StarMade News

Greetings citizens,

Hotfix 0.199.217: Fixed universe generation (no planets in new universes). Fixed ClassCastException when loading ship with ongoing auxiliary power explosion.

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 <RailHitMultiplierParent> 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

Hello citizens, ~

a small hotfix has been uploaded:

~ Fixed servers with lots of blueprints freezing when a player saves a blueprint (Uncontrolled multithreading caused too much memory being consumed)

~ Fixed cores being destructible on client side (didn't affect servers, so it had no direct gameplay implication)

~ Fixed orientation resetting for damaged blocks on client side (also didn't affect servers, so it fixed itself on reload)

~ Changed entity saving method to possibly fix issue of playerstates resetting on some systems. Also increased log output on that should it still happen.

Thanks for playing StarMade,

~ the Schine team

Greetings, Citizens ~ 

Terra here. After many months of working on the new launcher, I’m excited to finally announce its release! 

The new launcher is a pleasant departure from our previous, rather utilitarian version. It’s beautiful, very user-friendly, and should help resolve many issues. (Though, should you prefer using the legacy launcher for any reason, you may still do so.) 

Please note that we are only releasing the launcher on Steam at present. 
A standalone version will follow soon. 

If you want to use the new launcher outside of Steam now, head over to our downloads page and hit the “DOWNLOAD NEW LAUNCHER” button http://www.star-made.org/download . 

Here are a few of the major points: 

Bundled Java

One of the primary benefits of the new launcher is that it comes already bundled with Java. Not only will this allow users to launch the game on systems without Java installed, it also ensures the correct bit version for their system. (While using 32bit Java on a 64bit OS is possible, doing so causes significant performance issues.) Furthermore, we specifically picked the Java version we’ve bundled for its better performance, so using the new launcher should improve gameplay experience, at least slightly, for most players. (Should you prefer to use your own installed Java version instead, you may specify it within the launcher options.) 

On a related note, there’s a relatively rare but difficult-to-troubleshoot problem that has plagued many players in StarMade and other Java games alike: the _JAVA_OPTIONS environment variable. When present, it overrides any settings passed to Java, often causing crashes or extremely poor performance. The new launcher warns you when it is present and allows you to alter its value if desired. 

These two features should resolve the majority of pre-launch issues. 

Steam Linking

Steam linking is considerably easier now: when running the launcher via Steam, it will ask if you want to link your Steam account after you’ve logged in. The option is also available in the launcher options. 

Memory Settings

Continuing with the theme of thwarting potential problems, the memory settings window will not allow you to choose invalid memory values, and has sensible defaults. The input boxes allow fine control over values, while their spinners and the slider allow you to change values quickly. 

Moving Forward

As the launcher is freshly out of beta, there may be some lingering bugs. If you discover any, please restart the launcher with the --verbose option (via the console, or within Steam via “Properties > Set launch options…”), reproduce the behavior, and attach launcher.log to the bug report along with the usual information. I will be happy to squish them for you. 

Speaking of options, passing --help to the launcher will give you a list of options that change its behavior, including bypassing the autoupdate feature, or capturing the game’s output for troubleshooting purposes. 

I will continue updating and improving the launcher, and already have several additional features planned. Furthermore, we here at Schine are planning on releasing the launcher’s source in the coming weeks, so if you’re keen on forking it or helping out, you can! If you just want to poke around, that’s fine, too. 

Stay tuned for more updates! 

And as always, thanks for playing StarMade 
~ The Schine Team

Greeting citizens, ~

 

Since mainly we are working on the NPC factions feature at the moment, which is a big update with a lot of planning, design, and architecture, the updates during this period will contain smaller features, fixes, and optimizations.

 

However, this doesn’t mean that the updates won’t have any impact. The latest optimizations make ship battles, including capital ship fights a lot more fluent.

 

Faster Chunk Loading

One major bottleneck of the old system (even more so with the new chunk32 system) was the final step of loading or generating chunks for the game. The step of putting the blocks in the game physically and updating all logical dependencies as well as center of mass, tensors, and other metadata.

 

Since this step was done in the main thread, it often caused fps drops, and/or stalling (small freezes). This was mostly visible when starting up.

 

Most of the work has now been put into the generator threads that load the chunks. This archives much faster chunk loading as it utilizes multicore processors.

 

The data that needs to be in sync with the main thread is prepared and applied in one step per chunk.

 

It doesn’t eliminate all the short freezes on startup, but it makes it considerably better. It also improves general loading speed by about 30%-40% (reported by our testing team).

 

Bandwidth Optimization

Positional data is now sent dynamically based on where the players are. The further away an object is from you, the fewer position updates you will receive. This will improve bandwidth usage on bigger servers by a lot since the positional data is at least 50% of the total data sent.

 

Lag Correction

As you all know, when going fast and trying to hit an equally fast ship, stuff starts to jitter around. This is now fixed. The new lag correction algorithm does a much better job at smoothing client and server differences out. Speeds up to 300m/s had no noticeable jitter on the official test server.

 

However, sector changes still cause your ships to jitter, that’s a different issue.

 

Physics Optimization

Although physics performance on single entity ships is in a much better place now, stuff gets to a crawling halt when two bigger ships with docked entities meet.

This is now optimized to run several times faster (from around 1fps on two big ships with 200+ entities colliding to around 40-60, coming from 80 fps).

 

Cannon/Beam Hit Optimization

Block modifications in general, but especially block damage and removal caused by cannons, damage and salvage beams have been sped up considerably.

 

Volleys from capital ships will no longer turn the game into a slide show. From testing results, weapons that used to freeze your game for several seconds per volley, barely affect your FPS now.

 

This combined with the physics optimization should make ship battles a lot more enjoyable.

 

Bug Fixes

T1830 Block information for Russian/Traditional Chinese cause freezes

T1025 Joystick and Gamepad support broken

• Fixed a layout issue for the Pixel texture pack.

• Turret power sharing (for AI) now looks at every chain before it stops firing. The threshold is still 35% of max power capacity (but per chain now).

• Fixed an issue where destroyed blocks would re-appear (client side only) in some cases.

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,

~ The Schine Team

 

Hello citizens ~

we just uploaded a small update that will increasy lighting calculation speed by ~30%. That's the time of a recalculation when you place a block, or turn light on/off. The chunk32 update introduced a bit of delay on it since it is doing 8 times the work now. There are more optimizations planned in that regard very soon.

Also, a lighting bug has been fixed. It caused the lighting switch to distance lighting to be a hard edge, so chunks appeared to be suddenly darker when coming closer.

Thanks for playing StarMade,

~ the Schine team