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

Tutorial Videos

The engine can now play videos in-game. You can either watch it in a moveable video player or toggle in the background while you play. (There is currently an issue where the first opened video does not have this option, as well as the toggle tutorial button not functioning correctly. This will be fixed in a hotfix tomorrow.) At the moment, the videos available are those from our YouTube channel. We will be improving, optimising, and expanding them for in-game tutorial usage. At the moment, videos are at 720p, in the future we will try to offer a low-quality offline option with the ability to stream full quality directly from YouTube (if possible). It may be a while before a full series of quality videos are available. We will also be looking into implementing an in-game browser for our wiki to link into the game, enabling the ability to find info about a block or a system via a context menu. This is just the beginning of the new tutorial system, and we will further expand on it with dynamic suggestions, so that if a new player puts down a block, the tutorial system would suggest a video or a wiki entry based on that. Currently, video audio only work with OpenAL sound enabled, however, for anyone having problems with that system, or wanting a tutorial in other languages, there will be full subtitles in any supported language available in the future. Speaking of languages, we are close to releasing the first bunch of translations, and that will probably happen in the next release. For more info about translations, visit http://translate.star-made.org/

New Lighting System

As most of you know, the shading on structures, especially on angled shapes has serious problems with lighting. The reason why those errors persisted for so long, was because the lighting normalizer required a full rewrite, and to make things worse, it is one of the most brain-scrambling things to implement. However, it was time to do it, and the new system is now able to be easily adaptable to new blocks. Fixing any remaining lighting errors and other related glitches should now be a lot easier as the new system is now modular and abstract instead of just one big pile of if-then-elses, which grew with every new block shape added. Here are a few comparisons: OLD
NEW
OLD
NEW
OLD
NEW
There’s a minor issue remaining where your ship mode view can’t see through non-cubic blocks such as wedges or corners. We’ll make sure this is resolved in the next hotfix.

Main Menu Additions

We’ve added a few improvements:

• 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

The initial loading has been improved to take a little less time. There is still some things to be done there to speed it up further. A few tasks were fixed too, lighting and tutorial tasks not included:

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

If you notice any issues with the new lighting, please make a bug report on our bug tracker Phabricator Thanks for playing StarMade, ~The Schine Team

[ 2016-06-05 03:15:23 CET ] [ Original post ]