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

The Chunk Update

If you're unfamiliar with how our blocky universe is comprised, blocks are grouped into chunks. 16 x 16 x 16 cubes that are used to manage data in a more practical way. It influences everything from performance to lighting and everything in between and is one of the pieces that make up the backbone of the game. What's currently being worked on is an increase to the chunk size in order to improve performance. Chunk sizes will be changed from 16 x 16 x 16 to 32 x 32 x 32. This increases the number of blocks per chunk from approx 4k to 32k. This primarily will help reduce the number of requests and operations on large objects but will influence many other aspects of the game as well, improving everything from loading and even compressing. We estimate up to 50% increase in performance in some areas due to this change. What this will mean however is a major conversion period, and when rolled out could cause some significant downtime for servers. The converting is mostly for moving all blocks to the new chunk grid. For individual ship entities, the ship core was originally placed at coordinate 8 8 8 placing the ship core in the middle of a chunk. This meant that for smaller ships it could be possible to only require the loading of one chunk, rather than if the core was located in the corner of a chunk, it had the potential for 8 chunks to instead be required for loading. All blocks in a blueprint are saved "relative to the core" so a block located at 0 1 0 would actually be located at 8 9 8 in the chunk. This relative locating is one of the ways StarMade is able to support quite large ships. Shifting to a 32 x 32 x 32 chunk format means that every ship entity needs to have the ship core shifted to 16 16 16 instead of 8 8 8. This is why the conversion process will take quite a while, as not only are all the existing entities in the universe needing to be updated per server, but also all the saved blueprints. The processing time on making this shift on a single entity is also the reason why a simple core moving system for build mode has been difficult to implement. This conversion could result in servers taking at most a couple hours to convert. This change however is going to present a number of major improvements as well as improving processing for some future core code changes planned later on in the development timeline. It also significantly reduces the database size for servers and reduces the amount of files required. Why we're telling you this now is so you know what's ahead. We're going to do our best to ensure that everything is as prepared as possible before we release this update. However we do recommend you back up any blueprints, ships, servers, sectors, etc locally that you want to ensure you save just in case anything unforeseen happens during the conversion process. Have any questions, feel free to ask them, otherwise watch the news space for all the details going ahead in anticipation for this update. - The Schine Team