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

Auxiliary Power

The need for power in StarMade is always present. So much so, that players came up with complex designs that involve using the supply beam to overcome built in restrictions to docked entities. The problem with this kind of construction was, that they didn’t really perform very well, and if they actually undocked in combat or on accident, they would cause major lag. We don’t want to punish players by just taking their power away, so we had to come up with a compromise. Together with the council we developed a new block: Power Auxiliary. This new power block replaces the functionality of the current docked reactor concept with an onboard block. Eliminating any lag caused by physics. Auxiliary power can be assigned to your hotbar (from your weapons menu) and can be turned on and off on demand. It works like a reactor with internal storage that can act as a buffer. When it’s on, its regeneration gets added to the main ship and also its stored power gets dumped into it (even if there is no room). When it’s off, it charges its internal storage although at a slower pace compared to its normal generation. Stations/Planets can’t switch between modes, their reactor is always on. The AI though can’t use the block right now, that will be added at a later stage. Docked reactors had downsides though. They were easily found on a ship because of their navigation markers. And when damaged, they would rapidly lose their efficiency. The new block has a different downside that comes down to the same thing, loss of efficiency/regeneration. If a block of a group gets taken out, the whole group starts to discharge. Explosions will occur inside that group. The amount of explosions, their radius and damage depend on the size of the group at the time of being hit. The biggest reactors can almost reach an efficiency of 200 power per block but they’re also the ones that are easily hit and take the most damage when exploding. They’ll lose most of their blocks in about 1-2 minutes which still makes them useful for a short period after they got shot. However, it is strongly advised to use armor, not only to protect those groups from external damage, but also to interlace it within the group, so a potential discharge would minimize damage inside a group. It’s a high risk high reward system. Using it wisely can make your ship superior to others. Using it recklessly can make your ship useless with some lucky hits. Your power is the most important part on your ship and you want to make sure it’s out of reach. (Smaller ships didn’t have docked power reactors to begin with. We have other systems planned that will affect them.)

Supply/Drain Beams

To make sure people will stop using docked reactors of any kind, we have now included a config option to modify the output of these Beams when they’re hitting a docked entity, or an entity where it is part of. It’s set to 0 meaning that

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

Don’t work anymore on any docked reactor type. We didn’t make a shield reactor replacement system since this is just a fancy way of avoiding the “regen under fire” mechanic. If shield rechargers or capacitors need a buff, then we’ll simply change the config values. Role play servers that still want these reactors to work just to have to change in their blockBehaviorConfig to 1

Lighting Shader Overhaul

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

Texture Changes

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

Small Shipyard Features and Fixes

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

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

Rail Fixes

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

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

Config

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

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

Looking for new forum admin(s)

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

Other Bugfixes

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

Thanks for playing StarMade, ~ The Schine Team