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Hi all, this update adds some minor texture updates to existing blocks as well as some fancy new purple forcefields.
The launcher login has been fixed. There are still a few other bugs, which will be fixed as well.
This update makes some minor adjustments to system balance and fixes a whole range of bugs and issues.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
TL;DR Between the dates of the 11th of October - 20th, the following was done: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:
Greetings, We've released a dev build that introduces two things:
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:
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:
Hotfix#4 (0.201.341):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Greeting, Citizens ~ The power update has been finally released.
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:
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
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.
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
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.
Greetings, citizens ~
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.
Greetings, citizens ~ Here’s another weekly dev blog!
Greetings, citizens ~ Here’s another weekly devblog.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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:
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…
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.
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.
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.
Hello Citizens, ~ A small hotfix has been uploaded:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
Enjoy! ^^ _____ List of current bugs/annoyances: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
Hello, There have been some fixes yesterday, and also just now:
Hello players, In our quest to make the game a lot more accessible, another important step has been done: Tutorial Videos.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
(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
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.
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.
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