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

A new (faster) system for generating terrain noise has been added. This system has tweaked asteroid generation to produce larger and more natural looking asteroids. Thanks to native libraries and SIMD instructions this new system has a large performance increase over the previous system, therefore asteroids should generate faster and put less load on the CPU by doing so. Comparison testing has shown around 7 times performance increase compared to the old asteroid generation. Further native library usage will be used for other CPU heavy parts of the game. This means, we now have the speed of C/C++ for the performance critical parts, while still keeping the convenience of java.

Custom Shapes

The engine now supports custom shapes. Those shapes can pretty much be any 3d object. The game automatically handles natural Level of Detail. That means that from afar, shapes will automatically turn into either cubes, “sprites” (like current flowers for example), or completely transparent. Objects further away will not have any decrease in fps that way. The distance at which objects blend to blocks can be adjusted in the options. We are adding just a few decorations for now to test the limits and how players will use it. There will also be functional objects later. However, these objects should never be a main build component. If needed, more restrictions can be done like a limit on objects per area (client sided), to avoid slower computers lagging out. The shapes we will add in this build are a Pipe and a Console, both of which can be found in General -> Decoration -> NonCubic. In following updates, there will also be options for physics meshes. For ship vs ship collisions, the cube (or nothing) will always be taken. More shapes will be added over time, as the process to make new ones and get them into the game is very straightforward. Also depending on tests we will replace existing shapes like flowers, capsules, and light rods with custom shapes.

New Languages

Thanks to the awesome translators that helped us, StarMade now supports seven new languages: French, Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese Traditional, Polish, and Spanish! The system we have set up for translations is very easy to maintain and add new or changed strings without messing up the code at all. Languages packed with the game have most strings translated; translations may not be accurate. As translation progresses, we will update language packs and add new ones. It's a community effort, so if you can contribute, the translation project is here: http://translate.star-made.org/ . Anyone is free to edit, simply sign up and translate!

Reworked GUI Graphics

We have reskinned the User Interface with a cleaner theme akin to our main menu. The noisy and heavier elements of the older design often cluttered up the denser menu structures. We hope this new theme not only helps with legibility, but allows us to easily scale up our assets to higher resolutions in the future. Further fine tuning will take place in the coming weeks with updated HUD elements currently being worked on.

Bugfixes

First and foremost: Logic Lag when loading in an object has been fixed. Inner logic (weapons etc) are also now loading a lot faster by using more Threads, but keep in sizeable tiers, so small calculations don’t fill up the queue and can be handled much faster. T1540 Exit Test Sector brings up Tutorials instead T1512 tutorial tile menu isn't constrained by menu size T1509 new tutorial menu doesn't end processes when closed T1484 Log spam...too much yhole (PDLDLKDJLKDJLKDJLKDJLKDJDLKJD) T1352 Faction Permission Block Texture bug (Pixel texture pack) (Fixed Linux/Mac crash on startup when sound system cannot be initialized) (White lines appearing on White hull fixed - no phab report)

Development Timeline

To coincide with this release we’ve put together a thread covering the progression of development of the game. This should give a better impression as to what is planned as well as what’s directly ahead. You can find the thread on StarMade Dock here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-active-development-timeline.25541/ Thanks for playing StarMade, ~The Schine Team