StarMade v0.198.146 - Tutorial Videos & New Lighting
Hello players,
In our quest to make the game a lot more accessible, another important step has been done: Tutorial Videos.
#Hotfix:
~ Fixed issue where "Play in Background" isn't shown on the automatically played intro video
~ Fixed issue where F8 didn't open the Tutorial Selection Screen
~ Fixed backside of angled shapes being drawn, even if adjacent to an opaque face
~ Fixed wedges side triangles being drawn both in transparency and opaque (rest of the angled shapes will follow soon)
~ Fixed crash on mac when playing any video
Tutorial Videos
The engine can now play videos ingame. You can either watch it in a player or in the background while you play.
At the moment, the videos available are those from our youtube channel. We will be improving, optimizing, and expanding them for ingame tutorial usage. Also, while at the moment, the videos are 720p, in the future we will try to offer a low quality offline option with the ability to stream full quality directly from youtube if possible. It may be a while before a full series of quality videos are available.
We will also be looking into implementing an ingame browser for our wiki and link that to the game, so you could look up info about a block or a system via a context menu.
This is just the beginning of the new tutorial system, and we will further expand on it with dynamic suggestions, so that if a new player puts down a block, the tutorial system would suggest a video or a wiki entry based on that.
Currently, video audio only work with OpenAL sound enabled, however, for anyone having problems with that system, and other languages, there will be full subtitles in any supported language available in the future.
Speaking of languages. We are close to releasing the first bunch of translations, and that will probably happen in the next release. For more info about translations, visit https://crowdin.com/project/starmade
New Lighting System
As most of you know, the shading on structures, especially on angled shapes has serious problems with lighting.
The reason why those errors persisted so long, was because the lighting normalizer required a full rewrite, and to make things worse, is one of the most brain scrambling things to implement. However, it was time to do it, and the new system is now able to be easily adaptable to new blocks. Fixing any remaining lighting errors and other related glitches should now be a lot easier, as the new system is now modular and abstract instead of just one big pile of if-then-elses, which grew with every new block shape added.
Here are a few comparisons:
(inserted when copying to sm.org)
There’s a minor issue remaining where your ship mode view can’t see through non cubic blocks such as wedges or corners. We’ll make sure this is resolved in the next hotfix.
Main Menu Additions
We’ve added a few improvements:
-
You can rename local worlds with the right click context menu.
-
Advanced settings for local worlds now has a Save and Discard changes button. Previously it only saved when starting a world.
-
Ability to use the default astronaut skin again, an X appears next to the Skin select button that deselects your custom one.
Bug Fixes
The initial loading has been improved to take a little less time. There is still some things to be done there to speed it up further.
A few tasks were fixed too, lighting and tutorial tasks not included:
If you notice any issues with the new lighting, please make a bug report on our bug tracker Phabricator
Thanks for playing StarMade,
~the Schine Team
