StarMade v0.19498 Slabs & New Blocks

Hello players,

 

Here is a small but impactful update before the cargo update.

 

EDIT: Hotfix: Crash fix for intel and some other cards that only support GL2.1

Slabs

While implementing cargo, we looked at different options to display different states of a cargo area filling up, and a long planned feature came back into discussion: slabs.

 

With having finished a lot of ground work in the past year, they finally became possible, and here they are. As always, of course, scalability is our main concern, so we made sure that slabs wouldn’t impact performance any worse than any other block. This is possible because of the grid system in use.

 

There are 3 different sizes of slabs available: Quarter, Half, and Three-Quarter Slabs

The slabs are taking a block id, but a system was built to make creating and maintaining them as easy as right clicking on a category in the block editor.

 

Since we knew that with another 3 sub-types of blocks, the inventory would become incredibly cluttered, the slabs aren’t items in the inventory, so only the full block version is needed. They can be placed down by selecting any full block that has slabs, and then conveniently selecting the slab size in the advanced build mode. Any slab can of course also be rotated in all 6 directions.

 

Slab versions of special blocks like wedges and corners will follow. If necessary the internal size of blocks can be expanded from 3 to 4 bytes, effectively doubling block ids a few times, so don’t worry about block ids running out.

Currently we have added slab variants for all Hull types, Hazard Stripe blocks, Doors and Force Fields.

 

New Textures

Good news everybody, we are expanding your range of building materials! We have monitored feedback over the past year and have begun to implement a few of the most popular requests. In this release, we have added Dark Grey Hulls. You can expect a few more in the run up to the winter holidays.

You may (or may not) have noticed some slight UI changes. We have begun to look into some legibility and scale issues. Our plan is to further streamline the UI, provide support for players using high resolutions and a wider range of characters for translation packs.

 

List of fixes:

 

We are working to fix the problem of spawning inside a block for good. For now, you can hit the 'up arrow' key after spawn to warp out of any stuck situation.

 

T839 Certain weapons mounted directly to an asteroid and then fired will crash the game at the next autosave

T789 deleting shipyard core anchor when design is loaded, removes it from the database

T786 Players that are attached to a ship via alignment share the ship's shield when shot.

T748 Tutorial Immediately Bugged

T722 Recursive use of create dock feature in shipyards breaks out of creative mode

T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking

T640 game config: computer limitation does not work and acts like group limitation

T490 Planet part entities does not vanish even without any blocks

T450 Fix for entity-flag exploit does not affect already created entities.

T400 Warpgate faction permission issue

T258 All blocks are rotatable

T233 Chat kick and ban options

T64 /Destroy_Entity and overheating making rail entities invulnerable/untouchable

T52 ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in storage UI

 

Black Hull textures are now darker.

Shield Drain & Shield Supply are now correctly labeled on their CPU texture.

 

Next update, the cargo system should be ready,

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,

 

- The Schine Team