Greetings, citizens ~ Here’s another weekly dev blog!

What are we working on right now?

In the wake of the power update, we’ve identified a few features that overlap nicely with the new power system and other ideas we’ve had for quite some time. One of these features is the ability to draw groups of blocks separately and apply various graphical effects to them. Among other uses, this will allow us to display the inner workings of ships quite nicely, e.g. highlighting a specific salvager/weapon array, a circuit, damaged blocks, etc. There are several existing uses for this, but it will be especially useful on future features, such as: scanning other ships, getting an overview of your reactors, highlighting potential issues therewith, etc. We’re aiming to do a release with this feature implemented in quite a few areas.

We will be updating Advanced Build Mode with increased functionality. This will include the above highlighting, as well as new tools. This update will not only make reactor design much easier (and allow integration of their features), but it will also give players better building tools in general. Among these planned features is a fill tool, which will allow you to progressively fill any area, as well as tools to draw lines and possibly arcs.

Power Update

Thank you again for additional feedback. We went through most it, and we will be addressing more of your concerns later on where needed.

Major concerns

After reading all of the concerns and debates over the new power system, we can address two of our major concerns players had with the mechanics. The first is that players are limited to a single active reactor per ship, and the second is that only a single reactor would ever be active for a group of docked entities. We agree that some of these issues may be valid, but are not something we can easily solve in a balanced way. We came to the conclusion that implementing a working multi-reactor system right now would compromise the whole reactor system as we do not know that system on its own works in-game. That’s why we’ve decided that after implementing the base system (and after its initial balance passes) we will look into the concerns about the single-reactor issue again, to have a better overview on the possibilities in this system. Specifically, we will re-examine allowing docked entities to have their own active reactor, and possibly even allow multiple active reactors per entity to see if we can find a balanced, non-exploitable way to implement them without introducing countless rules and restrictions. Even so, coming up with something to allow docked reactors only solves a small part of the bigger problem mentioned here: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-devblog-may-22nd-2017.29057/

What’s next? / Conclusion

We definitely appreciate all of the feedback we’ve received thus far. It has gone a long way to help shape and solidify StarMade’s next steps. Given the work we’ve been doing, we are planning a pre-release build in a week or two. Be on the lookout for that build, and if you have questions on our release cycle, please refer to the following: https://starmadedock.net/threads/starmade-release-cycle-news-posts.28895/ And as always, thank you for playing StarMade! ~ The Schine Team