StarMade v0.19485 Internationalization Support & Bugfixes
Hello players,
EDIT: HOTFIX 0.19488: fixed missing textures. fixed high bandwidth usage on servers. fixed a crash in a running condition. fixed blueprints not correctly loading inventory pull. fixed clients crashing on changing inventory pull on older blueprints.
this update is mostly for bugfixes and to introduce internationalization for the game. We have some little problems with our CDN (cloud), so depending on your location it might take a little for the update to become available. We hope to fix those issues in the coming week.
Language Packs
As some probably already found out in the last build, StarMade will now support language packs. Although, there isn’t a complete pack available yet , they can already be created and used by setting them in the settings.cfg. As soon as there is official packs, and option in the startup options to change language will become available.
There is a fully functional language editor already available in the startup options under “tools”, which automatically takes the original texts of the latest version and marks them as changed, so updating from version to version should just be a thing of translating new or changed entries. To create a language to use it will have to be placed in StarMade/language/languageName/pack.xml
Keep in mind that changing the default “english” as that is the original “blueprint” for language and will reset as that is based on the build itself.
The reason for the delay on that was to finally go over every text entry in the game and to re-engineer corrected text into the code.
Internationalization is always a critical point in development, since if it’s done wrong, it can severely slow down development from that point, or even cause a complete mess (I witnessed that happening in previous work experiences).
To prevent that, a lot of extra design work was put in.
Technically for a coder, using internationalization is as easy as using printf with just a different function name. There is now a preprocessor that will automatically process all uses of that function and create a Language Class with static variables replacing the occurrences. On startup those variables will be filled with the entries from the used language pack. This means, that performance doesn’t suffer at all from using language packs.
Furthermore this system even saves performance, as all occurrences of ingame server messages are automatically indexed and just the index and its arguments are sent, so the client can use a translation if possible. This means, a lot of text that took bandwidth from the server is now reduced to just sending a number.
Bug Fixes
We heard the criticism about the transporter beacon and we agree that it makes shuttle play too irrelevant. The “beam down beam” will therefore be on hold for a little while until we further assess the balance and maybe come up with more elegant solutions. The transport beacon now has a charge time. The default is a little slow but item improvement will also be a thing. If there is future debuffing needed we are playing with the thought of having the beacon discharge on movement of the astronaut.
Some major bugs have been fixed. Foremost there seemed to be a NullPointer which was plaguing servers, which hopefully shouldn’t happen anymore.
Also, all weapons/tools have been a little bugged due to the optimization where it appeared that the entity behind another entity was hit. This issue has been fixed and does not occur anymore.
Race Gate laps have been fixed. There was also a bug that Race Gates wouldn’t always trigger when going through, which has also been fixed/improved.
Another bug was that people were getting stuck in their cores, which should have been improved now. Getting stuck inside a block prevented you from removing/using it but that has been fixed completely so it should be easy to unstuck yourself.
Furthermore the tutorial has been fixed. There was a problem that NPCs appeared to fall through the tutorial station, and also a NullPointer when talking to NPC-00.
AI macro Simulation was overall pretty broken, but should now be fixed. Response fleets should again work correctly, as well as other encounters/patrols. All weapons trigger a fleet event again.
Some minor fixes have been done to shipyards to prevent exploitation. Also there was a bug that any multi slot item in an inventory of a deconstructed ship was lost. This is now also fixed. The bug that ships are cut off was already fixed in the last release.
Collision damage has been improved and is now applied to both colliding entities. It is also now saved correctly.
Lastly, linking a computer to itself will no longer cause that computer to lose its link with the shipcore. This caused it to disappear from the Weapons Menu.
You can now also use the admin command /simulation_info and /simulation_clear_all to combat potential lag caused by simulation (pirate groups getting stuck, or just cleaning up in general).
The next update scheduled will be in two weeks,
Thanks for playing StarMade,
the schine team
