0.301.101 - Universe Update (Pre-Release 3)

New Launcher Notice

• Via the new launch option on Steam
• Via the GitHub releases page

System Changes

New Tutorial System

New Shops

• Trade Station (Advanced Shop): Comes with docks and a shopkeep spawn block.
• Trade Outpost (Standard Shop): Does not have docks or a shopkeep, and is shorter than a Trade Station.

Misc. Changes

• Screenshots and Gifs are now saved in the StarMade/screenshots folder.
• Saved build hotbars can now be cycled through by holding Left-Alt and using the scroll wheel in creative mode.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed map waypoint icon selection.

Known Issues

• Some waypoint icon sprites are missing and need to be finished.
• The waypoint icon color picker recent colors palette doesnt function properly.
• The Local Universe Advanced Settings panel doesnt display correctly, and causes OpenGL errors.
• Templates cant be loaded because the selection drop-down isnt interactable.
• The weapon menu detail panes dont display correctly.
• The new shops sometimes dont spawn after a world is reloaded.
• Build Hotbars dont load correctly in survival mode.

Feature Changelog:

• Warp Gates are active by default on placement, but can be deactivated with logic. Persistence appears to work but may need more testing.
• HUD selected ship stats in top left-hand corner now shows reactor level, power output, and power consumption rather than just the consumption percentage.
• Added brief wait before requesting synchronization, as this seems to make the login issue less frequent.
• Added better messages to login loading screen, so the game doesn't appear to be waiting for a config when it's actually already done receiving and processing the configs.
• Systems update rate limiter is now absolute regardless of what update threads are doing. The old method seems to have been causing lag at larger scales due to long queue clearing times.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a Fleet order persistence bug. - Note: Let us know if it still occurs, as its difficult to reproduce sometimes. At the very least, this fix should narrow down the cause of the issue.
• Fixed orientation mapping of Decorative Coil blocks.
• Added retry for synch-all packet if not received correctly; this was seemingly preventing people from logging in - BUG: Due to synchronization/threading shenanigans, activity logging inside of network commands appears to never get written to stderr. May have to move it to an internal command log that prints when the command is finished or times out.

The launcher login has been fixed. There are still a few other bugs, which will be fixed as well.

Community Update

Feature Changelog:

• Reduced HP of Basic Hull from 400 HP to 200 HP.
• Replaced duplicate mod error with a less intrusive warning.
• AI now has internal support for unfocused fire.
• AI will now fire salvage beams unfocused during fleet mining, making it more efficient.

Bug Fixes:

• Gave Basic Hull 0.1 Armor value in order to fix an infinite penetration bug.
• Fixed severe bug that would cause asteroids to break a sector on modded servers sometimes when they were modified by players.
• Fix coil texture orientations.
• Partially fixed AI navigation issue when core is too far from center of mass (infinite spinning bug).

This update makes some minor adjustments to system balance and fixes a whole range of bugs and issues.

Feature Changelog:

• AI can now use Selected Target turrets by firing at the target of the main ship.
• AI can use Cannon-Missile weapons. Expanded AI firestate system under the hood, which should accommodate more complex conditional weapon operations if fancier things are added in the future.

System Balance Changes:

• Thruster blocks have had their individual mass reduced from 0.25 to 0.15 to match other system blocks.
• Beams have twice the tick rate and half the damage per tick, which should mitigate some of the Beam-Beam damage disparity against armor.
• Reduced Reactor Capacity cost for Top Speed Chamber levels to 8%/10%/12% respectively.
• Reduced Reactor Capacity cost for Thrust Blast Base chamber from 4% to 2%.
• Reduced Reactor Capacity cost for Thrust Blast Strength 1 chamber from 4% to 2%.
• Reduced Reactor Capacity cost for Thrust Blast Charge Speed 1 chamber from 4% to 2%.
• Reduced Reactor Capacity cost for Thrust Blast Multi-Charge 1 chamber from 4% to 2%.

API Changelog:

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed lighting colors for crystal sub-shapes being only white. Weapon stats menu now displays correct power usage.
• Adjusted AI targeting priority of Reactor blocks from 15 to 30 to match the targeting priority of Chambers.
• Fixed bug causing vertically-placed missiles fired by AI turrets to be fired straight at the turret rather than from the correct direction.
• Missiles now check armor at the place they hit and reduce damage accordingly (except Bombs).
• Bombs and Warheads correctly deal self-damage again.
• Inventory transfer rails now only need the actual pulling storage to pull, not both, in order to work.
• Semi fix for downloading block behavior softlock (turns out it's just an indefinite wait for server response).
• Entities made entirely of Cargo Space, intangible rails, and/or their pickup areas will now auto overheat.
• Fleets assigned to Fleet Mining will no longer target ghost asteroids, which should allow them to function more reliably than before.

Future Changes / Ideas:

API Changelog:

• Deprecated old API hooks for block damage and destruction.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a salvage beam exploit.
• Fixed new block damage API hook not applying to missiles.
• Fixed mod error window potentially being larger than the monitor screen.

This update aims to address many of the bugs and concerns introduced by previous updates. We want to assure you that we are working to fix these issues, and we have adopted a new development pipeline and standards to cut down on bugs introduced in the future. We want to apologize for the recent troubles and these new standards and procedures should address these issues.

Feature Changelog:

API Changelog:

• Added an event for when an entity changes its faction.
• Added a new directory for locally installed mods that will take priority over downloaded ones. This should fix many of the duplicate mod issues that were present before.
• Added mod-specific logging so that each mod gets its own log (moddata/modname/logs/modname_log.0.log) writable through the StarMod class. We want to encourage developers to use this new logging system instead of outputting to the main console. This way, it will be easier to debug mod specific issues without having to comb through large global log files.
• Moved persistent object logging to its own file (moddata/modname/logs/persistent_objects.0.log) for each mod separate from the mods main log. This should cut down on the I/O spam issue that many servers had and reduce lag.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug that caused AI turrets not to fire on targets even if set on aim at selected and they would only fire at entities from an enemy faction.
• Fixed transporters not being activatable by logic.
• Fixed transporters not being activatable by decorative consoles.
• Fixed normal and emissive textures for new blocks.
• Fixed icon outlines for new blocks.
• Fixed bug causing some icons for modded blocks to be mismatched.
• Fixed output width being ignored on cannon combinations without a conical damage pattern.
• Fixed coil blocks having incorrect orientations.
• Fixed gravity exit module being hidden in the creative menu.
• Fixed thruster blocks not being controllable through decorative consoles.

Known Issues:

• Temporarily disabled adjust cockpit feature due to a game breaking bug that would lock all other players out of their controls.
• Some normals still need adjustments, but we felt it was important to get these fixes out.

• Fixed icon mismatch issue
• Fixed mod block icon issue

Decor Update [0.203.147] (Community update)

Features Changelog:

Gravity Logic:

Gravity Exit Unit:

Energy Pylons, Energy Cells, and Power Cores:

Coils:

Beige Hulls:

Additional Shapes:

• Carved Stones
• Ingots
• Crystals
• Ice

Features Changelog

• You can now sit in front of consoles without having to put them on a separate entity.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed crash caused by activating an unlinked console.
• Fixed spacedust particle error.
• Improved debug logging.
• Other bug fixes.

Features Changelog

New Functions for Decorative Consoles:

• Added ability for Decorative Consoles to control Thrusters.
• Added ability for Decorative Consoles to control Transporters.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed chunk-related issue causing Decorative Consoles to not activate properly when outside the core chunk.
• Fixed crash bug related to edge case casts.
• Fixed rare server crash related to entity tag saving.

Features Changelog

Decorative Console Functionality:

• Ship Core: Enters the Ship Core.
• Build Block: Enters the Build Block.
• Reactor Power: Opens the Reactor menu when activated.
• Shipyard Computer: Opens the Shipyard Computer menu.
• Faction Module: Opens the Faction Module.
• AI Module: Opens the AI Module.
• Shop Module: Opens the Shop menu.
• Display Module: Opens the Display Module for editing.
• You can also link it to Buttons and Activation modules for logic activation.

Personal Computer Mail:

• Personal Computer blocks can now be used to access user mail.

New Sounds for Doors and Forcefields:

• Door and Forcefield blocks now have an activation sound.

Bug Fixes

• Removed the WIP crew blocks that werent supposed to be included in release yet.

Features Changelog

Balance Changes

API Changelog

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug preventing owners from making changes to their fleets while the ownership was set to shared.
• Fixed bug that prevented shared fleets from being used if the owner was offline.
• Fixed bug causing Fleet Patrol to only run the route once then revert back to idle.
• Fixed SegmentPieceKillEvent not firing soon enough.
• Fixed SegmentPieceDamageEvent not firing soon enough.

Community hotfix for the asteroid crash

The LOD bug that prevented some blocks from displaying, as well as the factory bug that happened in the recent update have been fixed.

Hello players, Today's update is the second part of what will be a series of quality of life mini-updates created by community members. These updates will seek to address some bugs and features that needed extra attention. AI Changes: - Made the range cap AI gets vs jamming targets configurable and disabled by default as it can break the ai behavior and immobilizes it until it takes block damage. - Added in configurable cooldowns for AI automatic scanning and inhibitor usage, defaults are 5000ms (5 seconds) Fleet Changes: - Implemented Fleet Patrol command for players to use, with up to 10 user-defined waypoints - Added fleet rename button - Added faction accessible button for fleets, which allows players of the same faction to use each others fleets - AI Fleets on Patrol will automatically engage hostiles they encounter, and will notify their owner. Other Changes: - Added a /list_mods command that will list the mods currently active on the server. And many, many bugfixes... Planned / Possible Features: - Fleet aggression setting: Would determine if a fleet should try to engage an enemy or attempt to retreat depending on the setting. - Fleet auto-generated "Battle Reports" that would try to ccombine the results of an engagement for a player to view. - (If enabled), the results of a battle may effect the factions FP score, with victories boosting the faction's score, and defeats incurring a penalty. - More uses for Faction Points in general, such as protecting non-homebase stations using FP. This particular idea would need factions to have a reason to have non-homebase stations, such as player-controlled automatic mining, delviery, production, etc. which should eventully tie into parts of the Universe Update. Thank you to the community for this update, and as always, thank you for playing StarMade. Suggestions? Join the StarMade Discord and let us know! https://discord.gg/7TG7kHUBpG

Patch Notes: * Made restricted blocks extendable via a method in BlockConfig * Seperate overlay texture loading on icon texture loading * The shipyard repair and reinforcement will have to be finished later as part of a fleet rework. For now, the shipyards and shops on ships by itself is good enough. * re-add hooks from steam update for the cannon hit projectile listener * Re-implement CannonProjectileHitListener * add handleAfterAlways hook * shadow glsl ATI compatibility * add break statements to prevent nullpointer for BlockPublicPermissionEvent * Several modding improvements and fixes * Remove repairs section from shop panel for ships Thanks to the community, specifically Jake, Ir0nsight, Garret for this update, and everyone else working on it and testing.

Bugfixes: * Made restricted blocks extendable via a method in BlockConfig * Seperate overlay texture loading on icon texture loading * The shipyard repair and reinforcement will have to be finished later as part of a fleet rework. For now, the shipyards and shops on ships by itself is good enough. * re-add hooks from steam update for the cannon hit projectile listener * Re-implement CannonProjectileHitListener * add handleAfterAlways hook * shadow glsl ATI compatibility * add break statements to prevent nullpointer for BlockPublicPermissionEvent * Several modding improvements and fixes * Remove repairs section from shop panel for ships Thanks to the community, specifically Jake, Ir0nsight, Garret for this update, and everyone else working on it and testing.

Hello everyone, here is another update brought to you by the community. - Changed credits to be a long, so you can have much more credits - First selected entity will no longer be pinned as AI target - Fixed issue with game freezing when relogging from a server If you like to get access to the source code, just PM me on discord, and I'll add you. Thank you for playing StarMade, - schema

Hello everyone, here is the changelog. - Fixed turrets being unpowered if a single turret lost it's rail docker - AI scan whenever it can - AI use interdiction addon in combat Thanks to the community for this update. If you are interested in getting access to the source code, feel free to message me (schema) via Discord.

Community Update from the Mod-Launcher Team: Some smaller fixes, and one major bug where block ids where desynced between client and server

Greetings Citizens, this is a small update, that fixes some issues with mods as well as balane: - Fixed customBlockConfig being ignored when mods are enabled - Fixed weapons dealing 1/3rd of their intended damage - Added notification dialog when joining a server that has mods enabled We have gotten some new contributors on the repository of the code. Since it's not a small project, it will take a little until things take off. If you would like to contribute, please send me a quick DM on discord https://discord.gg/6r9KGmJWbn We're also getting the bug tracker back up, and will likely make a fresh start to clean up and to not overwhelm newcomers. Thanks for playing the game, - schema & the Schine Team, the mod-launcher team, and contributers.

Greetings citizens, as announced this is a minor update by the community, already using the opened codebase. It fixes a few bugs, as well adds a mod-loader. Bug fixes:

• Fixed AI leading beam shots
• Fixed the "Require authentication" being enabled by default, making people unable to log into single player without uplink.
• Made factory progress bars not factoring in the Factory Bake Time chamber
• New UI for the blueprint manager
• Effects and defenses now use a more straightforward formula, where the defense rating subtracts a percentage of incoming damage in the corresponding offensive effect type
• Fixed an issue where all defense ratings were multiplied by zero. Defensive effects (such as armor chambers and innate defenses from the BlockBehaviorConfig) are now functional.

A SSL cache issue has caused the launcher to think that the certificate is expired. The update should fix that. There will be an actual game update and more news within the next few days. The summery of that:

• StarMade will go Open Source for the community. (since I can't work on it until I have enough money to not have to work on other projects for a while)
• Community mod launcher
• Balance updates and bugfixes

Hello players, The universe update is well underway and the code bases are now so different that any change on the old version takes a lot of time because of migrating. For this reason, this will probably be the last update on the non-universe-update version of StarMade. It introduces balance changes that the Quickfire initiative developed and tested.

Unobfuscation

Quickfire

OVERVIEW

Screenshot and station build by SkylordLuke. This is the fourth universe update dump copied from our official Discord server, in the channel #universe-update-dev-news-dump. To receive universe update news as it happens, join our Discord channel here: Join the StarMade Discord Server! Previous Discord dumps:

• https://starmadedock.net/threads/universe-update-discord-dev-dump-1st-of-october-10th.31420/
• https://starmadedock.net/threads/more-audio-work-universe-update-dev-dump-2-11th-of-october-20th.31426/
• https://starmadedock.net/threads/audio-system-finished-gui-scaling-and-better-resource-loader-universe-update-dev-dump-3-11th-of-october-29th.31435/

• Decoupling of data accumulation and the actual writing. Essentially we no longer need to synchronise the writing thread during writing, making I/O operations not affect performance.
• System to mark objects in a sector for writing, as well as a spawn/cleanup system for new sectors and for sectors no longer loaded.
• Sector change performance tweaks to make switching sectors a seamless experience.

• New universe creation details, creating an ultimate goal for the game, conquer the galaxy! This would be a separate gamemode from our standard sandbox experience. Compacting resources and gameplay into a central area.
• Population system plans. A new "resource" to fuel and grow an empire, represented by physical NPCs!
• New planet discussion and screenshots of some of the planet work we've currently got in development!

Image is of USS Endeavor, by Wilavid7. You can check out the progress of his ship here. Background image taken by 12yanogden. This is the third universe update dump copied from our official Discord server, in the channel #universe-update-dev-news-dump. To receive universe update news as it happens, join our Discord channel here: Join the StarMade Discord Server! Previous Discord dumps:

• https://starmadedock.net/threads/universe-update-discord-dev-dump-1st-of-october-10th.31420/
• https://starmadedock.net/threads/more-audio-work-universe-update-dev-dump-2-11th-of-october-20th.31426/

• Audio system finished.
  • Remote audio events now implemented, allowing the server to send an audio event. These events are only sent to players in range of the actual source of the audio (with the option of sending globally). Saving bandwidth and removing a potential area for bugs.
  • Advanced audio events implemented.
  • New audio settings integrated. SFX is split up into sub mixers for GUI and in-game (engines, explosions etc.) allowing more control over audio volumes.
  • The only thing that's left is bugfixing and actually creating a soundtrack and SFX to put into the game and subsequently assigning them to audio events.
• Settings redesign, cleaner code, slightly faster access to settings and a ton more versatility. Since the system has been changed, settings will reset when this update hits. Old settings.cfg files will not be compatible (server.cfg will be compatible). This is needed to integrate audio settings into the game and also paves the way for GUI scaling.
• GUI scaling work began, updating the settings system makes it a lot easier to handle. Settings menus now have GUI scaling (see images below).
• Refactored and modernised the resource loader (for loading audio, images, meshes, textures etc.) Now more modularised and robust.

• Overhaul of the individual block system. Putting all block variants into a better structure (wedges etc.), and an LoD system! LoD (level of detail) system basically decreases the complexity of a 3D object, for StarMade this would simplify a cube mesh to make a low poly representation of chunks. This should drastically increase rendering thoroughput, giving a performance boost and potentially allowing us to scale new planets up a bit.
• Write/read overhaul, massive performance increases! Moving chunk data to unsafe native memory.
• New universe creation.

Image is of 116-2 Marksman, by MeRobo. This is the second universe update dump copied from our official Discord server, in the channel #universe-update-dev-news-dump. To receive universe update news as it happens, join our Discord channel here: Join the StarMade Discord Server! Previous Discord dumps:

• https://starmadedock.net/threads/universe-update-discord-dev-dump-1st-of-october-10th.31420/#post-378613

• Continuation of the Audio Engine. Audio Manager's event tracer was completed, events represent an audio asset triggered by the game. Events come with special arguments for spatial properties as well as control indicators for start/stop/onetime.
• Finished audio asset manager, which has a list of all available sounds. Ability to assign an (audio) asset to either a tag group or individual event ID, e.g. a GUI button sound might be assigned to a GUI button tag group. If we wanted to have one button with a different sound, we'd simple assign an (audio) asset to its individual event ID.
• Worked on a music manager which will essentially work the same was as the audio asset manager, using the same tag system. It'll be a little different in that the player will have a collection of AudioTags that would describe its current state. E.g. if the player is near its homebase, it'd get the HOME tag, in enemy space the ENEMY tag, flying around would get exploration tags based on location e.g. a PLANET tag. There'd be tags for all sorts, such as pirates, other players, building, mining, factory and so on. We could play a custom soundtrack that suits each activity, adapting to the player's current gameplay. Music will not always be playing, silence is as much a part of the space experience as sound.

• Overhaul of the individual block system. Putting all block variants into a better structure (wedges etc.), and an LoD system! LoD (level of detail) system basically decreases the complexity of a 3D object, for StarMade this would simplify a cube mesh to make a low poly representation of chunks. This should drastically increase rendering thoroughput, giving a performance boost and potentially allowing us to scale new planets up a bit.
• GUI work, most importantly GUI scaling to support larger resolutions.
• Resource loader refactor (for audio, images, meshes, textures, etc).
• Write/read overhaul, massive performance increases!

Image is of Brimstone-L7 Advanced Salvager by DeepspaceMechanic. This has been copied (with a couple of corrections) from the semi-daily updates posted by schema in our official Discord server, in the #universe-update-dev-news-dump channel. To receive universe update news as it happens, join our Discord channel here: Join the StarMade Discord Server! We'll be posting more of these dumps over the next few days to get up to date with where we're at now. All update news is available for reading in our Discord server. This post is for those of you not in our Discord channel. TL;DR Between the dates of the 1st of October - 10th, the following was done:

• New network protocol implemented, which provides much needed optimisations. Message handling is easier to synchronise, resulting in less errors from multi-threading. NIO implemented, which works on native memory as opposed to heap. This memory is much faster to access from native functions. Finally an interface-driven callback/listener system, resulting in far less unnecessary calls and more control over what called which listener.
• Audio Engine, designed in a way to be highly customisable, easily implementable into our existing codebase and focuses on performance. Also, allowing playermade soundpacks to be created. The system we're using can also be extended for particle effects and maybe even modding! Much work on the audio engine was done during this time, with many events in the game now having audio events attached to them.

• Ease of use, one of the hardest things is to organise sounds in groups, so that you can assign a sound to multiple events of a similar type. For example, assigning one sound for all OK buttons. However, it should also have the freedom of being granular so that we can assign a sound for an individual action if needed.
• Code clutter, putting out an event for audio should not take more than a line, and also auto manage itself into a meta state, so that audio can be assigned within a config and a tool.
• Management: Tools for audio that handle the assignment, type and parameters of the sound.

• Remote events that only trigger on the server but the client received a more general event (e.g. activation gate). It will use the same system (server will not trigger normal sound events but handle sending of remote ones. Just required more info on where to send the event to (object id etc)
• Sub-ID for events. Some events that require state changes (start, stop), need an extra ID to handle events (e.g. beams fired and stopped) automatically
• Ship Ambience: some blocks will emit ambient sound (like reactors, factories, thrusters, etc). The same system is made to handle those, but an extra layer of management to automatically start/stop as well as update sound events for block collections (<- I'm here)

Greetings, We've released a dev build that introduces two things:

• Implemented QuickFire balancing project configs as default.

• This build has been (mostly) unobfuscated, to reduce the barrier for our community to mod StarMade.

• As of dev build v0.202.0, StarMade is unobfuscated. (Apart from the new planets scheduled for release in the universe update.)
• From the 8th of August till today, we were distributing unobfuscated builds to modders that requested it (this is no longer needed).
• Opened a discord channel for modders to communicate what they need to make their projects easier/possible. We want to make sure there's a strong relationship between Schine and the modding community.
• Invited members from our own modding community, as well as those from outside it to give their input on how we should go about supporting modding in StarMade.
• Released our game's launcher under the MIT license on GitHub. We saw some of our community were trying to modify it to add mod support, so we thought why not release it. (Schine/StarMade-Launcher)
• Granted git repo read access to the current lead ([USER=417003]NZSmartie[/USER]) of a modding toolchain and API for StarMade, DistortSM. Also granted the same permissions to gabizou, a lead developer for Sponge (Sponge - Minecraft: Java Edition Modding API) who has expressed interest in helping StarMade modders.

• We want to eliminate as many barriers as reasonably possible before our next major update (universe).
• We want to focus most of our efforts on the universe update. However, suggestions that don't take a lot of time for us, but make modders lives a lot easier are fantastic.
• Ideally, we can continue to add/modify things that would aid in mod development during/after the universe update.

• asie - tons of feedback about modding and considerations we should take about our policies.
• jamierocks/jmansfield - above and beyond answering our questions and giving feedback, even in an hours long voice call! Went through an unobfuscated build, giving feedback and input.
• gabizou - Gave a ton of input in Discord DMs and our Discord channel. Went through an unobfuscated build, giving feedback and input.
• Zidane - Gave a ton of input in Discord DMs and our Discord channel. Started the mod proposal google doc, which is very comprehensive.
• progwml6 - Gave a ton of input in Discord DMs and our Discord channel. Created the modpack google doc with Benevolent27, which goes into details that we never would've thought of.
• jaredlll08 - Gave a ton of input in Discord DMs and our Discord channel.

• "Quickfire's configs will not work with vanilla ships. Power costs and proportions of systems and weapons are very different from vanilla, and desirable armor configurations in vanilla (i.e. very little, if any) are potentially very different from what may work well in Quickfire. Some chamber setups will need changes as well. Using this config means a full refit of systems on any existing ships & stations." - QF Team
• Community-run and always seeking feedback, suggestions, testers etc.
• We've put their changes in a dev build because we want to bring exposure to the project, so they are able to get feedback and improve their config. So please give them your feedback in either their Discord server (Join the Starmade Quickfire Initiative Discord Server!) or forum thread (https://starmadedock.net/threads/the-quickfire-initiative-rebalancing-starmade.31326/).
• QuickFire configs are always changing, as further testing and feedback are done. Values in this dev build will likely be different in a few days after this news post, a month from now it might be very different. To test the latest QF configs, join their server here: QuickfireSM.com:4242
• The goal is to eventually implement well-received config changes the community has made, provided they reach a state where both our community and we are happy with them. This does not necessarily have to be the QF config changes; however, this is the most popular (and only) config pack so far. The QF team have put a lot of effort into their config, reaching out to many different members of our community. They've been testing and taking feedback to create balanced gameplay. Ultimately, we understand that not everyone will be able to come to a consensus on what the "best" settings will be. Whether this is adopted into our release branch depends on your feedback, so again, please give some :)

• Latest config files (GitHub) - https://github.com/alterintel/Quickfire
• Overview of QF changes - Quickfire Initiative - Config v0.1 Changelog/Overview
• A more detailed document of changes and their reasons - Quickfire Initiative - Config v0.1 Full Change Overview + reasons.
• QF forum thread - https://starmadedock.net/threads/the-quickfire-initiative-rebalancing-starmade.31326/
• QF discord - Join the Starmade Quickfire Initiative Discord Server!

This post is a Community Spotlight (CS), where we're bringing attention to cool community-driven projects for StarMade. We'll be posting some more of these in the near future. Check out the "Discuss with the Devs" that happened in our official Discord last month here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/discuss-with-the-devs-july-18-2019-sis-shortform.31343/ --- Quickfire Team: Quickfire is a community-run project to modify the games configuration files for a more balanced, fun, and interesting game experience. The QF team consists of members from every part of the StarMade community, including several veteran PvP specialists, creative builders with technical knowledge, and a long-time administrator of one of the most historically popular StarMade servers, as well as several other veteran StarMade players. While the mechanical changes that can be made within configs are somewhat limited, we have done our best to correct the issues the community has been having with the current game and enhance combat gameplay. The Quickfire Initiative has also worked with Schine on refining certain game mechanics (e.g. armor stacking). We have, at the same time, made an effort to avoid undermining key design elements of the power and weapons updates (e.g. the chamber system and arrangement) when not absolutely necessary. We have also played a key role in testing, tracking down, and confirming several critical bugs with weapons and systems, which were fixed in the most recent patches. Quickfire has created a config package that includes everything from fine-tuned missile guidance to rebalanced chamber costs. Every system in the game has been looked over and re-tuned to address various balance issues brought up by the community and/or our team members. We have also adjusted or modified all of the weapon combos, with the goal of creating greater diversity, viability, and utility for each where possible. Weapon changes include eliminating the troublesome cursor recoil mechanic from cannons, significantly improving acid damage application from beams (reducing the need for output spam), adjusting missile guidance, flight speed, and turn rate, and eliminating the extremely exploitable Death Beam. Currently, we have addressed most of the issues and features that we intend to (aside from some minor tweaks), and have a configuration set available for testing. We are now in the phase of refinement and testing, and for this, we need the community! Feedback, suggestions, and thoughts on our settings for weapons, systems, and chambers are welcome, and will help us improve and refine the Quickfire Initiatives configs and make StarMade a better experience for everyone. Our in-progress configuration set is available on a public Github (updated often), and we also have a public creative/test server running our configs, at QuickfireSM.com:4242. You can find an overview of Quickfires changes in this document. A longer, more complete list of changes and the explanations behind them is available here. If you have feedback, suggestions, questions, issues, or other comments about our config set, please post them in the project thread. You can also join the Quickfire Initiative Discord server. --- Schine: We'll be adopting the Quickfire config changes in the next week or so. At the same time, we'll also begin to start making efforts to lower the barrier for modding. We've been working with modders from our own community as well as others to come up with a plan to make modding StarMade much easier, without taking a big chunk of dev time from the universe update. If you're interested in modding StarMade, head over to our official Discord (Join the StarMade Discord Server!) in the #modders-dev channel. If you don't get a chance to test QF configs out before then, we'll be taking feedback with the Quickfire project when we officially adopt their changes and continue to address balance concerns. Thanks for playing StarMade, - The Schine Team

Hello players, sorry for the long time without an update. There was a lot of smaller technical stuff, as well as some research and other projects which made it hard to talk about specific things. What I can do, however, is give you a summary about the upcoming items well be working on for the Universe update in the following months:

• Graphics Engine Update
  • Switch to deferred rendering for dynamic lighting: Deferred rendering will greatly increase the quality of rendering as it allows for a lot more light sources than forward rendering. The nice thing about this is that it will be possible to use the prebaked information as part of the deferred rendering to simulate ambient occlusion. And since even deferred rendering has limits in terms of light amount (around 50-100 light sources), we can use the prebaked system in a LoD system being able to still show unlimited amount of lights without slowdown.
  • Optimizations:
    • An all new backwards LoD system that will decrease the number of polygons very significantly.
    • Fast treebased occlusion culling, so areas that wouldnt be visible can be discarded before drawing.
• Block container revamp
  • This is basically refactoring how block types, rotations, etc are handled. This will make it much easier to deal with bugs and to introduce new blocks.
• Block Engine Update
  • The load system for sectors will be revamped. The goal is to preload data more efficiently, so that sector changes would be virtually unnoticable.
  • Saving and the block save structure will be revamped to be more efficient and safer (more guards against data loss/corruption, as well as features to prevent newer players from losing work due to a ship getting blown up (automatic versioned save feature on ships))
  • Moving all block data to direct memory, as well as possibly moving more expensive functions to native c++ code (lighting calculation, saving/loading)
• Audio System
  • Research completed on best designs. System will make it possible to live edit sound effects ingame
• Particle System
• AI
  • AI Collision System
  • AI LoD (Collision sphere sweeping)
  • Crowd AI (AI positioning without fighting over space)
  • AI behavior layering (macro actions like getting to a position in the universe and micro like fighting against another ship)
  • AI mission system
  • AI behavior
• Universe recreation
  • New structure
    • Hirachial Region System
    • Region ownership system
  • New NPC structure
    • overall NPC behavior
  • Place of Interest creation
  • Key area creation
  • Area specification
  • New stellar objects
  • New planet injection
  • Difficulty flow (for single player)
  • Event System
  • Void System

• Population system
  • Low level NPC population
  • Population resources

Hello players, here is a small feature and fix update. There will be several of those along the universe update roadmap (roadmap blogpost on www.star-made.org). Durking the update, we'll be working ~1 week per month on fixes and small features (especially for the rule system), while spending the rest of the time on the universe update. Universe update Roadmap News: On the universe update, we are currently in the middle of GUI scaling, and close to starting to implement the sound system. This update features a lot of new conditions and actions. The system now supports rules of different types, depending on the target (players, factions, sectors, etc). Actions are transferable to other entities: e.g. if condition on a ship is true, you can execute a player action for all players on that ship. Here is the full changelog:

UI

Rule System

• Player Mod Faction Points
• Player Set Faction Points
• Entity Mod Faction Points
• Entity Set Faction Points
• DateTime fixes
• Entity Weekly duration
• FactionRules
• FactionIsInRange
• FactionAddFP
• FactionSetFP
• FactionHasMemberCount
• FactionHasFpCount
• Action Bridges
• Entity -> Sector / Player / Faction
• Sector -> Entities / Players / Factions
• Player -> Sector / entered Entity / Faction
• Faction -> Players
• 'Entity system claimed by' condition
• player warp to sector action
• player set credits action
• player mod credits action
• player kick action
• player ban action
• player in sector cond
• player say cond (regexp)
• player send message action
• player last joined condition
• player kick out of ship action
• player kill action
• segment controller in sector range condition
• all faction condition parameters now range
• sector chmod condition
• sector range condition
• sector contains entity count condition
• sector chmod action
• sector admin command action
• Added inverse conditions (condition group feature)
• recurring actions
• player: add credits over time
• player: add blocks
• player: add blocks over time

Fixes:

• fixed missing integrity triggers
• fixed beams not active on server when using logic to toggle them (logic salvage beam not working)
• fixed linear reactor level calcs
• fixed activatable modules not synching correctly (cloak drive)
• fixed torch damaging stick shops
• fixed error that would respawn Asteroids over and over if they were moved

Balance

• blockBehaviorConfig now has global defense of blocks based on type (shield, armor, block) additionally to the previous individual block effect defense (which would be a mess to adjust)
• Note: it's now possible to set defense value for all block types depending on if it's armor, normal or shield that is hit. The defense value is put against the offense value of the weapon. This now enables a balance where some weapons can be better/worse against shield/armor/normal
• beams now use calculated armor values for damage reduction
• Note: Beams now do damage calculations in a similat way as cannons in that the armor depth is calculated upon hitting a surface. The damage of the beam is reduced depending on armor thickness. Values have been added to config.
• General Balance Note: The current config values for the new balance additions are currently experimental and in no way final

Hotfix#4 (0.201.341):

• Fix for servers with custom config coming up (not being able to move astronaut, crashes and other various issues this bug caused)
• Fix for torch beam (didn't do enough damage to compensate for the fullhp encoding (has to do at least one byte of damage)

• Fixed possible crash when applying rules when entities apply changes at the same time
• Fixed rail logic so only adjacent activation and basic button activate (still any logic block can be connected with c+v) (fix of hotfix#1 didn't apply yet)
• Fixed crash in rule dialog (checkbox cleanup when the field wasn't initialized yet)

• Fixed error when spawning ships from blueprint items.

• Fixed missing icons for new blocks
• Fixed rail logic so only adjacent activation and basic button activate (still any logic block can be connected with c+v)
• Fixed manual turret aim to be off by default to fix AI mobs not firing their turrets

Rule System

Tracking & Marking

• player_get_block_amount (fixed target inventory)
• entity_set_check_flag
• entity_is_check_flag
• entity_track

New 3D Assets

• Grate Wedge (previous Grate Wedge has been renamed to Grate Slope)
• Metal Corner and Metal Bar
• Beacon and Colored Light Corners and Light Bars
• Light Rods
• Paint Cans and Resource Capsules
• Small Button and Small Activator
• Red, Orange, Green Consoles and Console Inner and Outer Corners

3D Collision Meshes

Balance

• Stabilization beam between reactor and stabilizers is removed
• Integrity is removed

• Removed integrity (can be re-added by rules)
• Remove reactor stabilization beam (can be re-added by rules)
• increased cannon speed from 25x to 40x server max speed
• Increased armor bonus from 0.1 to 0.5 (bonus added on armor thickness)
• Halved vertical cursor recoil
• Beam damage reduction based on armor value of the block hit. 20% of armor value of block reduced per tick. (config option)
• 2.5% flat cannon damage reduced if armor if penetrated (config option)
• Config Option to add additional damage reduction based on armor thickness (currently unused)

Full Changelog

• Rule System
  • Full rule system with condition and actions to affect entities
  • Cascading Condition groups
  • Global rule assignment
  • Individual rule assignment
  • Full config export/import
  • Export/import of individual rulesets
  • Full GUI in tools main menu
  • Full GUI ingame with live synch feature
  • New ingame file browser
  • Added basic conditions (more to come)
  • Added basic actions (more to come)
  • Tracking feature
• fixed advanced build mode raytrace bug where an imprecise physics test would sometimes select the wrong blocks
• fixed physics bug where cannon shots would sometimes skip a chunk and do damage inside a structure
• 3D assets can now use any existing shape to be represented
• 3D assets can now use any arbitrary meshes as physics mesh to be represented
• 3D assets can now have activated state meshes
• Improved pipeline for mesh import with the block editor
• turrets will no longer be able to shoot through other docked entities (they wont do damage to their docks)
• improved fleet formation by refreshing ship sizes more frequently and taking ship size more into account for spacing between ships
• Fixed Fleet not slowing down after move order (edited)
• Added delay between weapon switches of AI. delay only applies to within type (from a cannon computer to another cannon computer etc.)
• Added ai_weapon_switch_delay server config and admin command.
• added effect SHIELD_HOTSPOT_RECHARGE_MODE to set to rely on recharge instead of capacity
• added and exposed formula switching for power reactor
• player_get_block_amount fixed target inventory
• entity_set_check_flag
• entity_is_check_flag
• entity_track
• all commands with *_UID
• docked pull/push permission now saved in blueprint (edited)
• server.cfg option to allow factories on ships (ALLOW_FACTORY_ON_SHIPS)
• beacon light now is a flag in the block config
• logic block is now a flag in the block config
• updated loading screen tips to reflect game changes
• Refactoring work
• Increase missile tickrate to be more precise
• Added and adapted server config missile target prediction value to prevent missiles from going after a targets previous position. Added admin command /missile_target_prediction . Make sure no missiles are spawned when using or those missiles might get confused.
• Fixed race gates power usage
• Fixed draw beams game option
• Self cleaning waiting for for entities to dock message for the case that the object isnt in the db anymore. Reduced frequency of message for all other cases
• Can now load blueprints directly onto docks
• Server.cfg option to remove need to build shipyard structure (SHIPYARD_IGNORE_STRUCTURE)
• Reduced roll speed to balance between rotational axis (more turn speed balance will come)
• Orange and Blue Light Block color adjusted to differentiate from Yellow and Teal
• AI ships now auto charge stealth drive (should fix fleet cloak/uncloak/jam)

• Removed integrity (can be re-added by rules)
• Remove reactor stabilization beam (can be re-added by rules)
• Balance: increased cannon speed from 25x to 40x server max speed
• Balance: Increased armor bonus from 0.1 to 0.5 (bonus added on armor thickness)
• Balance: Halved vertical cursor recoil
• Balance: Beam damage reduction based on armor value of the block hit. 20% of armor value of block reduced per tick. (config option)
• Balance: 2.5% flat cannon damage reduced if armor if penetrated (config option)
• Balance: Config Option to add additional damage reduction based on armor thickness (currently unused)

  Since the weapon update there have been a lot of smaller updates along the way which fixed several issues and added smaller features. For this one, we wanted to make a seperate release announcement for some bigger features as well as more bug fixes.  

Entity Sidebar

Build Mode Camera Drones

Adjustable Cockpit view

Block Editor Model Tab

Textures

Logic Changes

Pin AI Targets

Bugfixes

• Possible Fix for missing/reverted chunks This bug seems to be finally fixed (can’t call it 100% fixed yet without long term experience on production, since we had no way of reproducing it). The bug was possibly caused by save events marking chunks as not validated on the server, but at the same time not queuing them for validation cause of another event at the same time. This caused those chunks to not be saved in that session.
• Fixed all crashes due to malformed translation Strings If there was an error in a translation string format (e.g. using malformed arguments), the game would previously crash. These bugs would be fairly hard to track down since they would only happen in that specific language. The system has now been updated to compensate for those bugs and automatically replace the string with an error.
• Fixed pirate/tg spawning when attacking a station
• Fix for missing Area Trigger icon, + icons for new blocks.
• Custom texture for cargo block in build mode
• Fix for cargo draw issues (on transparent blocks)
• Torch beam damage upped from 1 to 4
• Fixed nullpointer on UI when active reactor changes
• Fixed bug that would prevent newly spawned planets and asteroids from being saved when edited (existing ones had no problem).
• Removed popup when opening storage
• Added more info in the build mode entity info
• Temporary shield disable now affects whole structure incl. all docks, instead of just the entity it was triggered on.
• Fixed crash after setting the "Pull up to" value of Cargo to 0.
• Turn rate config values exposed and explained in blockBehaviorConfig
• Fixed custom block texture handling
• Fixes map drawing
• Fixes crash when changing certain graphics settings ingame.
• Fixes shield message spam
• Fixed client crash when shipyard anchor was removed when a design was loaded

• The Schine Team

After over 100 dev builds, the weapons update is finally here. It might be even bigger in scope than the power update. It not only introduces a lot of new features, it also has complete redesigns and code reworks of parts of the codebase. It also comes with fixes for a lot of the more serious bugs as well as stability updates and lot of minor fixes and upgrades. As always, make sure to do a full backup on your world and blueprints. We tested both fresh installation and upgrade multiple times, and couldn’t find any problem, but there is always a rest risk in updates this big. The weapon handling, projectile, and block processing code has been completely rewritten, as well as parts of the missile system, and a lot of other backend systems to improve performance and stability. This also allows for a lot faster development for these systems from here on out. In context of the main focus of this update we also improved combat stability and performance a lot, as well as hopefully fixed most of the nasty bugs that were affecting ship combat in the last release. There might still be some issues with some systems losing server synch temporarily under load, but those will be addressed in a follow-up cleanup update.

Features

Weapon & Tool redesign

Acid Damage model

Cannons

Over Penetration

Projectile Width

Recoil + Impact force

Cannon Combinations

• Default: An all-around decent cannon, doesn’t excel at anything
• Cannon + Cannon: Fast firing machine gun with fast projectiles. It uses the Cone: Wide-> Narrow damage shape.
• Cannon + Missile: Charge cannon with left click to charge, release to fire. The longer it is charged, the better the efficiency and damage of that shot. It also uses the Cone: Wide-> Narrow damage shape.
• Cannon + Beam: A slow firing artillery cannon with a narrow -> wide cone damage shape. Even when over penetrating, it will be relatively efficient, but it is hard to hit.

Damage Beams

Damage over Distance

Combinations

• Default: Latch on beam that breaks off when it has no direct line of sight with the current block.
• Beam + Cannon: Aimable beam with short burst time and cooldown
• Beam + Missile: Arc beam with a shorter range but doesn’t break when there is no direct line of sight anymore. Has a long burst time.
• Beam + Beam: Penetrating beam that can’t be aimed with your cursor. The damage of the beam is distributed equally over the blocks in the penetration line. Requires to be charged before firing and stops your shields from blocking damage while you are charging.

Repair Beam

Tractor Beam

Armor

• When a bullet hits armor it checks how many armor blocks come behind that block in its path.
• The count of armor will stop at any non armor block or air. That count defined the “armor depth”
• Each armor block now has an armor rating that will get added up (with possible additional bonuses on thicker armor)
• The resulting total armor value along the armor depth is then compared with the bullet’s damage
  • Is the armor value lower than the bullet’s damage, the bullet will travel on as normal and destroy the armor blocks along its way
  • Is the armor value higher than the bullet’s damage, the bullet will only do acid damage on the first block and stops completely
  • Is the armor value much higher than the bullet’s damage, acid damage is not even applied and only a single block gets normal damage and stops completely
• This will be repeated for every continuous plate of armor the bullet goes through in a ship, so inner armor a very viable option

Missiles

Missile Capacity

Missile Shield + Point Defense Prioritization

• High damage missiles
• Low damage missiles
• Random (Closest First (old system))

Missile Combinations

• Default: Fast non tracking missiles
• Missile + Cannons: Heat-seeking swarming missiles
• Missile + Beam: Lock-On Missiles
• Missile + Missile: A bomb with no self-propulsion and uses the ship’s velocity as its own. The bomb will ignore shields and does friendly fire as well. It will arm itself after several seconds, it won’t detonate (dud) if it isn’t armed yet, so you can’t fire it at point-blank range of your target.

Volley Fire

New HUD graphics

Undocking

Improved graphical effects

New Textures

Lead indicator

Effects

• Kinetic (Cannons)
• Electromagnetic (Missiles)
• Heat (Beams)

Sector Size Weapon Range independency

Mines

• Cannon Mine: This mine fires cannon projectiles when in range
• Missile Mine: This mine fires heat-seeking missiles when in range.
• Proximity Mine: The classic mine. Once a targets gets within range, it activates the mine and will follow the entity that triggered it, explodes on impact. Once triggered, it is used up.

• Cannon Mine Mod: turns mine into cannon mine
• Missile Mine Mod: turns mine into missile mine
• Proximity Mine Mod: turns mine into proximity mine
• Strength Mod: increases mine damage
• Personal AI Mod: mine will not attack the one that laid it down
• Friend AI Mod: mine will only attack the enemies of the person who laid it down
• Stealth Mod: with each additional mod the mine will gain one point in stealth. Depending on recon strength while scanning the mine will be invisible at distance (distance depends on the difference of stealth vs recon)

Cargo Damage

Integrity changes

AI

Shield changes

New Isanth

Block Hitpoints

New Admin Commands

• /kick_players_out_of_entity_uid [entityUID]
• /kick_player_from_entity [PlayerName]
• /bp_info [BluePrintName]  (populates information about a specific blueprint)
• /delete_bp [BluePrintName] (deletes a specific blueprint)
• /bp_setOwner [BluePrintName] [PlayerName] (sets a blueprint to be owned by a specific person)
• /clear_mines_here (clears mines in current sector)
• /clear_mines_sector [X] [Y] [Z] (clears mines in specific sector)
• /reset_repair_delay (Resets repair delay on selected/entered vessel)
• /reset_integrity_delay (Resets integrity battle delay on selected/entered vessel)
• /rail_reset (Resets rail (undock/redock) rail of only the selected or entered entity)
• /rail_reset_all (Resets rail (undock/redock) rail of all (sub)entities of selected or entered entity)
• /set_weapon_range_reference (Sets the weapon reference range distance in meters, which the config values are multiplied with (default is sector distance))
• /faction_set_entity_uid [UID] [FactionID] (sets faction of an entity by UID)

Optimizations

• The rewrite of the weapon and general usable module system made the amount of steps involved in pretty much everything weapon and module related a lot less. Not only does this result in much cleaner code, but also a general speed up.
• The update system for modules is now on-demand, which means the system will not bother to even check if the blocks of a group changed as long as there hasn’t been an actual notification for that. This means that the general idle time for all entities has been cut down significantly. This is very noticable in sectors with a lot of entities and docks.
• Block processing has been optimized to minimize the amount of lookups by grouping all changes by chunk. This also cuts down on synchronization time between threads and cleans up the code considerably in that section. This makes block processing in general a lot quicker, especially during battles.
• Block change recording has been completely rewritten to minimize memory usage and serialization size.
• Beams have been optimized to work a lot faster.
• Removed some bottlenecks that were occurring in big fights.
• Thread spool up to remove short freezes after starting the game, e.g. in build mode.
• A ton of smaller optimizations across the board.
• Memory optimizations for the particle systems.
• Log cleanup during ship battles

Config Changes

• Advanced Armor
  • (Effective) HP: 1000 → 2000
  • Armor Rating: 1000
• Standard Armor
  • (Effective) HP: 250 → 800
  • Armor Rating: 750
• Basic Armor (previously Hull)
  • (Effective) HP: 75 → 250
  • Armor Rating: 500
  • Recipe:
    • 1 Metal Mesh
    • 1 Crystal Composite
    • 1 Fertikeen Capsule

• Shields
  • Shield Capacity / Block: 400 → 250
  • Shield Recharge / Block: 20 → 25
  • Default Capacity: 200 → 0
  • Default Radius: 25 → 10
  • Shield Local Radius Multiplier: 10 → 7.5
  • Shield Upkeep % of HP / sec: 0.5% → 2%
  • Shield Power consumption resting / Block: 1 → 0.4
  • Shield Power consumption charging / Block: 1 → 0.8
  • Shield Under Fire Time: 30 seconds since last shot
  • Shield Minimum Recharge: 20%
  • Shield Minimum Recharged reached at: 50% Capacity
• Overheat Timer
  • Minimum Time: 60 seconds
  • Maximum Time: 600 seconds
  • Time added / Block: 0.001 seconds
• Stabilization Stream
  • Max Cooldown when hit: 60 → 15 seconds
  • Power Regen in Cooldown:  20% → 25%
• Reactor
  • Chamber blocks needed per reactor block:  0.5 → 0.25
• Integrity
  • Start Value: 200 → 400
  • Collection Integrity Update delay under fire: 300 seconds
• MineLayer
  • Layable Mine Distance: 10 meters
  • Cannon Damage per Strength: 1 000
  • Cannon reload: 0.5 seconds
  • Cannon speed: 2 x universe speed
  • Missile Damage per Strength: 10 000
  • Missile Reload: 10 seconds
  • Missile Speed: 1.5 x universe speed
  • Proximity Damage per Strength: 10 000 (bypasses shields)
  • Proximity Speed: 0.5 x universe speed
• Tractor Beam
  • Moveable mass per module: 5 mass
  • Maximum Force : 10 x Target mass
  • Power Consumption resting / Block: 10
  • Power Consumption charging / Block: 50
  • Distance: 400 meters
• Salvage Beam
  • Salvage ‘damage’ / Tick: 10 → 25
  • Power Consumption resting / Block: 3 →  5
  • Power Consumption charging / Block: 15 → 25
  • Ticks / second: 40 → 16
• Repair Beam
  • Blocks / Tick / Module: 1
  • Power Consumption resting / Block: 5
  • Power Consumption charging / Block: 25
  • Ticks / second: 20
  • Repair out of Combat delay: 60 seconds

Bug Fixes

What’s next

• The Schine Team

Greetings citizens, ~ The weapon update just entered the pre-release state. All the features we wanted to add are now implemented. In terms of content it is probably as big if not bigger than the previous Power update. It completely overhauls all weapon, adds a lot of new features, graphics, optimizations, fixes and other improvements. Some parts such as updating the block icons, textures and finalizing the config files, are still in the works but everything else should be there for you to test. We already went through a lot of bug fixing and this version should be playable. We strongly advise to backup your universe or use a completely separate installation. You cannot revert your world to the current release version without a backup. The current pre-release version 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) In case you’re not too sure about it, feel free to leave a comment on this thread.

Features

Weapon & Tool redesign

Acid Damage model

Cannons

Over Penetration

Projectile Width + Bullet Customization

Recoil + Impact force

Cannon Combinations

• Default: An all-around decent cannon, doesn’t excel at anything
• Cannon + Cannon: Fast firing machine gun with fast projectiles. It uses the Cone: Wide-> Narrow damage shape.
• Cannon + Missile: Charge cannon with left click to charge, release to fire. The longer it is charged, the better the efficiency and damage of that shot. It also uses the Cone: Wide-> Narrow damage shape.
• Cannon + Beam: A slow firing artillery cannon with a narrow -> wide cone damage shape. Even when over penetrating, it will be relatively efficient, but it is hard to hit.

Damage Beams

Damage over Distance

Combinations

• Default: Latch on beam that breaks off when it has no direct line of sight with the current block.
• Beam + Cannon: Aimable beam with short burst time and cooldown
• Beam + Missile: Arc beam with a shorter range but doesn’t break when there is no direct line of sight anymore. Has a long burst time.
• Beam + Beam: Penetrating beam that can’t be aimed with your cursor. The damage of the beam is distributed equally over the blocks in the penetration line. Requires to be charged before firing and stops your shields from blocking damage while you are charging.

Repair Beam

Tractor Beam

• No active logic block connected: hold
• One active logic block connected: pull
• Two active logic blocks connected: push

Armor

• When a bullet hits armor it checks how many armor blocks come behind that block in its path.
• The count of armor will stop at any non armor block or air. That count defined the “armor depth”
• Each armor block now has an armor rating that will get added up (with possible additional bonuses on thicker armor)
• The resulting total armor value along the armor depth is then compared with the bullet’s damage
  • Is the armor value lower than the bullet’s damage, the bullet will travel on as normal and destroy the armor blocks along its way
  • Is the armor value higher than the bullet’s damage, the bullet will only do acid damage on the first block and stops completely
  • Is the armor value much higher than the bullet’s damage, acid damage is not even applied and only a single block gets normal damage and stops completely
• This will be repeated for every continuous plate of armor the bullet goes through in a ship, so inner armor a very viable option

Missiles

Missile Shield + Point Defense Prioritization

• High damage missiles
• Low damage missiles
• Random

• Default: Fast non tracking missiles
• Missile + Cannons: Heat-seeking swarming missiles
• Missile + Beam: Lock-On Missiles
• Missile + Missile: A bomb with no self-propulsion and uses the ship’s velocity as its own. The bomb will ignore shields and does friendly fire as well. It will arm itself after several seconds, it won’t detonate if you fire it at point-blank range of your target.

Volley Fire

New HUD graphics

Undocking

Improved graphical effects

Lead indicator

Effects

• Kinetic (Cannons)
• Electromagnetic (Missiles)
• Heat (Beams)

Sector Size Weapon Range independency

Mines

• Cannon Mine: This mine fires cannon projectiles when in range
• Missile Mine: This mine fires heat-seeking missiles when in range.
• Proximity Mine: The classic mine. Once a targets gets within range, it activates the mine and will follow the entity that triggered it, explodes on impact. Once triggered, it is used up.

• Cannon Mine Mod: turns mine into cannon mine
• Missile Mine Mod: turns mine into missile mine
• Proximity Mine Mod: turns mine into proximity mine
• Strength Mod: increases mine damage
• Personal AI Mod: mine will not attack the one that laid it down
• Friend AI Mod: mine will only attack the enemies of the person who laid it down
• Stealth Mod: with each additional mod the mine will gain one point in stealth. Depending on recon strength while scanning the mine will be invisible at distance (distance depends on the difference of stealth vs recon)

Cargo Damage

Integrity changes

Integrity in Battle

Shield changes

AI changes

Optimizations

• The rewrite of the weapon and general usable module system made the amount of steps involved in pretty much everything weapon and module related a lot less. Not only does this result in much cleaner code, but also a general speed up.
• The update system for modules is now on-demand, which means the system will not bother to even check if the blocks of a group changed as long as there hasn’t been an actual notification for that. This means that the general idle time for all entities has been cut down significantly. This is very noticable in sectors with a lot of entities and docks.
• Block processing has been optimized to minimize the amount of lookups by grouping all changes by chunk. This also cuts down on synchronization time between threads and cleans up the code considerably in that section.
• Block change recording has been completely rewritten to minimize memory usage and serialization size.
• Removed some bottlenecks that were occurring in big fights.
• Thread spool up to remove short freezes after starting the game, e.g. in build mode.
• A ton of smaller optimizations across the board.
• Memory optimizations for the particle systems.
• Log cleanup during ship battles
• Gif recording performance has been improved (quality setting in settings.cfg)

Major Fixes

• Shipyards have been fixed. Additionally, shipyards now have a seperate logs to catch any future problems
• Docked entities (turret or not) being surrenly misaligned has been fixed
• Fixed hp problem for ships becoming 0 and then not taking damage after that, making a ship effetively unkillable.
• Fixed shields (fix came with rewriting the system)
• Fixed bug that would spam the log with exception during battles causing major lag
• Fixed bug on chunks not drawing correctly (wrong lighting)
• Fixed warp gates
• Fixed turret AI not being able to shoot at a target after a while

Hello players, The first dev build is now available. There is a lot to cover in this update. The primary focus of this update is to make weapons more unique and give them a better feeling, as well as improving the overall combat experience. This is the first dev build of many, and there are other features to come still like the ability to zoom with weapons, weapon graphical updates and PD missile priority. Not all combat related aspects will be addressed in this update, ship movement might still receive some minor (but important) changes in the far future and the AI itself will definitely get the attention it needs in other releases. Also, there will be graphical updates to the weapons still. Most important, however, is to first ensure good functionality.

Weapon Combinations

Recoil

Cannon

Armor

Combinations

• Default: An all-around decent cannon
• Cannon + Cannon: Fast firing machine gun with accuracy problems at higher damage values (recoil)
• Cannon + Missile: Charge cannon with left click to charge, release to fire. Will have different shape for acid damage (most likely a cone. The amount charged on fire will change its damage, acid damage spread and other variables to change its efficiency.
• Cannon + Beam: A slow firing, sniper/artillery cannon that will have a different shaped acid damage model once again. It will still be relatively efficient when over penetrating its target, but is hard to hit.

Beams

Combinations

• Default: A latch on beam
• Beam + Cannon: A beam that doesn’t latch on with some acid damage. The latch can break by turning away, but the beam will try to latch onto the next block that has a sight line to the beam output.
• Beam + Missile: An arc beam with shorter range but doesn’t break from target turning away. This is useful when trying to do focused damage on one spot.
• Beam + Beam: A doom beam that penetrates the complete length of the beam, and adds acid damage. This would represent an actual death star weapon. Very overpowered right now and can easily be used for performance tests! The acid damage will be adjusted later on, and this beam will get other penalties to account for its high penetration and damage values. This could be the inability to aim with your cursor, having to drop your shield, require additional charging time, having to stop to fire, can not be used on turrets, etc. Stations are especially vulnerable to this type of weapon so we’ll make sure there are mechanics in place to balance it properly.

Repair Beam

Tractor Beam

Missiles

Missile Capacity

Combinations

• Default: Very fast non tracking missiles
• Missile + Cannons: Heat-seeking swarming missiles
• Missile + Beam: Lock-On Missiles
• Missile + Missile: A bomb with no self-propulsion and uses the ship’s velocity as its own. The bomb will ignore shields, but it is extremely hard to aim and use (almost impossible to fire effectively from large ships). The bomb does friendly fire and will arm itself after several seconds, which means you should clear away after firing one.

Effect types

• Kinetic
• Electromagnetic
• Heat

Mines

• Cannon Mine: This mine fires a cannon projectile towards entities in range
• Missile Mine: This mine fires heat-seeking missiles as long as an entity is in range
• Proximity Mine: The classic mine. Once activated the mine will follow the entity that triggered it and do massive explosion damage on impact. Once activated, the mine is used up.

• Cannon Mine Mod: turns mine into cannon mine
• Missile Mine Mod: turns mine into missile mine
• Proximity Mine Mod: turns mine into proximity mine
• Strength Mod: increases mine strength 10 fold but also increases cost 10 fold
• Personal AI Mod: mine will not attack the one that laid it but everyone else
• Friend AI Mod: mine will attack only enemies of the player
• Stealth Mod: with each additional mod the mine will gain one point in stealth. Depending on recon strength while scanning the mine will be invisible at distance (distance depends on the difference of stealth vs recon)

Raw Feature List

• Completely Rewritten weapon handling and processing
• Effect damage
  • Effect damage block config capability
  • Effect damage block behavior config capability
  • Effect damage effect config
  • Effect damage attack and defense processing
• Effect armor
  • Global effect defense
  • Per block category effect defense
  • Per block type effect defense
  • Armor chamber effects
  • Environmental Armor effect
• Cannon width architecture system
• Cannon width pipeline
• Acid damage
  • Acid damage formula
  • Armor depth
• Cumulative optimized projectile block handling
• Beam optimized penetrate handling
• Beam latch-on functionality
  • Beam latch-on synchronization
  • Beam latch-on connection broken handling
  • Beam latch-on progression handling
• Repair beam
• Tractor beam
  • Tractor beam pull
  • Tractor beam push
• Cargo damage
• Mines
  • Minelayer blocks
  • Minelayer structure
  • Minelayer connection
  • mine graphics
  • mine network and db infrastructure
  • mine proximity checks
  • Mine hitbox checks
  • Minelayer inventory consumption
  • Minelayer mine composition calculations
  • Mine Stealth
  • Mine placement distance checks
  • Basic mine clearing admin commands
• LoD system
  • LoD abstraction
  • LoD mixed mode
  • LoD activation
• bBock change handle optimization
• Wep combination rewrite
• Missile capacity
  • Missile capacity handling/reloading
  • Missile capacity synchronization
• Thread instancing optimization
• HP data update (always making use of all available bits)
• Block Config parser rewrite
• Bomb missile
• Death beam functionality (penetrating/acid)
• Meta effect capability
• Raycast fixes and optimizations
• Beam optimizations
• Extended user controller pipeline in weapon usage
• Optimized repair storage
• Repair storage serialization
• Smaller fixes in between
• Inventory block-search reset when dragging from hotbar
• Mini freeze when building/starting game fix
• Major memory optimizations for handling damage and block changes in general
• Recoil
  • Physical Weapon Recoil
  • Physical Weapon Impact
  • Cursor Recoil

Hi, we've released answers for the Q&A opened on the 31st of March. The answers are available on our forum here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/31st-of-march-schine-q-a-answers.30541/ We're now taking questions for the Q&A opened on the 14th of April, submit your questions here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/14th-of-april-schine-bi-weekly-q-a.30542/#post-366607 A dev blog will be available soon :) Thanks for playing StarMade, - The Schine Team

Hi, we've released answers for the Q&A opened on the 15th of March. The answers are available on our forum here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/schine-q-a-answers-15th-of-march.30493/ We're now taking questions for the Q&A opened on the 31st of March, submit your questions here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/31st-of-march-schine-bi-weekly-q-a.30492/ Thanks for playing StarMade, - The Schine Team

Hi, we've released answers for the Q&A opened on the 15th of March. The answers are available on our forum here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/schine-q-a-answers-15th-of-march.30493/ We're now taking questions for the Q&A opened on the 31st of March, submit your questions here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/31st-of-march-schine-bi-weekly-q-a.30492/ Thanks for playing StarMade, - The Schine Team

Greetings, We've just released an update to fix SSL certification caching issues, this patch is required for both clients and servers. We're currently looking into fixing this issue for previous versions. First dev build for Weapons Update should be out soon, Answers for the first Q&A session will be released in the next week. Apologies for the inconvenience, - The Schine Team

Greetings, We've just released an update to fix SSL certification caching issues, this patch is required for both clients and servers. We're currently looking into fixing this issue for previous versions. First dev build for Weapons Update should be out soon, Answers for the first Q&A session will be released in the next week. Apologies for the inconvenience, - The Schine Team

Greetings citizens, ~ 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, well 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. Well 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. Wed 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 hes translated a total 7659 strings (64,439 words), almost solely translating all of StarMades text into Japanese. Hes been diligently keeping Japanese up to date with all our updates. Since the release of Power 2.0 hes 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 hes translated 6889 strings (64,439 words) and made significant contributions to both language projects. Hes 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. Wed like to thank everyone who has contributed to our translation project, its sometimes tough work translating schemas English ;) Thanks for playing StarMade, ~ The Schine Team

Greetings citizens, ~ 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

Hello players, This update contains some fixes for problems with the last update, as well as a new advanced system for reactor design.

Reactor Dimension

Stabilization Axis

Fixes and Additions

• Fixed a bug that would fill up VRAM slowly (causing fps drops)
• Added a system to search an entity by block type. Select a block in the dropdown in “Selection” in advanced build mode and hit the “highlight” button. All blocks of that type will be highlighted, which will help a lot when refitting ships
• Turret aiming left click will now focus fire (like beams) if your cursor is on a structure. Right click will be unfocused fire.
• AI now prefers to aim on reactors, chambers and stabilizers (will use the scanning system in the future)
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed some chunks not being editable anymore
• Fixed some ships not loading due to memory optimization using compressed chunks
• Fixed warp-gates not loading due to data discrepancy
• Fixed sector import failing with certain entities
• Fixed reactor HP removal on block destruction issue
• Fixed reactor overcapacity issue
• Fixed energy stream not always disappearing
• Fixed old blocks still appearing in factories (set deprecated to false to bring those back)
• Fixed RHP not deducting correctly on integrity explosions
• Overdrive, Ion, Piercing and EMP Effects are disabled now as they don’t work fully and will be replaced in the weapons update.

Greeting, Citizens ~ The power update has been finally released.

Features

Power 2.0

Motivation

• Scaling of power versus the surface area of ships
• Filling ships with power and systems is almost impossible to change afterwards without tearing it down completely
• Additions of bigger features was hard on existing system
• Consumption model was not consistent and didn’t scale well in terms of balance.
• Implementation based on partly outdated code
• Exploits to abuse power system mechanics

Power Basics

Reactor <-> Stabilizer

• The Main reactor block
• The Stabilizer block

Energy Stream

Consumption

Power Consumption Priority

Rail Power

Chamber Tree

Multiple reactors

Reactor HP

Local Shields

• To counter Jamming, your ship needs an equal amount of recon strength than the other ship’s stealth strength
• To counter Cloak, your ship needs 1 recon strength less than the other ship’s stealth strength.
• For scanning weapons, your ship needs 1 recon strength more than the other ship’s stealth strength
• For scanning chambers, your ship needs 1 recon strength more than the other ship’s stealth strength
• For scanning reactors, your ship needs 2 recon strength more than the other ship’s stealth strength

System Integrity

• Touches 0 blocks: - 10 integrity
• Touches 1 blocks: - 8.5 integrity
• Touches 2 blocks: - 7 integrity
• Touches 3 blocks: - 4 integrity
• Touches 4 blocks: - 2 integrity
• Touches 5 blocks: + 0.5 integrity
• Touches 6 blocks: + 2 integrity

• Thrusters will be considered as the same group, they all share the same integrity value.
• Stabilizers group if close enough, get combined into a single group. This can easily be seen when looking at their outline in build mode with a stabilizer block selected in the hotbar.
• Shield integrity will take the lowest integrity of both rechargers and capacitors within a shield radius. A shield with low integrity will also receive damage on a shield hit, which means that this is the only module where integrity is an absolute necessity.

User Interface Changes

• All new build information panel
• New power reactor panel
• Font sizes have been adapted to be more readable at higher resolutions
• GUI drawing optimizations
• Effect Config System GUI
• Several help and information bits based on context
• Updates to chat (more to come in weapons update)
• Several message popup fixes
• Right click on brush size scrollbar resets it
• A faction member’s position can now be set as waypoint in the faction member list
• C+V on remote logic (was already in but we missed mentioning it)
• The infographics you see in this post are available in the game as a quick reference in the top left corner when building a ship.

Ship Information Panel

HUD Context

Manual Turret Aiming

Repulsor Block

Storage/factory pull/push limits

Graphics Config Presets

Config additions

Optimizations

• Sped up general chunk loading by streamlining client requests
• Sped up module group calculations by avoiding unnecessary runs
• Reduced general RAM usage of ships, stations and asteroids by using dynamic chunk compression.
• Fixed several memory leaks
• Optimized RAM usage in several other places
• General drawing optimizations
• Several bottlenecks removed
• Reduced VRAM being used considerably by overhauling frame buffers.
• Fixed and reduced VRAM usage for antialiasing.
• Fixes for 4k resolutions
• Beam drawing optimizations
• Several block editing optimizations
• Networking optimization
• Use of advanced graphics card functions for cards that support it
• Faster debris handling

Bug fixes

• Fixed building while flying at high speed
• Fixed normal mapping tangent space
• Fixed many small fixes for textures
• Fixed several crashes (without issue attached)
• : Weapon output added to HUD context
• : Added safety checks for removal of an in-use inventory, warpgate with set destination, faction module and shop module
• : Fixed sounds not playing after 5 plays.

Known issues

• Tutorial videos are not up to date yet. Update video will follow shortly.
• NPC Assets are not using power 2.0 yet, will be converted along the way.
• Lighting bug on some sprites and girder
• Long range scanner not functional yet (placeholder for universe update, will be temporarily serving as the scanning module of the old version)
• Sensor block currently doesn’t function with the reactor. To fix it will probably be sensing the current consumption versus recharge percentage.

What’s next

This is not a full release, this is a release we believe to be ready, but still needs public exposure for testing. Pre-builds are after development builds, but before a release build. You can learn more about our release cycles here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-release-cycle-news-posts.28895/ 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

Power System

How to use the new system

Power Consumption

Docks

Structure HP -> Reactor HP

Chambers

• Defense
• FTL
• Logistics
• Mass
• Mobility
• Power
• Recon
• Stealth

Stealth and Recon

Shields

Integrity

Repulsors

Manual Turret aiming

Factory/Storage upgrade

Greetings citizens, ~ 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

Greetings Citizens, 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

Greetings Citizens, 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

Repulsors

FAQ

• Does the chamber <-> reactor distance requirement also work in a diagonal direction as well as a straight line?
  • Yes.
• Why do those chamber blocks have shards?
  • Currently, we use the resource overlay system to show if a chamber is in use or not in our testing phase.
• How does this work for small fighter sized ships?
  • The same for any ship size, the config is made to make any volume to surface area ratio work.
• Can’t you make a massive weapon that can fire once?
  • No, each usable system requires a bare minimum of power regeneration even to fire once. There’s also a top-off rate mechanic that makes any ready to use system, consume some power still.
• Do you need conduits to connect a reactor with stabilizers?
  • No, you only need conduits to connect reactors with chambers. The stabilizers work connection free and only care about the current active reactor.
• Does this mean ships will become smaller than previously, as in needing less blocks?
  • No, you’ll just need fewer system blocks to build any of these ships.
• Reactors on docked entities/turrets? Power inherited from parent ship?
  • There can be only 1 active reactor on the entire entity, including its docks. If you dock a turret with its own reactor to a ship that already has one, the turret’s reactor will simply disable and inherit its power instead. It always looks at the root structure, if that has no power reactor, nothing docked to it will have power either.
• Will chambers only apply their effects when parent reactor is active?
  • As there can only be 1 reactor on the entire entity, its chambers will also apply for the entire entity
• What about jump inhibitors?
  • Jump Inhibitors are still available, but are now accessed through a chamber tree.
• How do you switch reactors?
  • Currently, there’s only a user interface option, but we’re planning to add more options there.
• Do conduits need to be orientated?
  • No, they only require to touch sides to form a connection.
• What is the motivation to actually make separate reactors when you can just put every chamber on your main reactor and not have to suffer the downtime when switching?
  • Scanning will not show inactive reactor groups; your other reactor may only have minimal damage.
  • Reactor HP is tracked for each group; you can switch if your 1st reactor is heavily damaged and get quite a lot of your original power regeneration back. Depending on the situation, the new chambers may not be initialized fast enough.
  • You can only have a limited amount of chambers active at the same time (determined by chamber capacity), you can have a separate offline reactor with different chambers to fit your need. An FTL specialized reactor for travelling and a Salvage specialized reactor for when you find some asteroids.
• Will we be able to use the old system still?
  • Yes, there will be a config option to disable/enable the old system. When it’s still enabled, a structure will switch over to the new system as soon as one of the new reactor blocks is used. If the old system is disabled, all old power related system blocks will be inert and only serve as decoration.
• Can priorities be controlled with logic?
  • No, it’s not currently planned.
• Will we able to use logic with the chambers?
  • We would like to have it in some shape or form, but we’re not sure yet how as it could cause some stability/balance issues.
• Will there be a designated filling block?
  • At this stage, we don’t see the need for it. Basic hull already serves that purpose quite well but also depends on more user feedback.

Greetings Citizens, 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

Greetings citizens, 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

Greeting citizens, 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

Greetings! Over the past few weeks we've been posting endgame document parts on our forum, which you may have seen. Now that all parts are released, here is a single document detailing all parts :) We realise this document doesn’t really have much new information for our veteran players, this is simply a single repository for what we want to achieve with StarMade. This should be especially useful for new/out of the loop players. Dev blogs will be returning to Steam from this point on. We’ve found that there isn’t always news every week, so we’ll likely have dev blogs in some weeks with no new information. Alternatively, we may switch to a different dev blog schedule.

End Goals Introduction

• Builder
• Explorer
• Industrialist
• Trader
• Fighter
• Imperialist

Builder

Explorer

• Resources: Restructuring the universe to condense most resources into relatively small areas will make them stand out much more than the generic space surrounding it. Uncommon resource rich regions will automatically become points of contention, and therefore points of interest where players, as well as NPCs will be drawn to.

• Content: These points of interests would, in addition to its resource richness, contain much more to increase its exploration value. This could be anything, ranging from different stellar objects to treasures and loot. Examples could be moons, nebulae, gas giants, different types of stars (supernova), black/white holes, and other abnormalities each with their own effects. Fauna and flora could add greatly to this system too, but would be an add-on feature.

• Out-of-ship exploration is a whole other chapter: stations, ships, planets, dungeons, caves and fauna add countless possibilities for adding unique content. Upgrades to astronaut equipment could be found and crafted with these resources, encouraging you to leave your ship’s safety and gather those few materials you need by hand.

• NPC Factions: Their primary role is to fill the universe with history and lore, making it feel alive where every NPC owned entity would have real astronauts walking around. Some of these factions need some extra diversity to make them stand out more to make it easier for a player to align to at least one of them.

• Danger: Natural hazards, hostile factions and other dangerous anomalies would need to be added to restrict the amount of freedom a player has when exploring. The extra challenge is sorely needed yet should not become a nuisance. The main requirement for this to work properly would be to have a structured galaxy where certain areas are always easily accessible with little to no dangers.​

• Quest and Reward system: Quests, either given by NPC’s or triggered automatically (finding a log book), will point the player to new and other interesting areas. Although finishing the quest would give rewards, they mostly serve to encourage the player to go beyond what they already know. Additional progression can also be given with collectibles or rare decorative items, introducing some more lore.

• Events: Generated events like battles, trading routes, raids, space creatures, mysterious faction appearances and supernovae will add more immersion and life to an artificial universe, and making sure the player encounters them without having to actively search them out. As an option, we could have end-game events to spice things up when a SP or MP world starts becoming stale.

• End-game: Several entities in the game (prominently NPC factions) will not only provide events, but also a real challenge for anyone. The farther the player goes “out”, the more dangerous it will get to the player with the void being the most dangerous area.

• Map information: The current interface that shows you what the galaxy looks like has no level of detail system, overflowing players with tons of information they don’t need.

• Transportation: How balanced the thrusters and jump drives are right now is unclear, mostly because the third option, Warp gates, are far from usable. The warp gate is supposed to be the ultimate traveling mechanic to get from one to another that has a huge setup cost in comparison as its downside.

Industrialist (Miner, Producer)

• Stick-shops need replacement to make economy work.
• Ties in with a universe redesign to make resource distribution more diverse
• Production needs more progression and be more complex without being tedious (high level producer with good use of logic), as well as a balanced form of unloaded production.

Trader

Fighter

Imperialist

Greetings Citizens, ~ Apologies for the steam post delay, here’s the most recent news post from star-made.org (The previous weeks devblog: http://www.star-made.org/news/starmade-v0-199-646-build-mode) ~ T2513: Old exploit fixed ~ T2510: OSX OpenGL crash ~ T2507: Connections and statistics not showing correctly - client issue that was always there, but became a lot more common because of the improved speed with chunk requesting. ~ T2500: Sorting in Main Menu Local Play Adv. Settings is by tooltip ~ T2498: Unable to lock symmetry plane in place with empty hotbar slot ~ T2495: false positive for “is waiting for docks” | “still needs entities to dock on it” ~ Fix for infinite stock shops Additionally a new “context help” has been added, replacing the old help keyboard list. it’s a lot less in the way and hides/shows information when needed:
You can deactivate these “Keyboard HUD Icons” in the options menu - general. Onwards to implementing the power system prototype (which has been worked on already for the past weeks). Thanks for playing StarMade, ~ The Schine Team

Greetings, citizens ~ A few months ago, we planned to release our End-Goals document but never really got around to make a public version. As announced in the previous post, this dev blog contains

End Goals Introduction

Builder

Block Availability

Block Progression

Shipyards

Expandability

What’s next?

Greetings, citizens ~ We’ve added some exciting features this week, including a fill and line tool, and new rails. There’s also a new Advanced Build Mode GUI! Everything should be cleaner and much easier to access now. However, keep in mind that the layout and content is still a work in progress, and so may change significantly between builds. Over the next few days, we’ll tweak what each group contains and adjust how the tools work in order to streamline the experience.

New dev build!

Fill Tool

Line Tool

Load/Unload Rails

Advanced Build Mode GUI

Outline System and New LoD mesh

New Chunk Request System

Moving Forward

Greetings, citizens ~

News

What are we working on right now?

Advanced Build Mode

Cargo Transfer

Hello players, The dev blog for this week features something more on the technical side. It covers a nice feature that will be very important in going forward.

Optimized Meshes

Greetings, citizens ~ Here’s another weekly dev blog!

What are we working on right now?

Power Update

Major concerns

What’s next? / Conclusion

Greetings, citizens ~ Here’s another weekly devblog.

What are we working on right now?

Launcher update

Power feedback

• Restrictive rules that contradict several goals (Simplicity, Logical):
  • 1 active reactor per entity | 1 active reactor for entire ship
  • Minimum block count for chambers
• Tech points are too abstract
• Bad terminology for power related functionality such as Tech Points, Chambers, Skill trees, ...

• Only the main ship, the one at very bottom where everything is docked is too, can control movement.
• Rail connections are weak points, if you combine 2 of the exact same entities with each other through a rail connection, and someone manages to destroy your rail. Your ship that you still control, suddenly lost half of its mass. As if the experimental feature “break off” was enabled.
• No full 2-way inheriting.
  • Shields are inherited from the parent entity
  • Thrust and mass, are inherited from the child entities
  • Rail enhancers, rails only enhance their 1st level child entities <=> entities only care about the enhancers of their parent
  • Mass is inherited 1- way, the bottom ship will be the sum of its own mass, and the chains above it.
  • On top of all this, most of these systems use power, yet power either inherits only from the parent, and/or it uses its onboard power.

Greetings Citizens, Our new power proposal has been posted on our forums: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-ship-systems-2-0.29026/ Be sure to check it out! Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbjHdbfPTDM Thanks for playing StarMade, ~ The Schine Team

Greetings citizens, We have an update on the power update as well as an exciting announcement for you.

What are we working on right now?

New developer joining the team

Greetings citizens, 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?

Future Plans

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

• 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

List of Bugs fixed

• T2349 (Private): Grouping issue
• T2139 (Private): Power and shield drain issue
• T2138 (Private): Player max build area not working properly
• T1969 (Private): Performance issues with logic
• T1963 (Private): Missile and AI targeting issue
• T1931 (Private): Shop module crash
• T1851 (Private): Transporters and grapple beam issue
• T1828 (Private): Jumpdrive/inhibitor charge issue
• T1823 (Private): Bounding box issue
• T1627 (Private): Performance issues with logic
• T1602 (Private): Linking update issue
• T1575 (Private): Undo issue
• T1570 (Private): Ion issue
• T1558 (Private): Crash when enabling shadows
• T1299 (Private): Rail logic switching issue
• T1227 (Private): Collision issue
• T1145 (Private): Derelict stations issue
• T1080 (Private): Faction protection removal issue
• T1050 (Private): Docking issue
• T1023 (Private): System claiming issue
• T941 (Private): Docking issue
• T895 (Private): Faction rank permission issue
• T840 (Private): Asteroid respawning issue
• T823 (Private): Another Ion issue
• T659 (Private): Logic issue
• T654 (Private): Warhead issue
• T643 (Private): C+V linking issue
• T512 (Private): Design issue

• T2353: Sector Import fails to load ships docked to planet plates/asteroids
• T2352: (Prebuild only) Shipyards causing disconnect and class cast exceptions
• T2347: Caps-lock mouse interaction on OSX
• T2339: /load_as_faction crashes server
• T2333: Nullpointer being spammed in server console
• T2309: /destroy_uid_docked command not working properly
• T2294: Gold, silver and bronze bar icons missing
• T2291: Autofill “ingame player name” from launcher
• T2289: Make Bobby AI activation logic controllable
• T2278: Cannot dock here
• T2273: Adjust starter equipment for the new block selection method
• T2270: Server deadlock, unknown cause
• T2267: Server crash related to physics, and meta objects
• T2252: Registry has a max password length of 128 characters but not stated anywhere
• T2249: Flip flops not working properly
• T2246: Torch cannot destroy faction module
• T2214: Navigation menu mass of docks is always 0.1 and 0.0 for stations/planet plates
• T2181: Nullpointer with processErrorDialogException
• T2150: Radar jammer and cloak stay active on exiting core for fleet ships
• T2140: Display module performance issues
• T2118: Add dimensional limits to game config
• T2101: Rail detection with rotators and set rotation broken
• T2100: Sell available and price updates at the wrong time
• T2099: Place order edit button is switched around
• T2094: Fleets losing docked entities
• T2044: /despawn command with fleet entities fails
• T2009: Derelict stations get false positive removal for “ship only blocks”
• T2004: Crash when attempting to access online play without internet connection
• T1995: Importing sector fails with ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
• T1980: Cargo spaces can be reused by multiple storages
• T1957: C+V Rail detection doesn’t send false signals
• T1776: Converted blueprints have undocked entities as response fleet
• T1678: Uplink doesn’t save for OSX
• T1664: Loading sector causes mass timeouts with colliding asteroids
• T1658: Shop price not set without ownership doesn’t allow moving blocks in between
• T1639: Nullpointer with joystick connected
• T1616: ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException with missiles or effects
• T1553: Error handling for version mismatch and missing uplink insufficient
• T1525: ffmpeg causing crash for OSX
• T1510: Nullpointer in character file
• T1466: Frame buffer capabilities not detected for OSX
• T1465: Nullpointer with projectiles, causing invisible beams
• T1422: NaN illegal comparison with shootout rail
• T1384: Nullpointer when charging shields
• T1337: Wedge blast door texture reversed
• T1318: Spawning ships with same names as formerly existing one may lack docked entities
• T1282: Creative mode doesn’t allow dropping specific block quantities
• T1257: Incomplete build mode undo/redo
• T1004: New unchanged stations turn into red hull blocks
• T990: Rolling not working properly
• T684: Shop permission resets when server restarts
• T524: Weapons hitting deeper inside your ship
• T428: Not staying attached to ship when logging out
• T355: AHP and SHP is capped
• T325: Asteroids can spawn in solid entities
• T252: Startup crash with custom Windows theme
• T25: C+V Linking memory leak

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

Release and news post cycle documentation

Power proposal progress

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: SteamsteamappscommonStarMadeStarMadelogs 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, ~ The Schine Team

Greetings Citizens, 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.

• T2139 (Private): Power and shield drain issue
• T2138 (Private): Player max build area not working properly
• T1969 (Private): Performance issues with logic
• T1931 (Private): Shop module crash
• T1828 (Private): Jumpdrive/inhibitor charge issue
• T1823 (Private): Bounding box issue
• T1627 (Private): Performance issues with logic
• T1570 (Private): Ion issue
• T1558 (Private): Crash when enabling shadows
• T1299 (Private): Rail logic switching issue
• T1145 (Private): Derelict stations issue
• T1050 (Private): Docking issue
• T1023 (Private): System claiming issue
• T941 (Private): Docking issue
• T840 (Private): Asteroid respawning issue
• T823 (Private): Ion issue
• T659 (Private): Logic issue
• T654 (Private): Warhead issue
• T643 (Private): C+V linking issue
• T512 (Private): Design issue

• T2289: Make Bobby AI activation logic controllable
• T2273: Adjust starter equipment for the new block selection method
• T2270: Server deadlock, unknown cause
• T2267: Server crash related to physics, and meta objects
• T2252: Registry has a max password length of 128 characters but not stated anywhere
• T2246: Torch cannot destroy faction module
• T2181: Nullpointer with processErrorDialogException
• T2140: Display module performance issues
• T2100: Sell available and price updates at the wrong time
• T2009: Derelict stations get false positive removal for “ship only blocks”
• T2004: Crash when attempting to access online play without internet connection
• T1995: Importing sector fails with ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
• T1980: Cargo spaces can be reused by multiple storages
• T1957: C+V Rail detection doesn’t send false signals
• T1776: Converted blueprints have undocked entities as response fleet
• T1678: Uplink doesn’t save for OSX
• T1639: Nullpointer with joystick connected
• T1616: ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException with missiles or effects
• T1525: ffmpeg causing crash for OSX
• T1510: Nullpointer in character file
• T1466: Frame buffer capabilities not detected for OSX
• T1465: Nullpointer with projectiles, causing invisible beams
• T1422: NaN illegal comparison with shootout rail
• T1384: Nullpointer when charging shields
• T1337: Wedge blast door texture reversed
• T1318: Spawning ships with same names as formerly existing one may lack docked entities
• T1257: Incomplete build mode undo/redo
• T990: Rolling not working properly
• T524: Weapons hitting deeper inside your ship
• T428: Not staying attached to ship when logging out
• T355: AHP and SHP is capped
• T325: Asteroids can spawn in solid entities
• T252: Startup crash with custom Windows theme
• T25: C+V Linking memory leak

• T1963 (Private): Missile and AI targeting issue
• T1851 (Private): Transporters and grapple beam issue
• T1602 (Private): Linking update issue
• T1575 (Private): Undo issue
• T1227 (Private): Collision issue
• T1080 (Private): Faction protection removal issue
• T895 (Private): Faction rank permission issue

• T2291: Autofill “ingame player name” from launcher
• T2278: Cannot dock here
• T2150: Radar jammer and cloak stay active on exiting core for fleet ships
• T2118: Add dimensional limits to game config
• T2101: Rail detection with rotators and set rotation broken
• T2044: /despawn command with fleet entities fails
• T1664: Loading sector causes mass timeouts with colliding asteroids
• T1553: Error handling for version mismatch and missing uplink insufficient
• T1282: Creative mode doesn’t allow dropping specific block quantities
• T1004: New unchanged stations turn into red hull blocks
• T684: Shop permission resets when server restarts

• Faction signature inheritance and protection
• Building including all advanced build mode tools
• Logic
• Rails
• Weapons and their offensive/defensive effects
• Shipyards and cargo
• Shops

Greetings Citizens, 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

Bug spring cleaning

Power update

Current changes

Greetings, citizens ~ In this release we’re making good on our earlier promises of performance improvements and updating some of the existing systems, focusing on combat. Huge swarms of missiles no longer cripple servers, nor cause disconnects or “rubber banding.” This should also help with balancing, as users can no longer disconnect their opponents with ridiculous numbers of missiles. Cannon projectile hits now require considerably less processing than before. As an example of just how large of an improvement this is: a shot penetrating through hundreds of blocks previously caused a half-second freeze, give or take. The processing from this same shot now takes 5 milliseconds -- barely even noticeable. We hope these two major optimizations make combat much more enjoyable.

Missile Performance Update

Projectile Performance Update

Power Overhaul Thread

Fixes

• T235: Overridden blueprints show wrong mass
• T2234: Galaxy map stops reading scroll wheel inputs
• T2180: Placing wrong block when swapped on the hotbar with another

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. 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. Drivers can be found here: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us OR http://www.nvidia.com/object/driver_rollback.html to rollback without download.

Combined Blocks

New Shape Selection UI

New LOD Blocks

Extended Texture Blocks Preview

Optimizations

Toggleable Light Bar

Weapon Changes

• 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.

Bugfixes

• T346: Explosive effect stops scaling after 10%
• T1024: Damage beams apply inconsistent damage against armor
• T1642: Piercing effect armor efficiency doesn’t scale
• T2154: Crash related to NPC system loss
• Some player sector locations being logged were removed or changed. There are probably more of them; please report them if you find any.

Translations

Greetings citizens, ~ 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)

Other Fixes

• 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

• DYNAMIC_RECIPE_PRICES_MODIFIER in server.cfg

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.

Texture Update

• 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.

• 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.

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.”

Asteroids

• Asteroid resource chance
• Asteroid resource size

Extra Language Entries

Bugfixes

• T2106 NPC Faction Descriptions contain typos
• T2105 Faction window "tab" area font is too large
• T2103 Faction expansion takes the wrong systems
• T2098 Fleet location broadcasted to clients on login
• T2093 No pickup text when picking up credits
• T1945 Flight mode minimap shows radar icons for radar jammed entities
• T1895 invert hotbar scrolling direction (Council)
• T1796 Close button of build mode info panel does nothing
• T1734 display cursor coordinates in build mode (Council)
• T1715 Username is erased after hitting enter/tab on username in online play
• T1567 Crash on startup - /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `CXXABI_1.3.8' not found
• T1394 Missile-Lock animation played after no longer selecting Lock on Missile
• T1355 Mouse Option "Flip through hotbars... Without Control" incorrect
• T905 Incorrect shield power consumption display values
• T68 Incorrect texture face orientation

Greetings citizens, ~ After weeks of non-stop work the first NPC Faction update is finally ready to release. By introducing a completely autonomous systems for AI controlled factions the universe will no longer be as empty and lifeless as it was before. Offering us more options to expand upon and create an engaging universe. This update adds the basic NPC factions and features with many more to come. It took a while to bring together all of these parts into one single update. And there were a lot of them, all with big potential of being disastrous if handled wrongly. We took longer for testing to make sure that everything is fine, but there is always a possibility that we overlooked something severe, and because this is such a big update that affects a big part of your universe, we urge all server admins and players to make backups of their universes. The launcher has been updated recently to make that process a lot easier.

NPC Factions

Trading

Physical Trade Fleets

Fleets and Fog of War

NPC Systems

Resources and Mining

Production

Maintenance

Diplomacy

Known Issues

What’s next

​ You've probably been sitting around twiddling your thumbs in anticipation for the next release, savouring any piece of news or updates you get about it. So here's a Dev Blog to help take away those hunger pains, at least for a little while. While we had anticipated the Faction Update to be ready to go by now, we'll talk a little bit about why things are currently taking longer than usual, and more importantly what the implications are. For those unaware, the Faction Update is one of our largest updates we've ever undertaken so far on StarMade. It introduces procedural Factions; NPC ships and stations that spawn in the galaxy and begin to expand their borders. We can already see the experiences that this update will bring to gameplay just by flying around in the dev builds. Mining fleets appear and travel around; Scavenger fleets appear after a battle to try and scavenge what they can from any ships that were destroyed. There's a lot more data and interaction between factions, with a faction news tab and faction diplomacy screens now. It's all slowly coming together.
Galaxy map showing different NPC faction territories ​This update has a lot of parts that all need to work together to not bring the whole thing down. One of the main problems is creating a huge amount of possible entities and systems without causing scalability issues. Each NPC system has its own fleets and more. All this needs to be organised and spawned correctly. Not only that, but the fleets all have to have something to do. Overall, the goal with this update was not to just give the illusion of an alive universe, as that would have been a lot easier to do by just spawning in a few alibi ships flying by the player and then de-spawning again. Our goal is to give everything that spawns persistence and/or a purpose. Looking at everything we’ve had to include, this is probably one of the biggest updates ever coming to StarMade.

• System resource management
• Contingent calculations
• Spawning mechanisms
• Fleet organisation
• NPC operations like trading, production, mining and much more
• Diplomacy and diplomatic consequences of decisions you make
• Formating all the config files and directory structures for easy modding and expanding
• Implementing everything above to best work in a networked environment without using huge chunks of bandwidth.

Greetings, Citizens ~ Terra here. There’s a new Launcher update live (v2.1.1!) as it’s fairly notable, I’d like to take a few minutes to discuss its features. I’ll go into a bit more detail than what’s listed in the…

Changelog

Backup Dialog

Version Tracking

Java Settings

Memory Validation

Other Changes

Moving Forward

• Consolidating the various options dialogues into a single dialogue listing different sections, thereby giving much-needed additional screen estate for more controls (e.g. backup and logging settings). This will also make the launcher cleaner and more intuitive by creating a central location for these settings and useful information (the installed game build, the launcher version, the user’s account name, etc.). As a secondary benefit, this will fix (or simply avoid) a few of the long-standing bugs, such as stacking dialogues.
• Offline support, as the launcher currently requires a connection to the Registry to function. The recent DNS attacks highlighted why this feature is so important. Coupled with this feature will be status indicators for the Registry and star-made.org.
• Official support for concurrent game installs. While useful primarily for development testing, the community has shown interest in this as well.
• Allowing the launcher to resize, and possibly breathing new life and style into its rather cramped (if pretty) design. I won’t list specifics as I’d hate to ruin the surprise.
• And at last: Translations. As many languages’ translations will require more space than their English counterparts, this feature must come after the size and design changes.

Greetings citizens, ~ At this stage, our current version is ready to be tested on the Official test server. It contains all core features where we can expand on with the upcoming releases. This is not the NPC update release, this is a development build available to the public, we're currently in a testing phase and need as many people to test it as possible. Please check out the development build. How to report bugs: http://phab.starma.de/w/create_bug_task/ The test server is running the build for a public test on play.star-made.org:4848. These builds are only available on the Dev branch; it’s highly recommended that you use a different installation location or make a backup of your entire StarMade folder before overwriting it with a dev build. Keep in mind that follow-up dev builds will most likely require you to also start a new world. To get a fresh install of the dev build, select a different install folder in the launcher and switch to the dev branch.
Click on the gear (1), and change the build type (2) from “Release” to “Dev”, it is also recommended to use a separate installation directory (3). (Append a “DEV” to the installation path, to keep your original installation intact.) The dev build has mechanics that will be disabled in the next public release, but are a necessity for experimenting with the NPC factions:

• Debug menu, press F1 + B
• Extra logging in your logstarmade.log files
• Disabled Fog of War
• Shows all fleets
• Shows info in the galaxy map if you go into a NPC faction controlled system
• Will send extra information to clients so it might be a bit more bandwidth intensive and prone to lag in multiplayer as long as in debug mode

NPC Factions

Spawning

Initial Growth

Faction Demand

Faction Inventory

Trade Prices

Contingent

Fleets

System Status

Diplomacy

• Status effects: these effects add or remove a constant amount of points based on status. This means that if you are in war with a faction, they will apply -X points to your score, though the points will go back to its original point value as soon as that status no longer persists. This means, that status effects don’t actually permanently change points. There are several advanced status effects available including having close territory to them, being at war with their allies, or positive ones for being at war with their enemies.
• Action effects: these effects create modifiers that add or remove points permanently over time. In war for example, in addition of the status effect, you’ll also get a negative action modifier for starting the war. This modifier will slowly remove points over time as long as you are in conflict. This means that you will end up with less points permanently after the war. There will also be negative modifiers for any aggression towards the faction and their allies. So no matter how much they liked you in the past, if you start to kill their stuff, they will get mad at you depending on how much of that you do. Action modifiers, when no longer reset by repeating the action or by a persistent status will slowly fade out till it runs out of penalty points or enough time has been spent since then.

NPC Faction Turn

Mining

Production

Resupply

Consume

Trade

Expand

Greetings Citizens, ~ Due to the sheer scale of this update, the impact it has and the amount of parts it has to it, we're unfortunately not able to release the NPC update this week. However, we have created a video for you to watch, outlining how the NPC factions will work. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXmMArgf7AQ As mentioned in the video, sometime after the NPC faction update, AI will be revamped and upgraded on all fronts. We've been waiting for the NPC faction update to address an AI overhaul so that all parts can come together. We will also address and overhaul weapon/ship-structure/resource balances in subsequent update cycles. Thanks for playing StarMade, - The Schine Team

​ Couple of days late! We're back with another Dev Blog to give you an update on how we're tracking. There's been some great releases thus far, and I for one can say I've very much been enjoying all the new Display Module updates. However as much as logic updates are great, one of the most exciting additions recently is Fog of War. Not necessarily because of that feature alone, but because of what that feature is leading us into. Now let's say this up front, the main reason for this Dev Blog is to inform you that our release cycle is changing for a bit. Up until now it has been a steady two week release cycle, and has worked great overall. Moving into larger development projects for the game though has seen these two week turnarounds become more difficult, and resulted in slower progress on these larger projects. To rectify this we are now going to be operating with a four week release cycle, at least for the time being. With more similar scale projects ahead in the development timeline you will find us choosing to swap to four week release cycles a bit more frequently. Let’s talk about the development project that has spurred on this change. NPC Faction Generation At the moment StarMade’s default faction stations would randomly spawn on the start of a new universe and populate the galaxies. Additionally you would occasionally encounter pirate ships and a battle would wage. This has been the most basic NPC faction generation, but we have much larger plans for NPC Factions, so in revisiting the system everything has been built from the ground up.
There’s a number of aspects to NPC faction generation. Thinking about the playtime of games gives a rough look at how complex their NPCs need to be. A simple game like Counter-Strike, in terms of round time, means that any NPC bots just need a rudimentary understanding of how to play, rather than complex strategic calculations. Progressing to most real-time strategy (RTS) games and the logic and calculations and strategies that NPCs employ during gameplay is far more complex, as those games are often a lot more drawn out. Now think about StarMade and consider a server that you could return to play on over days, weeks, months. All that time there’s additional NPC factions that will exist in the universe, doing their thing with their goals that they wish to work towards. It’s just scratching the surface to the breadth we wish to give NPC factions, resulting in a constantly evolving landscape of gameplay as time progresses. This is especially significant for singleplayer gameplay, and something that StarMade has been lacking thus far. This is just the starting phase of all we wish to do with engaging content that evolves over time through gameplay. Setting a solid foundation for NPC faction generation is paramount to the stability of everything else planned. Hence the move to extend the release cycle periods. If we picture NPC factions like a jigsaw puzzle, there's a lot of elements coming together…

• Newly designed ships and stations for our Default factions (Trading Guild, Scavengers, Outcasts)
• Numerous ship fleets from our fleet competition that will be for procedurally generated factions
• Fog of War to encourage exploration, but also to hide what the other factions are doing, making it more engaging in the process depending on whether they're friend or foe.
• Many new features for factions or that factions will be engaging with (e.g. the Trade Network)
• A robust faction generation system to handle generation, exploration, expansion, gathering resources, diplomacy, etc.

Greetings, Citizens ~ In the process of working on NPC Factions, we’ve been doing what we can to release those pieces of it that work on their own. One such piece is the Fog of War.

Fog of War

Faction Sharing

Display Block Upgrade

• '[PASSWORD]text': The text in this block will not show up.
• '[ADD]text': The text after [ADD] is added to the existing text of the connected block ([ADD] must be in the very front)
• '[DEL]number': Removes an amount of characters from the conneted block ([DEL] must be in the very front)
• '[REPLACEFIRST]regexp[WITH]replacement': use java conform regular expressions to replace specific text ([REPLACEFIRST] must be in the very front)
• '[REPLACEALL]regexp[WITH]replacement': use java conform regular expressions to replace specific text ([REPLACEALL] must be in the very front)

Further Development

Greetings citizens, ~ This is another update in the midst of developing the NPC update. Although we said updates are going to be smaller during this time, this one actually has quite the substance to it for logic users.

New Logic Blocks

Logic Sensor Block (Council suggestion T1756)

• Power and Power Aux: The output is based on the power/capacity percentage.
• Shields: The output is based on the percentage of shields compared to its capacity.
• Jump Drive: The output is based on the charge percentage.
• Jam/Cloak: The output is 100% when it’s on and 0% when it’s off.
• Doors: The output is 100% when closed and 0% when open.
• Cargo: The output is based on that unit’s volume/capacity percentage.

Radial Menu

New Graphical Effects

Thrusters and Cannons

Display Block Logic

Rail Connection Logic

Additional Features

Block Config change

• Power auxiliaries were changed from 100 SHP to 25 SHP. This should make it less punishing to lose them. We’ve planned other changes, but they’ve been delayed for the time being due to insufficient feedback.
• We’ve changed the grouping of logic multi-slots to make room for the new randomizer and sensor block.

Bugfixes

• T1869: Client crash in specific sector (nullpointer)
• T1918: Power aux explosions aren’t random
• Ghost linking by switching rails with logic is fixed.

Greetings citizens, We are currently mainly working on the NPC Faction update, but we will release updates at the normal schedule. This update has some nice new gameplay features, as well as an overhaul of our lighting engine and a small texture update.

Auxiliary Power

Supply/Drain Beams

• Power Supply
• Power Drain
• Shield Supply
• Shield Drain

in their blockBehaviorConfig to 1

Lighting Shader Overhaul

We completely reworked the lighting shader engine. It now looks much cleaner than before, allowing better specular control and removing previous oversaturation issues. More features will be coming to improve lighting indoors. If you have previously altered your Gamma or Lighting Quality settings to manipulate the brightness you may want to re-check your settings to find a desireable light level in this update.
Detailing on hulls such as wear and scratches are now light dependant and will shimmer in the sun.
Blocks that are light in colour will no longer wash out or bloom when lit.

Texture Changes

Hulls and Light blocks have been adjusted to work accurately with the new lighting system. All others blocks have been given a basic working specular value temporarily while we prepare for new texture projects. Normal maps have been re-enabled on hulls and measures added to help prevent Moiré effects. We’ve squashed lots of rotation bugs on hulls meaning hazard stripes and hull blocks with normal maps will no longer sit at odd angles to each other when rotated. They should now smoothly tessellate across varying shapes and angles and lighting will flow accurately along their maps.
This example of old, broken tiling is a thing of the past!
Fixed tiling! Hazard hulls will now tessalate correctly over multiple angles and shapes. An all new texture pack is in progress, which will take advantage of the new lighting changes to allow better material definition through specular mapping. This new pack is a complete overhaul of our default set, you can check out a few work in progress shots and discuss the upcoming changes here in this thread. We hope to have this in your hands within the next few release cycles.
Work in progress shot for the upcoming texture set.

Small Shipyard Features and Fixes

Several shipyard bugs have finally been fixed. If you find more, make sure to report them. Shipyards will be a key component later on so it’s important to make them reliable. There is still more to do in terms of usability but some small new features have already been added:

• Designs can now be created directly from the catalog list.
• A permission block next to the Shipyard now also acts like a permission block next to the shipyard anchor, making it possible for players to create ships on a shipyard that doesn’t belong to their faction. The constructed ships will have the faction of the player who issued the order.
• Shipyards can be linked to factories (pull on construction will pull from factories)

Rail Fixes

In tandem with the Shipyard fixes, some important fixes to rails have also been made:

• Rail movement is now delayed until all necessary elements have been loaded. That means, docked entities will no longer just start moving if they are on a rail that has 0 speed. They will also not collide into each other on loading making them unusable until redocked.
• Rail collision behavior has been improved by delaying a resetting entity by a random time, this decreases the potential of a deadlock at intersections considerably. You could also use this as a random signal generator (until a block for that is introduced).

Config

The SHP of Shield capacitors and rechargers was reduced from 100 to 25. This should make them a more viable choice to use as a buffer block between your armor and your power. These blocks lost most of their usefulness when you start taking block damage so there’s no reason to have their SHP this high. The new power auxiliary block has the same values as power reactors/capacitors except for its HP and its recipe:

• Block HP is 50 (instead of 25)
• Crafting recipe is: 1x power reactor + 1x power capacitor

Looking for new forum admin(s)

The StarMade Forums (StarMade Dock) are currently looking for one to two new community administrators. Admins are volunteers who manage the moderation team, site policy and overall ensure the community is running well. More details can be found here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/looking-for-new-administrator-s-for-smd.26679

Other Bugfixes

• Your player character getting reset on exiting the game might be fixed now. This one is hard to trace.
• Fixed an exploit involving shipyards
• T1360 Shipyard adds suffix and prefix to chosen name

Thanks for playing StarMade, ~ The Schine Team

Hello Citizens, ~ A small hotfix has been uploaded:

• Fixed servers with lots of blueprints freezing when a player saves a blueprint (Uncontrolled multithreading caused too much memory being consumed)
• Fixed cores being destructible on client side (didn't affect servers, so it had no direct gameplay implication)
• Fixed orientation resetting for damaged blocks on client side (also didn't affect servers, so it fixed itself on reload)
• Changed entity saving method to possibly fix issues of player states resetting on some systems. Also increased log output, in case it still happens.

Greetings, Citizens ~ Terra here. After many months of working on the new launcher, I’m excited to finally announce its release! The new launcher is a pleasant departure from our previous, rather utilitarian version. It’s beautiful, very user-friendly, and should help resolve many issues. (Though, should you prefer using the legacy launcher for any reason, you may still do so.) [img=http://i.imgur.com/pW892pg.png] Please note that we are only releasing the launcher on Steam at present. A standalone version will follow soon. If you want to use the new launcher outside of Steam now, head over to our downloads page and hit the “DOWNLOAD NEW LAUNCHER” button http://www.star-made.org/download . Here are a few of the major points:

Bundled Java

Steam Linking

Memory Settings

Moving Forward

Greeting citizens, ~ Since mainly we are working on the NPC factions feature at the moment, which is a big update with a lot of planning, design, and architecture, the updates during this period will contain smaller features, fixes, and optimizations. However, this doesn’t mean that the updates won’t have any impact. The latest optimizations make ship battles, including capital ship fights a lot more fluent.

Faster Chunk Loading

Bandwidth Optimization

Lag Correction

Physics Optimization

Cannon/Beam Hit Optimization

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a layout issue for the Pixel texture pack.
• Turret power sharing (for AI) now looks at every chain before it stops firing. The threshold is still 35% of max power capacity (but per chain now).
• Fixed an issue where destroyed blocks would re-appear (client side only) in some cases.

Please note: This is not a release announcement, this is a call for final public testing for our new launcher. Greetings, The latest beta launcher is now available for Steam users, and it's a rather large update. It's also a release candidate, so if all goes well, we will release the launcher by the end of the week. Help us make sure it's ready! To launch the game with the beta launcher, simply click "PLAY" in the Steam application and select "Play with Beta Launcher (experimental)" in the popup box. [img=http://i.imgur.com/Q91beis.png] Alternatively, you can download it directly:

• Win32: https://s3.amazonaws.com/sm-launcher-public-beta/build-163/starmade-launcher-win32-ia32.zip
• Win64: https://s3.amazonaws.com/sm-launcher-public-beta/build-163/starmade-launcher-win32-x64.zip
• Linux32: https://s3.amazonaws.com/sm-launcher-public-beta/build-163/starmade-launcher-linux-ia32.zip
• Linux64: https://s3.amazonaws.com/sm-launcher-public-beta/build-163/starmade-launcher-linux-x64.zip
• OSX: See below.

• Feature: Actual logging! The launcher writes the log to launcher.log within its directory. I will continually add to the log and tweak its entries as the launcher progresses.
• Behavior change: Reduced the amount of console output, notably during game updates. This change also considerably reduces Electron's needless spam.
• Behavior change: --debugging and --verbose now change the log-level, thereby showing additional log entries. Please use --verbose when sending in launcher bug reports.
• Feature: --development now opens chrome dev tools for all windows.
• Feature: --cache-dir allows you to specify a custom launcher cache path. Note that this does not persist between instances, so you must specify it each time.
• Feature: added --capture-game-log, which does what it says. The launcher will capture and log all game output; invaluable for troubleshooting. Implies --attach, useless with --detach
• Feature: Rewrote --help, including version/build info, and grouping available options. I've also moved this code to the top of the main process, bypassing the Electron output garbage and speeding up execution considerably.
• Bugfix: Capturing game output works correctly again.
• Bugfix: Memory slider and memory defaults now cap to physical ram.
• Bugfix: Memory slider can now always snap to the lower/upper bounds.
• Bugfix: The first news entry's title in the news feed is no longer cut off if it is too long.
• Bugfix: Updated cache location. The launcher now stores its cache within its own directory. This update also fixes the bug where the launcher would create several directories in incorrect locations.
• Behavior change: The launcher and game are now self-contained by default: both the cache and game folders default to within the launcher folder. (applies to: win32, posix)
• Feature: Added low memory warnings to the memory settings window
• Feature: Added validation for invalid memory settings.
• Feature: Added path sanitizing (win32, posix) to the build type dialog's install path. This prevents using paths with invalid characters (causing undefined behavior) and using a blank path (which previously would install the game to your drive's root -- messy.)
• Feature: Added warning dialog when detecting the _JAVA_OPTIONS environment variable that details what it is, why it's harmful, and allows the user to alter its value if desired. This should solve some of the rare, difficult-to-troubleshoot support tickets.
• Feature: Launcher now presents --steam users with the Steam Link page post-auth until they have either linked or permanently ignored it.
• Feature: The autoupdate process now buffers the update package, and gracefully handles any errors it encounters. It only applies the update if everything succeeds. Previously, any interruption during the lengthy download would irreparably corrupt the launcher, making it susceptible to any number of issues from connection timeouts to power failures to impatience. This change narrows that corruptible window from several minutes down to less than a second. (Aside: an i/o error detected during this tiny window is the launcher's only use of the [amusingly accurate] FATAL log entry type.) In addition, the other launcher windows (auth, main) will no longer open during the autoupdate process.
• Many, many internal changes and improvements.

Hello citizens ~ We just uploaded a small update that will increase lighting calculation speed by ~30%. That's the time of a recalculation when you place a block or turn light on/off. The chunk32 update introduced a bit of delay on it since it is doing 8 times the work now. There are more optimizations planned in that regard very soon. Also, a lighting bug has been fixed. It caused the lighting switch to distance lighting to be a hard edge, so chunks appeared to be suddenly darker when coming closer. Thanks for playing StarMade, ~ The Schine team

Greetings citizens, This is just a small update to fix the resources in asteroids. There should be more than eight times as many raw resources in asteroids, and the veins should be spread more evenly. This fix will only apply to unchanged asteroids. Additionally, there is a small fix to the light bars which blocked players from walking through its block sized hitbox. Also, there is a small fix to wireless logic when the recipient isn't loaded in yet. Thanks for playing StarMade, ~ The Schine Team

Greetings citizens, This update should bring more stability to the game, and multiplayer servers in particular.

Optimizations

Physics

Blueprints

Memory

Model Export

Bug Fixes

• T1807 Dropped meta items stack when picked up
• T1791 Creative mode can’t be turned off in singleplayer
• T1785 Shipyard fail to load designs
• T1782 Can no longer dock to a shipyard with core beam
• T1698 Log files have an unexpected file extension
• T1692 Catalog manager deletes wrong blueprints when not sorted as numbered list
• T1689 Settings reset when starting a dedicated server
• T1641 Collision detection in docked entity pilot mode has severe performance issues
• T1544 Shoot out rail undocks too soon after direction change
• T1407 /destroy_entity and overheat despawning makes some entities non physical
• T1198 unfactioned ships will get stuck on pickup rails when re-docked without a pilot inside
• T1148 Tooltip shows incorrect names for swapping meta item places
• T574 Improper orientation of blocks when using undo in advanced build mode
• Several typo fixes

Greetings, Citizens ~ As mentioned in our previous Dev Blog, this is an optimization update where we are improving the chunk system, among other changes. We expect performance gains of up to 50%, in the best cases even close to doubling frame rates on some structures.

Chunk32

• Note: Converted blueprints are not backwards-compatible; however, the game retains backups of the chunk16 blueprints, so downgrading is not an issue.

• Note for servers: If you have already made backups yourself, you can turn off the automatic backup by adding the following lines in the server.cfg, if not already present: BACKUP_WORLD_ON_MIGRATION = false BACKUP_BLUEPRINTS_ON_MIGRATION = false We’ve also renamed ASTEROID_SIZE to ASTEROID_SIZE_MAX. We’ve lowered its default value from 4 to 1 because of the new larger chunk sizes. (Addendum: as it’s a radius, it doesn’t include the center chunk. We will switch to a by block radius in upcoming versions)

New translation

Gamma

Bug Fixes

• LoD models act like rails
• Cargo space/area trigger display issue
• Teal standard armor config fix

What comes next

​ Surprise! Dev blog time! Last time we were talking about asking for your input on what you wanted as part of our in-game video tutorials. Well we've taken those on board and have released the first set of in-game video tutorials to cover the basics of the game. We'll continue to add to them as time goes on and to assist in teaching new major features planned for the game. This dev blog however is more focused on what's currently being worked on, as it changes a lot of core code for the game and has some ramifications that you as the StarMade community should be aware of.

The Chunk Update

Greetings, Citizens ~ This is a small update that adds a new tutorial series to the game meant especially for new players. These tutorials should provide players with enough information to understand the basics of the game and begin building. We will update the tutorials and release additional videos as the game progresses. Furthermore, we’ve implemented some fixes and optimizations: ~ Inventories pulling large amounts of items previously caused immense server lag, visible even in single player. This release almost completely eliminates the lag, therefore squishing yet another cause of the dreaded server lag popups. This fix not only improves the speed of pulling, but of all inventory operations. ~ The visual glitch of placing LoD shapes (such as console and light bar) onto transparent blocks has been fixed ~ Significantly improved the rendering speed of structures comprised of many transparent blocks (e.g. ice asteroids and certain ship/station designs). A bug in the drawing engine caused this by drawing concealed faces (such as the hidden face between adjacent ice and rock) despite the player being unable to see them. This lowered frame rates while viewing the structures due to the large number of unnecessary polygons being drawn.

~ T1670: Fixed importing sectors

• Fixed Trading guild share is 5%, not 20%
• Trading guild share per system is 1%, not 2%

Greetings, Citizens ~ This update marks an important step in the overall progress. The trading system will be used throughout the universe -- not only by players, but in the future by NPC Factions as well. This will create a dynamic economy throughout the universe, and should make gameplay much more engaging.

Trading System

Trade nodes

Player Shop Capacity and added functions

Setting Prices

Placing Orders

Active Trades

Galaxy Map

Trade Config

• Cargo Hold of trade ship: 1000 volume
• Cost per trade ship: 1000 cr
• Cost per system travelled: 300 cr
• Travel time: 1 sector every 3 seconds
• Trading guild flat share: 20%
• Trading guild share per system travelled: 2%

New LoD Blocks (and graphic changes)

Asteroid Tweaks

• Generation is now 2-3 times faster.
• Configurable asteroid sizes within server settings
• Some FPS improvements for ice asteroids, more to come soon.

Fleet Contest Results

Bug Fixes

What comes next

Greetings, citizens ~ Prior to releasing the launcher, we want to do a public beta to help ensure it will work correctly on all machines. The official testers have been invaluable in finding bugs with it -- and some minor ones remain -- but the comparatively small hardware/software sample size makes it impossible to be confident enough for a full release. That said, we would be most appreciative of any of you who would download and experiment with the launcher. If you encounter any issues, please post them on our forum here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/launcher-public-beta.25718/ or below (os, java, ram, launcher settings, steps to reproduce, screenies, etc). The more testing we have, the better the result! Here are the links for the most recent build (#146):

• OSX (32bit and 64bit)
• Linux (32bit)
• Linux (64bit)
• Windows (32bit)
• Windows (64bit)

• Win32 with Java64 installed may not start the game (fixed but not yet verified)
• Settings windows stack and do not preclude interacting with the launcher window behind them.
• Launcher does not distinguish between not having the game downloaded and a broken install.
• Archive branch is visible despite being empty
• Multiple identical version numbers (hotfixes) in the list
• Launcher window is resizable after changing users. (unverified bug)
• Launcher crashes/misbehaves if it cannot access the Registry
• Finding the settings windows can be annoying.
• Interrupting the autoupdate process can corrupt files.

Hello, Hola, cześć, Здравствуйте, Bonjour, こんにちは, 你好, Hallo players, This one is quite a big one. A lot of things in the pipeline have finished, while others are still being worked on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXT8HYAlk-8 HOTFIX #1: ~ fixed crash with shadows ~ fixed chinese language not working ~ updated language file to latest version ~ fixed Structure HP being negative due to Integer overflow (only happened when SHP amount was achieved with mostly one block type) HOTFIX #2: ~ further optimized Asteroids to generate even faster ~ fix for crash using SIMD if wrong processor information was provided by OS

New Asteroids

Custom Shapes

New Languages

Reworked GUI Graphics

Bugfixes

Development Timeline

Hello, There have been some fixes yesterday, and also just now:

• Fixed issue where "Play in Background" isn't shown on the automatically played intro video
• Fixed issue where F8 didn't open the Tutorial Selection Screen
• Fixed backside of angled shapes being drawn, even if adjacent to an opaque face
• Fixed wedges side triangles being drawn both in transparency and opaque (rest of the angled shapes will follow soon)
• Fixed crash on mac when playing any video
This is just a build change, and doesn't increase version, so servers don't need to update. Thanks for playing StarMade, - The Schine Team

Hello players, In our quest to make the game a lot more accessible, another important step has been done: Tutorial Videos.

Tutorial Videos

New Lighting System

Main Menu Additions

• You can rename local worlds with the right click context menu.
• Advanced settings for local worlds now has a Save and Discard changes button. Previously it only saved when starting a world.
• Ability to use the default astronaut skin again, an X appears next to the Skin select button that deselects your custom one.

Bug Fixes

• Talking to spiders causes nullPointer
• Build helper is locked to ship core
• Setting sell price to 0 of a block can cause crash

We're finally back with another Dev Blog! What an exciting few months we've had. Let's catch up on what's happened, what's coming in the future, and gather your input on a couple of things. We'll start things off by turning back the clocks and looking at what has happened since our last Dev Blog in February. Fleets & Carriers March saw the release of Fleets and Carriers, introducing a number of cool new features like being able to give basic commands to a fleet, recall them to the flagship, as well as the additional of a couple of new rail blocks enabling players to design their own docking mechanisms. If you want to catch up on what came in that update then click here. Massive Bug Fix Period April gave us some rounds of bug fixing as we addressed many lingering issues and bugs that plagued the game. Many game enhancements were addressed as well, for example, the ability for the build helper to remember the previous settings. There have been so many things addressed, for the lists check here (Round 1, Round 2, Round 3). Fleet Build Contest Near the end of April, we announced a Fleet Build contest to the community and the response has been fantastic, not just in that we've received 71 fleet submissions to date, but even the quality of them is amazing. There's still time to submit as the contest will close June 21st, 1:00AM UTC so click here to view the announcement post to find out all the details. New Council Term 3 May wrapped up our 2nd council term as elections were held for the 3rd Council term. Results for Term 3 were announced a day ago. We see the return of some familiar faces, as well as a new face on the council. We also reduced the number of councilors this term, to see if less works more efficiently; time will tell. Main Menu
The latest major feature to the game is the introduction of the main menu, something that we've needed for quite a while and so it's exciting to have it finally in. While simple on the surface, the main menu introduces some things to the game that we haven't had previously, like the ability to edit a lot of the settings and options right here in the game. Other features include the capacity to change servers or from an online to a local universe without closing the game. Find out all about this update here. What's coming up That brings us to where we are now. Behind the scenes an incredible amount of planning has happened, mapping out the rest of the game through to Beta, which is really exciting. Looking at the more immediate development plans, we will be bringing more objects into the game over time as we position ourselves to best do that. We're also going to be starting on introducing more trading aspects to the game, which will include starting some of the new Trading Guild ships. Beyond that, updates will include setting up some foundations, ready for new features to be added down the track, as well as some improvements to existing parts of the game. One of those foundations is the introduction of videos in-game, allowing us to create stylized contextual tutorial videos to assist with the learning curve of the game. This is a significant addition as it introduces the ability for us to ensure that we provide adequate tutorials for new features as they're added in with each major feature release. Your input This is where you come in. Now that we have the ability to provide specialized contextual tutorials for in-game content/features/mechanics we want your suggestions on what we should make tutorials for and how. For example, we could do videos on every single weapons system, or we could do one video on "weapons systems" as a whole. It's all dependent on your experience with the learning curve of the game, so let us know by replying to this news post with your suggestions on video tutorials you would have either found useful when starting out, or would find useful now. This will give us an excellent basis to be able to address the issues surrounding the learning curve of the game, and position us to continue easily adding tutorials and support in-game in a similar method when we add new features. That's it for another Dev Blog. We're excited for all that's around the corner and we hope you are too. - The Schine Team​

Hello players, Here is a small hotfix for a lot of issues and some minor additions:

Hello players, A new update has just been released, and it’s a special one. We can finally say goodbye to the ugly startup settings dialogue and welcome our new Main Menu.

Main Menu

New Gear Model

New block

Bug fixes

What’s coming next?

Vote here! Greetings Citizens, Voting for the third term of the Council of Intergalactic Representatives is now open! Voting will close on the 27th of May, at 1:30 AM UTC. We plan to release results on the 29th of May after we have contacted the election winners and signed all necessary agreements. Our voting process uses STV (Single Transferable Vote). Voters number as many candidates as they like in order of preference, with 1 being the most preferred candidate. If the voter's most preferred candidate is eliminated during the election, their vote will then transfer to their second preference, then third, and so on. CGP Grey has a great video explaining how this system works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI ​ Changes to the Council

• We have decided to change the number of councillors from 7 to 5. After evaluating our past two councils, we believe that seven is too many. We will be evaluating five councillors over the next term and will keep an eye out for any decrease in productivity.
• Council voting will require the user to have purchased the game; this is to make it harder for fraudulent voting to occur. However, there are no restrictions on applying to the Council. The upcoming elections will be a test run for this new requirement.
• Backwards tie-breaking will be used instead of the previous forwards tie-breaking method implemented.

• Added randomized application order based on the voter's user ID
• Added search bar, applicants fade out if they do not meet search parameters.
• Improved timeout handling, logins will timeout after ~30 minutes. Once you've submitted your vote, you may edit it at any time before voting closes. Use this as a save function to ensure your results are saved if you timeout.

Apply here! Info on the Council is at the bottom of this post. Greetings Citizens, Applications for the third term of the Council of Intergalactic Representatives are now open! Applications will close on the 15th of May, at 1:30 AM UTC. The voting site is planned to be opened on the 16th of May, at 1:30 AM UTC and new councillors should be announced on the 29th of May. For the past few months, we've been discussing some changes to the election and voting process. We've also been considering some changes to council rules and a number of other things. Recently, a popular discussion/poll about restricting voting to only purchased users has arisen. We have decided as a team to implement some of these proposals for Term 3; changes have been listed below. Changes to the Council

• We have decided to change the number of councillors from 7 to 5. After evaluating our past two councils, we believe that seven is too many. We will be evaluating five councillors over the next term and keep an eye out for any decrease in productivity.
• Council voting will require the user to have purchased the game; this is to make it harder for fraudulent voting to occur. However, there are no restrictions on applying to the Council. The upcoming elections will be a test run for this new requirement.
• Backwards tie-breaking will be used instead of the previous forwards tie-breaking method.

• Anyone can apply! You don't need to be registered on StarMade Dock to apply. However, we recommend doing so. As we link forum accounts to the applications and it's common for applicants to open a thread for questions in the council forum.
• Schine has the right to accept or deny any application put forward.
• All council discussion (including promotions), should take place in the Council section.
• Comments on applications are disabled; applications will be locked.
• All warning points, inactive or active will be posted on an applicant's application.
• Everyone has the same application format. However, that does not mean you can't incorporate content/responses that are not in the questions.
• Answer honestly, lying will probably result in disqualification and possible restrictions.
• Take the application seriously! We (Schine) will reject any application that does not meet the standards we expect from a Councillor.
• Read the Council Terms and Conditions

Greetings citizens! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH82JO_Ubbg We are pleased to announce the second official StarMade build contest! In the coming months we will be focusing on fleshing out the universe, factions, NPCs and more. When that time comes we will need plenty of assets to help populate your universe with other alien races and factions that you can encounter and interact with. This is where you come in! We are asking you to create a set of small ships that we can use for the final release of the game. These assets will be piloted by the generated factions of the game. We have an infinite universe, and we simply cannot build it all ourselves. This is a great opportunity for you to contribute something to the universe of StarMade that everyone can experience. There are rules of course as well as some guidelines, which will be outlined below. Rules

• A single submission should consist of a few ships. These ships should visually match each other in style. We ask for a minimum of 2 ships and a maximum of 5 ships per submission. Quality over quantity.
• Individual ships should be no more than 140 meters in any direction. As part of the contest, community-voted winners will get the opportunity to expand on their submissions with larger ships.
• The ships of a single submission should have a consistent style evident across all of them. Vastly different ships with no clear style will not be accepted.
• Create interiors for your vessels. Eventually, we will have NPC’s in the game and so this is practically mandatory. Drones are exempt from this rule.
• We will not accept builds that represent vessels from other works of fiction. Please create something original.
• Your submission needs to be uploaded to the community content section on the official SMD forums. Please dock all of your ships to a single object, a rack of sorts, so that all your entered ships are saved as one ship blueprint, making it easier for us during the selection process.
• It is best that you upload the file as a sment file.
• You must name the file using the following format: “Username’s_Fleet_Submission_1”.
• You may upload and enter more than one submission for entry, hence the 1 at the end of the naming format shown above.
• Lastly, we ask that you post a direct link to the community content download page in a comment in this thread. We will not actively search for the submissions if they are not posted in that thread on the StarMade Forums.
• This contest will end June 20th, 1:00 AM UTC time. Part way through the contest we will evaluate whether we need to extend the deadline for submissions, depending on what the community response is.

Hello players, This is the third round of fixing old and new issues in the game. We hope to raise the overall enjoyment of playing the game with the removal of some annoying bugs before moving on to new significant features. We’ll do one more week of bug fixing and then we get back to our regular schedule.

Small GUI Enhancements

• Build helper now remember the previous settings
• Inventory “search for name” filters now have quick clear option you can click on
• Replace filter can now be picked from what block the player is looking at, button is located in the advanced build mode panel
• If you replace a block type with another block type, it uses the orientation set in the build mode panel instead of the default orientation.
• As mentioned in the bug fix list, dates on blueprints and faction members are implemented now. Blueprint description also works now

Bugfixes

Greetings, Citizens ~ Unfortunately, our lead developer schema was hit by the flu three weeks ago and has only been able to work for the past week. Because of the lost work hours, this will be another bug fixing round! Schema is feeling well once again, so we can all get back on track. Something you have probably noticed is that StarMade now uses semantic versioning; while this doesn't affect gameplay, it’s an industry standard, and will allow us to more quickly (and accurately) identify revision/hotfix versions. Other notable improvements in this release:

• We have added a new model for the Marker Beam.
• Shield hits now scale with weapon power. (For example, your pistol will no longer light up the entire ship when fired inside.)
• We have made some small changes to the lighting shader which improves graphics at longer distances.
• The atmosphere of planets now looks better when viewed from different a sector.
• Mirror Cubes is now enabled by default.
• The yellow/red build box now has a new appearance and scales with box dimensions.
• Shipyard computers now have an [Edit Design] button to access ship cores without having to manually get in.

Hello players, It has been an eventful two weeks with our web servers going into chaos, but we are almost entirely operational once again. We also moved some things to more robust systems to hopefully never encounter blackouts of this size again. We apologize for any trouble and frustration caused by the downtime.

Fleet Mining

Other Changes

• Newly generated Void Systems are mostly empty now.
• Minimum Rail movement and rotation speed is now 5 times higher.
• With fixing simulation through the introduction of fleets, simulation spawn (pirates/traders) frequency has been increased. This may need to be increased again in the future.
• AI aggro range is now a lot higher.

Bug Fixes

Greetings, citizens! We apologize that things have taken a bit longer this release cycle. These features are quite large in scale. Also, there will still be a lot of things added and improved in coming updates, but with some core features already complete, we didn’t want to hold them back any longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3maUaFxSm4

Fleets

• Idle: This is the default state. Ships in this fleet will neither move on their own nor attack. In the event of a server restart, fleets will automatically revert to this order. (In the future, the last fleet order will be saved.)
• Move: The Move command sends the fleet to a sector, whether or not that sector is loaded. Currently, the fleet’s movement speed while in an unloaded state is fixed, and the fleet is also unable to use jump drives as of yet. These will be added in the future.
• Attack: A fleet will go to a particular sector and attack. Currently, attacks will only commence on loaded sectors; if a sector is unloaded, the fleet will wait on the sector’s edge until it is loaded.
• Defend: Similar to Attack, the fleet will go to a sector and attack any (loaded) enemies. However, the fleet will not pursue any enemies beyond 2 sectors of the target sector.
• Sentry: The fleet will attack any enemy in proximity.
• Formation Idle: the fleet will assemble into a formation, but will not attack anything. The flagship can be manually controlled.
• Formation sentry: The fleet will assemble into formation. Additionally, ships will break off and attack any enemy in proximity.
• Carrier Callback: This order is explained further below.

Carriers

New Blocks

• Pickup Rail: You can use it to lead your ship inside your carrier safely. It works exactly like a normal rail.
• Pickup Point: These go on the entry points of your ship. They are kind of an expansion to contact docking. Each block you place has a 3 meter radius. If any ship flies in that radius with its rail docker, it will automatically dock that ship to any rail block adjacent to the pickup area block. You can use the pickup area and the pickup point to make pickup points outside of your ship. Then, as the ship gets reeled in, you can use normal logic to open doors and store the ship inside your carrier. Keep in mind that the last pickup point used will be saved in the ship that used it. That will enable the carrier to call ships to the last pickup point they used. In the future you will also be able to control whether a pickup area is active or not via logic. Flying a ship manually into a pickup area will also result in it docking and it can be used to allow touch docking of flat surface which wasn’t possible before. If you have your rail docker selected in flight mode, you’ll be able to see all pickup areas on your display.
• Shootout Rail: The shootout rail is a way for docked ships to leave your carriers in a safe and non-obstructed way. Any ship reaching this rail will accelerate and shoot out the rails direction with some speed. To prevent misuse, ships will always undock on the end of a shootout rail even if you place a normal rail at the end of it.

Carrier Configuration

Fleet server options

• ONLY_ALLOW_FACTION_SHIPS_ADDED_TO_FLEET = false

• ALLOW_FLEET_FORMATION = true

Art Assets

Bug Fixes

Greetings once again Citizens! Here's an update for you that will hopefully answer some questions. We have worked hard the past two weeks to bring fleets into StarMade. Unfortunately, all the fleet work we have started to implement is not ready for release yet. The backend is fully implemented, and it’s already usable, but we would feel uncomfortable releasing it in this state, especially since the testing team didn’t have much time to try it out. You can expect a release soon... Instead, we will talk a little bit about how fleets work, how they integrate, and what they will mean for gameplay.

Fleets

Fleet Missions

Carriers

Gameplay

(Apologies for the delay on this dev blog, there's now a new dev blog detailing shipyards.) We're back with another Dev Blog. It's been a little while since we had one but it's now the right time to have one. Firstly the big question, no there's no new build release for this weekend. Why? We're entering into more complex features being added, brand new ones that require a lot more programming to implement and, therefore, a lot more testing to resolve bugs. In this case, fleets are something completely brand new, and it's taking time to implement. Since we've just had the start of 2016, you may have been away for holidays, or you may be brand new to the game. Either way, there's a couple of things that you should probably be aware of and/or check out. Firstly if you're new, you'll want to take a look at our Development Direction, that describes a lot of our plans for the game, not in great detail, but just a taste. Along with that is what our focus is mostly on during this particular season. It's worth checking out if you haven't already. Secondly, you may have seen it, or not, but our long awaited new launcher has come into open beta. You can finally get your hands on with it, test it out, experience some of the features it has and more. There'll be bugs no doubt so make sure you let us know by reporting them here. As developers we have to do a lot of stuff behind closed doors, but not everything. Our in-game assets team is constantly working on new ships and stations for you to encounter in-game. Criss streams a lot of the builds, as does Saber, so make sure to check them out on Twitch or on Twitter. Finally, you may have noticed that we now have a new council. Our player council is a group of seven community-elected players who help be a community voice to the developers, and also assist the developers in interacting with the community. They do this through a number of means. They read all the suggestions that come through, discussing the merits or answering ones that have been previously suggested, and pass them on with summaries to the dev team to review. They also discuss balancing issues with our dev team, vote on badges to give to community members to acknowledge their efforts or creativity, organise Q&As and discussions and other ways to connect the community with Schine. You need only jump into our suggestions forum to see how many threads they've read. The council, specifically SkylordLuke, has setup one mega-thread where you can see a summary of all the suggestions that Schine has received and responded to over the years. This is an excellent resource for new and old players alike to help paint a picture of some of what may or may not make it into the game. Fleets are the next update coming out, and it's taking a bit longer to implement as mentioned above. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't hear a couple of details about it. StarMade is primarily a space game, with ships, and so it naturally falls that fleets be the progression from that. With the ease of being able to make ships, it should be relatively easy to make fleets. Creating a fleet is as easy as a click or two, and adding members to that fleet equally as so. Each fleet has what's called a flagship, this is the primary ship that the other ships in the fleet position around and follow. More information on the fleet update can be found in the next dev blog. Fleets are the first example that some features are going to take a bit longer to implement than just two-weeks. That's a good thing, as it means that they're not only implemented more robustly but also that it's such a new experience and feature to the game that we all know and love that it makes exploring the new feature so much more intriguing. Be patient, and know what we have in store is good. We look forward to being able to share it with you and all our plans as they come to fruition. - The Schine Team​

Hello players, Here is another update with a few of the new gear models integrated, there will be a lot more of this in coming updates, and not only gear. Along with this, sun damage changed, and a few bugs have been fixed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as8X5bncFok

New Gear Models

Sun damage

What we are working on and what’s next

Greetings Citizens! It is with great pleasure that we can finally announce the public beta of the new StarMade launcher. The new launcher is the collective effort of every single person at Schine, and we are proud to finally see this day. The launcher will be our main way of communicating new and exciting developments within StarMade and the community. As new features (both planned and those yet to be foreseen) are developed within the Registry and StarMade in general, the launcher will be updated with the ability to access those features. We are releasing this version as an opt-in beta on Steam, as well as an optional download on the main StarMade site. In the following weeks, we’ll migrate to the new launcher as the default way of starting up StarMade. During this time, if you notice any bugs or issues, please file a bug report at http://phab.starma.de/. If you’d like to download the new launcher, you can find a link on the downloads page of the main site located at: https://www.star-made.org/download You may opt-in to the new launcher on Steam by right clicking on StarMade in your Steam library, and selecting “Options”. From there, select the “Betas” tab, and enter the beta password: NewLauncherMeow Again, thank you for your patience as we’ve built the new launcher, we know it’s been a long time in the works! We hope you all love it as much as we do! Sincerely, ~ The Schine Team Thanks for playing StarMade!

Hello players, we hope you had nice holidays. From this update onward we’ll be back on our usual release schedule. During our break I used a lot of the time to look at different new techniques I want to implement into StarMade, including maybe a very nice new way to do planets (nothing promised though). This update addresses a lot of common points about usability and also adds some features to make factions, as well as individual players, a lot more protected.

Personal Faction Rank

Faction and Public permission blocks

Rails on Trading Guild Shops

New Default Keybinds

Bug fixes

Council Term 2 Voting Closing Soon

What’s Ahead

Greetings Citizens, Happy New Year! Applications for Term 2 have now closed; the result being 46 potential councilors on our Ballot and now it's over to you, the community, to decide who you want on the next council. For those of you who may not be aware of the council and its purpose, the council is a community-elected group of players who represent the ideas and opinions of the community and serve as a useful bridge between us developers and the community as a whole. They sift through suggestions, debate and bring forward to the devs suggestions they have determined to have the most merit, or need, or that show an entirely new idea that no one may have thought of before. We bounce off ideas with them that we might not be able to share with the community as a whole just yet, assisting us in refining the ideas. They run polls and discussions, both on SMD and throughout communities they're involved in. They also help in acknowledging citizens who have displayed exceptional skill and dedication in a particular area, through nominating citizens for badges. The roles of the council is very organic, adapting to what we, the developers, need at that point in the development timeline. Term 1 did an excellent job at solidifying what roles the council can take on board. But now it's time for Term 2, a new council, elected by the community. To assist you in evaluating and choosing your votes, you can read all applications on the ballot at SMD here. When you're finally ready to vote then head over to council.star-made.org, you'll need to login to the Citizen's Registry before being able to participate in voting (login is at the top of the page). Again the voting system will be using STV (Single Transferable Vote); however, a change from Term 1's voting system is that this time you will not have a restriction on how many preferences you can add. You can vote for just one applicant by placing a 1 next to their name, or you can vote for all 46 numbering them in order of preference with the most preferred candidate being 1, and the 46th most preferred candidate being 46. To learn more about STV, CGP ​Grey has two excellent videos explaining how the system works. Check the first one out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI Voting for Term 2 will close at 23:59:59 UTC on January 20th, 2016, giving two weeks for you to place your votes. After that, the new councilors will be announced, and we'll be in Term 2 of the council. Happy Voting! - Schine Team

Friends, we're approaching the end of the year again. 2015 where have you gone! It's been quite a year, as every year is. We kicked the year off with a brand new GUI followed by several optimizations, performance updates, and balancing updates. We saw our team here at Schine expand, added in the new rails and docking system, the start of boarding mechanics, and overhauled how explosions work. Soon after on-ship spawning, flash lights, jump inhibitors, shipyards, transports, and more. The center-of-mass for ships changed, so did the HP and Armor systems, new chat controls, magnetic docking, not to mention more recently slabs, thrust mechanics and cargo. This year we also attended and exhibited at a convention with Schine showcasing StarMade at TwitchCon. The council had its first term that went for most of the year as we ironed out the procedures and methods of discussion. We had Q&As, Live streams and more. Overall a grand year. Behind the scenes, stuff got a lot more organised. We documented the rest of the plans for the game, organised all our planned features and determined the best direction forward to get them in as quick and practical as possible. Across a dozen or so documents, over 32,000 words described the plans for StarMade, detailing features, some of which have since made it into the game, many others you'll see in the new year. Already we have planned out the next six months worth of work, continuing a direction towards a StarMade we all want to see and enjoy. It's an exciting time for StarMade.

Council New Term

Some more teasers of some Trading Guild ships + stations

Holiday Break

2016 Plans