/edit/form/16/
Details on how to test pre-releases are here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/244770/announcements/detail/230088516619323169
StarMade has never been this stable. However, there is, of course, a lot of work left still, but it will only get better from here.
Fleets losing docked entities
https://phab.starma.de/T2094
It seems like we've fixed the ever elusive T2094. We spent a lot of time tracking this bug down, sending a fix, getting a report it's not fixed and then starting the entire process all over again. We have not been able to reproduce it for about a week now. We're not entirely convinced it's fixed, simply harder to reproduce. This means that if it's not fixed, it will occur less, but will be far harder to track down. If you come across this issue in the latest pre-build (or when we release), please save the game and send the logstarmade.0.log in a reply to https://phab.starma.de/T2094 immediately.
Logfiles are located directly in the StarMade/logs folder, for Steam users, this should be here: Steam\steamapps\common\StarMade\StarMade\logs\logstarmade.0.log
NOTE: If you restart the game, the logfile with the relevant details on the bug, will be moved down the list. For example, restarting the game once, will move the log files to logstarmade.1.log .
To learn more about how to test T2094 exclusively, go here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/244770/announcements/detail/230089879495604396
Release and news post cycle documentation
As mentioned in previous news posts, we're currently changing our release cycle. We're still working out how we'll go about a few things, but most of the procedures have been set in stone. We've created a document detailing how we deal with release cycles here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-release-cycle-news-posts.28895/
Power proposal progress
After drawing and writing up countless pages of concepts and design documents, as well as daily discussions, we are very close to announcing our new power proposal. We agree with a lot of the constructive criticisms the last one got and we started fresh in a very systematic and analytic way. We are currently writing up the final document meant for public release. Stay tuned for that.
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
Quick Dev Update
Hello players,
We are currently finalising the new version with lots of bugfixes. There are still a few bugs that need fixing. One of them is the "Fleets losing turrets" bug, which we have almost resolved. Because it's partially fixed, it's getting harder to reproduce, but we won't release before that is fixed.
Since this is so hard to reproduce we would be thankful for any help on the current pre-build, especially clean server or singleplayer logs of this bug happening. The task is here for more information.
Details on how to switch to pre-builds are here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/244770/announcements/detail/230088516619323169
What are clean logs? From the moment StarMade is launched, to when it is closed, almost every action you do is captured in a log file. A clean log is where the only actions logged are those directly related to the bug. To do this, a user must start the game, enter the world and solely focus on reproducing the specific bug. Once the bug has been located, the game must be closed directly after. Logs must then be uploaded to our bug tracker site (phab.starma.de). Restarting the game will push the log file down the list, and we will likely not be able to track it, so uploading ASAP is vital.
Where are log files located? Logfiles are located directly in the StarMade/logs folder, for Steam users, this should be here: Steam\steamapps\common\StarMade\StarMade\logs
To test, check out the current pre-build from the pre-build branch. There is a new admin command '/fleet_debug_move x y z' which sends the fleet of the selected ship on patrol between the current sector and the target sector. It will also engage a special debug mode, shutting down the game to preserve logs, should the game notice a change in the docking of those ships. Debug stops either when restarting the game or using '/fleet_debug_stop' on either ship of the fleet.
Once the bug has been reproduced, please upload the log files in the StarMade/log directory (compress with your preferred compression tool) in a reply to https://phab.starma.de/T2094
We suspect that the bug is still caused when jumping away either when the fleet is still loaded and above to move into an unloaded sector, or slightly after that.
Thanks for helping and thanks for playing StarMade,
This is our first "release candidate", which contains what we've worked on since the last official release. A release candidate is a version made available to the public for testing. The intention of a release candidate is to switch it to our full release branch if no significant bugs are found. Release candidates give the public a chance to play (test) the version before it becomes a full release, helping us prevent major issues cropping up in our release branch. If you're interested in helping out, take a look at the changes we've made in this news post and check the features or bug fixes that interest you. This is part of our release cycle changes, mentioned in our previous news post, if you haven’t read that already, make sure to do so: http://www.star-made.org/news/starmade-dev-update-spring-cleaning
If you come across any additions that don't work or you believe you’ve located a new bug, report that here: Report a Bug (Release Candidate)
If you find that a bug listed as being fixed here is not fixed (in this pre-release version), please click on the link listed for that bug and comment that the bug is not fixed, listing the pre-release version.
We'll make sure to classify new issues properly and fix any major bugs before releasing.
To install this release candidate, switch to Pre in your build type.
New (Steam) launcher: Build Type > Pre, make sure to set build version to the latest and then update.
Old (java) launcher: Options > Installation Settings > Build Branch > PRE > OK
Please note: Release Candidates are versions which we believe to be ready for full release. However, they have not been widely tested, and therefore may still have significant issues. We encourage everyone to try out release candidates, however, please make sure to backup your content beforehand!
This is a period that would last as long as needed; we can fix what comes up while we’re already working on the next update. If all goes well, this would only last a week at most, and we can release a version for everyone to be used soon after, knowing that it was thoroughly tested and the chance of encountering a game breaking issue would be minimal.
In some way you’ve already been doing that with every release, the difference here is that the version isn’t running on every server out there.
We focused on bug fixing this update although a few additional features did get introduced because of that.
Optimizations and New Features resulting from bug fixing
Considerable improvement of network load sending logic activations, and improving overall performance of logic
Optimization of display blocks, making their drawing speed multiple times faster
Fleet Commands now include cloaking and jamming
Bobby AI can now be activated via logic
GameConfig can now include size restrictions on ships and stations to add more customization for servers. This also includes blueprint spawning.
Everything listed below is an attempt at fixing the issue, which means some of them may not have succeeded. Unfortunately, we are not able to give any details about the countless exploits we’ve fixed as they would give clues for any other remaining exploits we might not know of. An exploit could also reappear several months later, which is why we would not like to share any details about them.
Note, we’ve attempted to fix every exploit known to us so in case you’re still aware of one that is working for you in this version, please inform us about it.
Here’s the full list of all the tasks we’ve worked on:
It's been just over two weeks since we last posted news, so it's well due for a dev blog! By now most of you will have discovered that the last release we did caused some serious issues with stations and saving block changes.
As a player, these severe issues can spoil your mood to play the game and in some cases also result in you losing in-game progress.
As a game development team, we’re aware issues like these lose our players trust and support. Additionally, having to do several hotfixes also eats away time in every new release cycle.
The release cycle, as it stands, is scheduled for a release every two weeks. Sometimes we extend major releases (such as NPC factions) to go through multiple release cycles. However, we try to stick to the two-week schedule as best we can. During this cycle, we have to plan, develop and test every release. We've found that it's hard to put a meaningful amount of content into a release in only two weeks, especially since we can't add anything new during the testing phase (currently 2-3 days) before release. What tends to happen is that after a release is sent out at the two-week mark, hotfixes are needed, we then lose even more time for the next release cycle.
Adding more testers to our testing phase wouldn’t help in the sense that a tester’s job is to mainly maintain Phabricator and to report any dev issues along the way. It’s a never ending task and finding volunteers that will do this for a long period has so far been difficult.
We've come to the conclusion that the current two-week release schedule is unfeasible for a team of our size. It's inefficient, unmanageable and it's not beneficial for our players or us. For these reasons, we've decided to work on a new release cycle, to eliminate/reduce severe issues in new releases and allow us to get more work done.
New release cycle
The changes we want to do here is to extend our release cycle to “as long as we need” with Dev Blogs to keep everyone up to date with what we’re working on throughout the release cycle.This gives us more time to do some long-term tests without feeling the need to rush a release out and then having to hotfix afterwards. This approach also lets us monitor any performance issues that pop-up and resolve them before a live release.
Although this should already be more manageable for testing, we would like to minimise the risk of any issue going unnoticed during pre-release testing. Therefore, when we think it’s ready to go, we will inform you about all the dev build changes in a news post but not do a live release. That would be our release candidate which will be used for public testing. You can check those changes out on our test server and help us out by reporting any issue you find. We even have a few servers that want to run this release candidate on a backup of their entire server database to give us even more coverage. Having the community involved in the process before the release goes live will ensure we catch as many issues as we can, avoiding the need for as many hotfixes after it goes live.
If you encounter any new issues, please report them here, and we’ll make sure to prioritise them correctly to fix any annoying or severe issues before live release. We’re planning to do these release candidates on a Friday if possible, and we estimate it will take roughly a full week before it can be uploaded to the release branch.
This will allow us to get a lot more work done, as the two-week release cycle was holding us back quite considerably, often reducing features to minor gameplay and decorative updates while we didn’t make as much progress with bigger features as we would have liked. The most popular updates like the rail update did have long release cycles, so we already know that it pays off.
We’ve written our different phases out here although they’re still subject to change. A lot depends on how well our next release will go when following these rules.
Bug spring cleaning
The two-week cycle also left bug-fixing in a poor state as we were always forced to fix bugs affecting the new features, and then hotfixing, neglecting other bugs that continued to get pushed back more and more. In light of this, our first usage of the longer release cycle will be the quest to fix all bugs that have a priority above “normal”. This is long overdue. We have also decided that when we release, the release should have fewer bugs than the last release. Not only will this make the game a lot better over time, but it will also free up resources for our testers, as fewer bugs will have to be processed.
We understand that it was a bit frustrating for new testers to see their bug report(s) in queue waiting to be fixed for so long. This is also something we want to resolve through this process.
Power update
With regards to the power update proposal we shared with the community. We have worked on ironing out the flaws in our concept and were hoping to have been able to present our revision a week ago. However, we’re still not quite ready to share our revised proposal just yet. Some of you mentioned it was hard to judge a system with a lack of details which is why we’ve been working on it for a while now. As we expected, it’s not easy to find a complex system where every block has a purpose and affects different portions of your reactor. We’ve toyed around with several ideas such as heat management and reactor shapes, but the hardest part is finding a good base and sticking with it. For now, watch this space.
Current changes
Our primary focus these past few weeks has been on bug fixing, addressing all of the higher priority bug tasks that were still in queue. Fifty of them have been addressed so far, although testing is still required to make sure they’re resolved. With bug fixing also comes some small features, such as the ability to toggle cloak/radar jammers on fleets. We’ve also been looking out for those annoying issues that aren’t necessarily a high priority but can still sour gameplay experience after encountering it too many times. For example, rolling a ship has always resulted in odd behaviour, and we’re very close to fixing it right now.
Our next release will require some extensive play testing; we’re sure our community will be willing to help us out
As always, thanks for playing StarMade
~ The Schine Team
StarMade v0.199.459 - Major Performance Upgrade
Changelog from 359-468:
StarMade v0.199.429 - Combined blocks, new blocks, optimizations and fixes
HOTFIX
v0.199.432:
Fixed old templates being broken
Fixed door wedges being misaligned
Fixed Radial menu popping up when it shouldn't
Added default shape stickies
Fixed IME letter input not being registered
Fixed functionality to press keyboard numbers repeatedly to select sub-slots
Greetings, citizens ~
We have a lot of new stuff cooking at the moment. Some of it has been planned for a while, but it’s finally done now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0YzVYm3jtQ
Important notice for players with NVIDIA cards: The latest nVidia driver (version 378.49) is broken and prevented the game from loading correctly. This also affects other games like Minecraft, reports of severe performance issues on other games. We've managed to circumvent the issue by calling javaw.exe directly, we've modified the new launcher to do this. Since we pre-package Java with our latest launcher, we were able to avoid NVIDIA's driver issues altogether.
If you have installed the driver and are still getting crashes, you can easily install a previous driver from December.
This one was suggested for a while now and brought to our attention by the Council. Because every block shape (wedge, penta, tetra, etc.) is an individual block type, we and also many of our players noticed a huge amount of menu clutter, especially in manufacturing. Having to build each shape separately is very tedious and doesn’t add anything to gameplay, so we’ve combined all of them into a single “root” block.
You can now use every available shape of a block by having the basic block in your inventory. Changing to this new system without breaking worlds, including inventories, took a bit of time to implement. All other shapes in your inventory will be automatically converted into their root block and combined. You won’t lose any blocks with this update.
Similar to slabs, when you pick up a shape variation of a block you will always get the root block back.
New Shape Selection UI
We’ve implemented a customizable shape selection menu to make building faster and easier. This adds convenience without marring the functionality veteran players are accustomed to.
For each block with multiple shapes, you can now open a radial menu and either directly select a shape, or use your right mouse button to sticky a block to the build bar. Sticky blocks work exactly like multi-slots in that they get added to scroll over vertically in the hotbar. The difference is that you can now decide what blocks will be in that stack, including slabs. The same system is now also used for any other block that uses an additional version of a root block like LOD blocks.
New LOD Blocks
A big part of why we made the change now is the arrival of new and upcoming LOD blocks.
First up, a corner variant on the Light Bar.
Pipes have received a T-junction, 90 degree corner, and 4-way intersection variant.
Lastly, an all new shape has been added, the Grate. A barrier that comes in three shapes. A straight section, a corner and a wedge.
More LOD objects and further refinements to their textures will be coming in the very near future.
Extended Texture Blocks Preview
This is another feature that we’ve been planning for a long time and now have a working mechanic to start preparing new textures for. While it is not active on any blocks currently, we would like to take this opportunity to preview the functionality, as many have spotted it in development builds and wondered exactly how it would work.
With this feature, a single block can use multiple textures depending on their position in the world’s grid. This reduces the frequency of tiling effects and allows us to add more variety to a larger surface area of the same block type.
To demonstrate what’s happening, let’s use this example texture. The complete grid we have overlaid represents the full combined texture space for this block (4x4 tiles). Each numbered block represents a single cube within the gameworld.
As shown here on a surface area of 8 x 8 blocks, only 4 unique texture tiles are repeated where as before the single unique texture would be repeated 64 times.
It is our primary intention to use this technique on terrain blocks and a hull type per colour (TBC) within the second part of our texture overhaul.
Optimizations
Due to new requirements, including ones from this update itself, the internal chunk format was updated. The basic array now consists purely of ints, which cost slightly more regular memory (no increase in graphics memory) but comes with an average of 20% speedup for all block operations. The speedup of this optimization affects all block operations from building/removing to damaging and applying changes to blocks. Using natives instead of byte arrays will in the future also speed up operations and save a lot of memory in other places.
Toggleable Light Bar
We’ve also moved a bit from Block HP to orientation. This enables us to use the active bit for blocks with more orientations like the light bar, allowing you to turn them on and off.
The max block HP of a block does become 127 now, but we can compensate for that by increasing its armor value.
Weapon Changes
We’ve started on reworking some of the weapons and resolving balance issues as we go. Thanks to our bug reporters and the countless suggestions on the forum, we already have a nice list of balance concerns.
Beams received 2 changes to bring them up to par with cannon block damage:
They apply explosive damage to every hit block now, instead of the 1st hit block of that tick
Beam damage with penetration now stacks on any armor block till it dies, then proceeds to distribute any remaining damage normally till it encounters another armor block again.
Their hit indicators changed slightly too, and the explosive effect hit indicator was removed due to a large amount of clutter caused by it. Most likely we’ll do the same for the explosive cannon hit indicators since those are not always accurate.
Explosive effect for cannons and beams changed too since it had scaling issues. As many of you may know, getting more than 10% on explosive effect didn’t actually do anything extra.
Now the radius of these weapons is always 1 when linked with the explosive effect, but the damage distributed to the surrounding blocks scales with your effect ratio instead.
The piercing effect’s armor efficiency bonus used to always apply even with a 0% effect ratio, making them extremely useful against any armor without getting any penalty for shield damage.
Now the armor efficiency bonus scales with your effect ratio too.
Another balance issue some may have noticed is that your Armor HP could be destroyed relatively fast by weapons that barely destroy enough blocks to justify the amount of Armor HP lost.
Now the Armor HP deducted is capped to the amount of Armor HP that specific block offers + the same amount multiplied with your Structure HP Penalty. For beams, it’s slightly different and is multiplied by the potential penetration depth.
However, this is only a temporary change; we’ve been looking for a different way for Armor HP to handle incoming block damage. Thanks to our community, there are several different suggestions related to it which gives us a good insight of what you expect armor to do, and how we could implement that.
Advanced armor (and its equivalents) had their HP lowered to 100 HP.
Its armor values were bumped up to 90% so their Effective HP should stay the same as before.
Bugfixes
Smoother sector crossing This issue has been in the game for a long time and should now be a lot better. Crossing a sector should be a lot more smoother on Multiplayer servers. There might still be a small “wobble” from lag reduction firing when it shouldn’t, which we hope to completely eliminate in further updates.
AI bumping into ships An entirely new collision system used for avoidance is in the works, but not yet complete. In the meantime, we’ve applied a hotfix: AI ships bumping into your empty ships will now behave as if they’ve run into a space station: halting their movement, but without flinging yours off into deep space. (If they’re persistent enough, however, they may be able to push your ships, albeit very, very slowly.)
We will try to fully resolve this issue with a complete collision avoidance system and a completely reworked AI flight behavior in the coming updates.
Copy & Paste Rotation Fix All blocks and LOD elements should now rotate correctly using advanced build mode. See T954
Chat fix for Languages using IME Languages that use IME like Japanese and Chinese are now fully functional in chat.
Minor Texture Fixes The last few (we hope) texture rotation fixes have been made, correcting Jump Modules and Rail Dockers (bottom face) in specific orientations, as well as the directional arrows on Pick Up rails.
Pick Up / Shoot Out rail blocks have received a cleaner texture which now tiles correctly across all 6 faces, at all rotations.
Ingot block specular settings have been improved.
Block icons have been improved to help legibility of different block shapes.
Some player sector locations being logged were removed or changed. There are probably more of them; please report them if you find any.
Translations
We added more missing translation strings, and that should also take care of the last big batch to be added. It’s still possible that we find a missing one here and there, though.
Unfortunately, some of us caught the winter flu, and we are just now fully recovering. We weren’t able to do as much as we wanted but it’s nothing more than a small delay to our schedule. We’ll simply move what we wanted to do to the next cycle now that we’re back up and running.
Luckily not all of us fell ill and for the last 2 weeks, Kupu kept himself busy refining the texture pack so that we could have an update nonetheless.
Texture fixes/adjustments
Texture coordinate fixes (rotation fixes): All blocks should now be correct.
CPU Top Faces: are now all the same and correctly orientated.
Overdrive + Pierce modules: Assignments fixed to display unique textures for each. Texture colour difference increased to help differentiate.
Gravity Module: Sides point to the right direction.
Activation Gate: Fixed non-mirroring wires on the unique face.
Gold / Silver / Bronze bars: Reinstated after mistaken removal.
Pick up point: Alignment (partial fix - rotation when activated doesn't work with non-symmetrical texture. requires minor redesign).
Red force fields: A little less glowy.
Thruster: Heat haze/wobble removed from the thruster ring. (Based on community feedback).
Blast Door: Reduced damage on texture, altered contrast and saturation. (Based on community feedback).
Build Block: Reduced damage and worn look on texture. (Based on community feedback).
Bloom: Slightly more performant.
Lens flare (Bloom mode): Changed so the sprites don't distort to screen resolution ratio + Improved sprites.
Lens dirt: New, improved lens dirt texture (subtle), the texture should no longer multiply sun brightness (as much).
Pixel Pack: Now updated for new layouts (possibly not 100% bug-free)
T2125 Sensor does not compare right values for Thrust (now uses max ship speed
T2128 Armor HP bonus adds extra structure HP damage
Horizontal divider in trade menu fixed
Fix for a rare issue involving diplomacy messages (could crash server)
Dynamic prices also work now for (raw) ores and (raw) shards
There is now also an additional modifier for dynamic prices that increases the price of a block’s basic resources, that way the more complicated blocks will end up a bit more expensive to promote trading a bit.
Set it to 1.0 to keep previous dynamic prices:
DYNAMIC_RECIPE_PRICES_MODIFIER in server.cfg
Thank you for playing StarMade,
~ The Schine Team
StarMade v0.199.357 - Texture Update
Greetings, Citizens ~
We hope you are having a wonderful holiday!
As a nice way to wrap up the year, and as a holiday gift to you, we’re releasing some of Kupu’s beautiful eye candy.
Our goal with this update is to step up the game’s visual fidelity without removing the familiar block designs and archetypes you’ve built your creations around. As well as texture improvements, we’ve implemented a few post processing and quality-of-life changes. This update should seamlessly improve the game’s visual experience at no performance cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7pOBtAMxS0
Texture Update
We’ve been working on an overhaul of our default textures for some time now, and this release implements the first and largest portion of that overhaul with all-new ship and structure textures.
Taking advantage of recent lighting improvements, these new textures provide better material definition, allowing glossy metals and matte plastics, and removing highlights where light should be occluded.
Please note all screenshots below are all using the Linear Mag Filtering (Block) setting, at 256 resolution, with normal maps enabled.
We’ve also added a unique texture for the Auxiliary power block:
Visual Logic changes
Logic blocks that do not emit a high or low signal themselves are now green colour-coded. For example, a Sensor or Area Trigger block will no longer be blue, potentially confusing the player that it is emitting a High state.
The Pick-up Point rail block now has an OFF state texture when toggled with an activator.
The logic pipes are a little less glossy, and a little more in line with the rest of the universe.
Miscellaneous changes
Animations given to some decorative screens, water, etc. with more to come.
More blocks now make use of emissive textures, making those darker areas a little more exciting!
Fixed visual rotation errors. e.g. computers will now rotate correctly.
Water is now non-physical.
Lighting on 3D model objects is now a little more accurate.
New hotbar cursor, allowing better clarity when hovering over charged and charging systems. (Shoutout to Valck for finding this better solution in his mod).
Almost all artificially lit bevels within the textures have been removed, improving the illusion of cohesive lighting when rotated.
What don’t we get?
This update does not include terrain, flora, resources or capsule art.
Those will all be coming at a later date, as we still continue to refine the assets and implementation.
There is a known issue of block shapes being harder to see in this icon set. It will be amended ASAP.
Shader Updates
New, softer bloomed suns.
New lens flare. Less lens glare.
Removed big Lens dirt.
Added smaller Lens dirt.
Cleaned up Display Modules a for extra clarity: the scan lines reduced in strength, the flicker removed, and colour brightened to fit better with surrounding screens and lights.
Patterns within the procedural backgrounds are now “softer.”
Please note unless Procedural Backgrounds and Bloom are enabled, you won’t see the changes to the backgrounds or stars mentioned here.
Asteroids
Reworked the asteroid resource placement system and fixing a bug causing inconsistent placement since the chunk32 update. A part of that was already in the previous update but wasn’t mentioned in the news update.
In the server config, there are 2 new asteroid related values:
Asteroid resource chance
Asteroid resource size
This new system also adds the ability to generate more exciting features on asteroids in the future! Ruins and debris, anyone?
Extra Language Entries
We’ve found ~250 missing strings for translation, which we have added into this update. We expect there are still quite a few stray strings out there, which will take a while to locate. You can help out by reporting missing strings to our bug tracker phab.starma.de . We aim to have all missing strings included in the next update, ready for translation.
Bugfixes
We’ve added some minor bugfixes during the holidays:
Most of us here at Schine are currently taking a break over the Christmas/New Year’s period. Expect to see us back in full swing by late January to mid February.
Happy holidays from Schine, and we hope you have a wonderful new year!
