StarMade News

Hello players,

 

It has been some eventful two weeks with servers going into chaos, but now we are almost fully back up. We also moved some things to more robust systems to hopefully never encounter blackouts of this size again. We apologize for any trouble and frustration caused by the downtime.

 

Fleet Mining

Fleets now have an additional order “Mine Sector”, that when given will do exactly that. Keep in mind that for now the sector they are mining in will have to be loaded. Also, the flagship will not participate in any mining. It currently only works on Asteroids.

 

We will further develop fleet functions along the way in the next updates.

 

Other Changes

• Newly generated Void Systems are mostly empty now.

• Minimum Rail movement and rotation speed is now 5 times higher.

• With fixing simulation through the introduction of fleets, simulation spawn (pirates/traders) frequency has been increased. This may need to be increased more in the future.

• AI aggro range is now a lot higher.

 

Bug Fixes

 

A bunch of bugs (47 confirmed) have been fixed. Also optimizations have been made to memory taken (RAM) and docking processing in bigger numbers (e.g. bigger numbers of turrets).

 

Another optimization was getting rid of a slowdown caused by non fleet ships, where servers would get bombarded by database queries which caused immense lag on server side.

 

A few unreported bugs have been fixed too.

 

List of confirmed fixes:

 

T1238 carrier recall drones unable to redock properly and get stuck in a loop, caused by non physical rails

T1205 nullpointer on entering tutorial

T1201 textures don't get extracted

T1199 Nullpointer when opening map after deleting a fleet

T1194 docked fleet members stay behind in unloaded move orders

T1191 Ship arrow versus Galaxy Map arrow

T1186 During carrier recall, drones can dock to the wrong pick up point

T1182 Fleet and normal AI is stationary in combat

T1172 ships assigned to fleet lose all rail based entities on unload

T1152 typos and oddities in fleet GUI

T1049 Personal Cargo drops at astronaut position on death w/ setting on

T1143 overheating fleet ships are still AI controlled

T1142 Cannot open calibrate thruster menu from build mode

T1125 removing shipyard computer while constructing results in item loss

T1122 shipyard nullpointer

T1121 Z-fighting with "preview block to build" enabled while using some build tools

T1118 explosions don't trigger shield recharge outage

T1115 ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException on modified planet plate

T1110 "View Relations" does not display correct relationship values

T1106 Body moves when buying from shop

T1060 Cannons with penetration depth have damage loss

T1051 Defensive Ion Effect Not Affecting Docked Entities

T1021 Shipyard pulling extremely inefficient

T973 Creating ores by replacing cargo space with rock types

T969 Nullpointer when removing filled cargo blocks

T883 Forcefield Slabs Lighting is Fullbright and Uncolored

T733 creative mode hotbar doesn't allow you to remove items

T714 Game complains inventory is full in creative mode

T711 ship core can be destroyed completely

T689 Tab + F6 causes nullpointer when in build mode

T675 Multislot ITEM LOST at Ship Deconstruction by Shipyard with Storage

T663 Shipyard running out of power causes loss of blocks

T647 Turrets on ships built in shipyard do not inherit AI settings.

T546 Using "create docking" on station and planets causes nullpointer

T534 F5-screenshots of galaxy map appear with background transparent

T291 AI without thrust modules does not work well

T261 Server cannot be started because of one collapsed "SIMULATION_STATE.sim"

T256 Filter options in Catalog/Mail window

T251 Collision Damage: protected sectors don't protect you from collision damage

T116 unexpected behavior of infinite shops and credits

T107 using thrusters and mouse input while power outage causes fast spinning

T87 NoSlotFreeException Issues, Factory production losing product/raw material

T72 shop prices display prices incorrectly

T57 Inner ship remote toggles on ANY click, even in menu

T45 firing weapons on docked ships while cloaked

T28 Faction restriction does not apply for chests

T27 Invisibility mode ship issues

 

Thank you for playing StarMade,

• The Schine Team

 

Greetings, citizens!

 

#HOTFIX 0.19592: Fixed astronauts in gravity of a ship falling out on sector change. Fixed Nullpointer at the end of tutorial. Fixed ClassCastException crash on server.

 

We apologize that things have taken a bit longer this release cycle. These features are quite large in scale. Also, there will still be a lot of things added and improved in coming updates, but with some core features already complete, we didn’t want to hold them back any longer.

 

Fleets

This is an entirely new system within the game’s backend. It is basically a cached virtual layer that can quickly operate on the main database of a server without the need to actually load in ships. We had to make some major modifications to the database’s tables to allow for this, so it took some effort to set up just right.

 

But enough of the technical details. Here’s an overview of how fleets work in-game: A player can create a fleet in the new fleet panel (default key ‘k’) and add multiple ships to it. There are several other management options for fleets in that panel as well. The first ship in the list is always the flagship (the ordering is easy to change later), and a ship can only belong to one fleet at a time. The flagship of every owned fleet will also always appear in the galaxy map. Ships don’t require Bobby-AI blocks to be part of a fleet.

 

Fleets can currently perform the following actions:

 

• Idle: This is the default state. Ships in this fleet will neither move on their own nor attack. In the event of a server restart, fleets will automatically revert to this order. (In the future, the last fleet order will be saved.)

• Move: The Move command sends the fleet to a sector, whether or not that sector is loaded. Currently the fleet’s movement speed while in an unloaded state is fixed, and the fleet is also unable to use jump drives as of yet.  These will be added in the future.

• Attack: A fleet will go to a specific sector and attack. Currently, attacks will only commence on loaded sectors; if a sector is unloaded, the fleet will wait on the sector’s edge until it is loaded.

• Defend: Similar to Attack, the fleet will go to a sector and attack any (loaded) enemies. However, the fleet will not pursue any enemies beyond 2 sectors of the target sector.

• Sentry: The fleet will attack any enemy in proximity.

• Formation Idle: the fleet will assemble into a formation, but will not attack anything. The flagship can be manually controlled.

• Formation sentry: the fleet will assemble into formation. Additionally, ships will break off and attack any enemy in proximity.

• Carrier Callback: This order is explained further below.

 

Important: Formation orders are currently experimental and may lead to strange AI behavior or fleet pile-ups.

Carriers

Carriers are now supported in-game thanks to the new fleet system. For this purpose, we’ve added three additional blocks: the Pickup Rail, the Pickup Point block, and the Shootout Rail. All of these blocks are non-physical and only visible while in build mode. This means that, while the two new rail blocks still function as rails and allow you to change them using existing logic systems, you can not collide with them even if you’re on the rail itself. They also do not provide any armor or hp to the ship.

New Blocks

• Pickup Rail: you can use it to lead your ship inside your carrier safely. It works exactly like a normal rail.
   

• Pickup Point: these go on the entry points of your ship. They are kind of an expansion to contact docking. Each block you place has a 3 meter radius. If any ship flies in that radius with its rail docker, it will automatically dock that ship to any rail block adjacent to the pickup area block. You can use the pickup area and the pickup point to make pickup points outside of your ship. Then, as the ship gets reeled in, you can use normal logic to open doors and store the ship inside your carrier. Keep in mind that the last pickup point used will be saved in the ship that used it. That will enable the carrier to call ships to the last pickup point they used. In the future you will also be able to control whether a pickup area is active or not via logic. Flying a ship manually into a pickup area will also result in it docking and it can be used to allow touch docking of flat surface which wasn’t possible before.
  If you have your rail docker selected in flight mode, you’ll be able to see all pickup areas on your display.
   

• Shootout Rail: the shootout rail is a way for docked ships to leave your carriers in a safe and not obstructed way. Any ship reaching this rail will accelerate and shoot out the rails direction with some speed. To prevent misuse, ships will always undock on the end of a shootout rail even if you place a normal rail at the end of it.

Carrier Configuration

To make a carrier, all you have to do is use the pickup areas on your flagship with your drones once. Your drones have to be fleet members. Then you can use the “Recall to Carrier” order on your fleet to order all drones back to their pickup points from anywhere in the universe. Keep in mind that currently only one carrier (the flagship) per fleet is possible, but as long as a ship has no pickup point, it won’t try to dock, so you can mix drones and other fleet ships. You can also wipe a pickup point in the fleet menu if you click on a member.

 

Fleet server options

Option to only allow factioned ships (of your own faction) to be added to your fleet, servers probably want to put this on true to prevent ship theft.

• ONLY_ALLOW_FACTION_SHIPS_ADDED_TO_FLEET = false

 

Option to allow fleet formations or not, it’s an experimental feature that could cause collisions and performance drops.

• ALLOW_FLEET_FORMATION = true

Art Assets

There is now a unique model for the healing beam, and minor adjustments have been made to the UI and other art assets as well. Furthermore some sprites (missile/shield effects) have been updated.

Bug Fixes

• T1197 Placing a block on an asteroid, removes said asteroid

• T1107 GameConfig.xml on new install is broken

• T1055 Nullpointer when sitting on blocks, crash

• T939 unload/load will drop blocks if volume used is bigger than default chest capacity

• T926 Cargo mass does not update correctly after over capacity bleeding

• T903 tooltip doesn't always display or shows wrong data

• T743 Linux version fails to start

• T737 Shield Supply and Drain textures are swapped

• T546 Using "create docking" on station and planets causes nullpointer

• T510 undocking ship from shipyard will usually redock it immediately

• T361 Missiles do no shield damage

• T37 abandoned stations don't have decaying turrets

• Performance ‘Bug’ has been fixed for servers where general performance would go down due to another fix for beams being able to hit objects in other sectors.

• Possibly fixed problem where ships would lose block connections

• Asteroids no longer vanish when placing blocks on them

• Fixed some inconsistencies on sector borders

• Pressing enter on any input dialogs now counts as clicking “Ok”

 

We hope these features will be a fun addition to gameplay. We plan to do a lot more with it as stated in the previous dev-blogs!

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,

 ~ The Schine Team

Hello players,

 

Here is another update with a few of the new gear models integrated, there will be a lot more of this in coming updates, and not only gear. Along with this, sun damage changed, and a few bugs have been fixed.

 

New Gear Models

For a long time, we’ve only had a pistol in game to use for all gear. We decided it was time to change that. We have started this by adding in 4 unique models for player gear. The Build Inhibitor, Laser Pistol, Power Beam, and Cutting Torch now all have unique models. We’re continuing to create unique models for the rest of the gear, so expect more to come in future updates.

 

Sun damage

Sun Damage is now a lot more potent, so be sure not to get too close to a star. Sun damage will now do explosive damage. It also scales depending on block count so that larger ships will take more damage. These numbers can be modified in the gameConfig.xml (if you already have an existing one, you can look up the variable names in the defaultGameConfig.xml in the ./data/config directory, add the SunHeatDamage tag and its contents to your gameConfig.xml to adjust them)

In further releases, there will be ways to make your ship more heat resistant, as that will become a vital strategic decision in future universe designs.

 

What we are working on and what’s next

 

Most of the work in the past two weeks has gone into preparing a better NPC system that will be lightweight, so a lot of them can populate the game. It is not done yet and releasing in its current state is pretty much impossible. As such, it is not included in this update.

 

Furthermore, we are planning and working on a new feature that will add a lot to gameplay: Fleets! We can’t tell you too much about it, yet, but this feature will be implemented in two stages: The “active” phase, and the “inactive” phase. This basically means fleet behaving while the ships are loaded (active), and on the other hand, fleets being able to perform tasks or even fight in an unloaded state (inactive/simulation). The first phase we are going to tackle is the “active” phase, so you can expect that very soon (maybe next release).

 

This update also contains some bug-fixes:

 

T1047: create docking is allowed if old docks are still being used

T1032: Faction permission personal can lock out everyone if owner leaves the faction

T900: Recipes for Brown Crystal Armor sub blocks wrong

T812: Unable to delete blocks while camera is inside the block

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

T753: Block count and mass is off

T568: Factions Relations always display own relations, instead of selected factions relations

T510: undocking ship from shipyard will usually redock it immediately

T236: can't move or rescale the player list menu (Tab)

T211: Star Heat damages astronaut in a ship's core even when ship isn't taking damage.

T91: beams have trouble hitting ships at extreme ranges

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team

Greetings Citizens!

It is with great pleasure that we can finally announce the public beta of the new StarMade launcher. The new launcher is the collective effort of every single person at Schine, and we are proud to finally see this day.

The launcher will be our main way of communicating new and exciting developments within StarMade and the community. As new features (both planned and those yet to be foreseen) are developed within the Registry and StarMade in general, the launcher will be updated with the ability to access those features.

We are releasing this version as an opt-in beta on Steam, as well as an optional download on the main StarMade site. In the following weeks, we’ll migrate to the new launcher as the default way of starting up StarMade. During this time, if you notice any bugs or issues, please open a support ticket at http://phab.starma.de/.

If you’d like to download the new launcher, you can find a link on the downloads page of the main site located at https://www.star-made.org/download.

You may opt-in to the new launcher on Steam by right-clicking on StarMade in your Steam library, and selecting “Options”. From there, select the “Betas” tab, and enter the beta password:

    NewLauncherMeow

Again, thank you for your patience as we’ve built the new launcher, we know it’s been a long time in the works! We hope you all love it as much as we do!

Sincerely,

~ The Schine Team

Thanks for playing StarMade!

Hello players, we hope you had nice holidays. From this update onward we’ll be back on our usual release schedule. During our break I used a lot of the time to look at different new techniques I want to implement into StarMade, including maybe a very nice new way to do planets (nothing promised though).

 

This update addresses a lot of common points about usability and also adds some features to make factions, as well as individual players, a lot more protected.
 

Personal Faction Rank

Faction modules now have a new “personal” rank that will help make joining and working within a faction a lot more secure. Selecting this rank within a faction module will set you (and only you) as the owner of the entity. This means other faction members will not be able to use that entity regardless of their rank – including the faction’s founders. If you leave the faction for any reason (including being kicked), you will retain your ownership of the entity. In this event, the entity would keep the existing faction signature, but your ownership will override it. Pressing R on the faction module will allow you to reset its faction once it is no longer docked to that original faction.

 

It’s important to note, however, that you can only set something to “personal” if you have permissions to access the faction module’s settings.

 

The rank selected in a faction module will now propagate to any docked objects so long as you the player have permission to set the ranks on those. This propagation will not apply to docked objects with faction modules set to “personal.” This prevents exploitation of the propagation feature to gain access to personal-set objects.

 

Faction and Public permission blocks

A new block has been added that will give faction-wide access to blocks it’s placed next to. The previous block, originally called “Faction Permission Block”, has been renamed to “Public Permission Block”. The new block has now been named “Faction Permission Block” since this makes more sense.

 

Permissions will now also extend to storage blocks, making it easy to protect your cargo.

 

There will be additional blocks in the future providing more rank customization.

 

Rails on Trading Guild Shops

Advanced TG shops now have docking rails by default. Server admins can also activate this feature on normal TG shops if desired, or switch it off completely. Changing the option does not require a database reset, however the docking rails will only appear on newly generated shops.

 

Docking on these rails will function similarly to docking on a home base, with the exception that no weapons can be used while docked. This should give factionless and new players a lot more room to secure their ships without having to rely on a home base or a faction.

 

New Default Keybinds

There have been some adjustments made to the keyboard.cfg which will provide a new default keybind set. Most of these changes were made to make controls more intuitive for newer players.

Your keyboard.cfg file should not be overwritten unless using a new install, so your custom keybinds should not be affected except in the case of a few buttons which were remapped to blank keys.

 

Any duplicates (in respect to context) in the keyboard settings ingame are now marked red for easy fixing.

 

Bug fixes

Fixed issues:

T1010 can build on factioned entities regardless of permissions

T1003 Can overwrite any blueprint by uploading one with same name

T964 Teal and pink light rods have full-block collisions.

T939 unload/load will drop blocks if volume used is bigger than default chest capacity

T903 tooltip doesn't always display or shows wrong data

T894 "Create Docking" not working on factioned entities

T860 BufferOverflowException + render issues with mass placement of non cubic blocks

T846 In game can't show full-width characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) But it works in setup window

T820 stuck in ship core /stuck in undeathinator

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

T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking

T649 docked entities created in adv build under create docking will not undock

T618 Flora items missing from creative menu

T548 "Filter by block name" does not work for multi slots

T442 Old docks can still be bought at shops, when using 'Buy amount' instead of 'Buy'

T243 Player character repeatedly removing/replacing helmet

 

Also, lists in GUI are now sorted by default and ‘Preview Block to build’ is now on by default. Removed additional arrow in “create docking” in adv. build mode to make overall orientation more clear.

The Metal Mesh has been given a new improved texture and Trigger Area blocks now have a block icon among other graphical improvements.

 

Council Term 2 Voting Closing Soon

For those unaware, as part of our continued engagement with you, the community, we have a community-elected council. For 4 months, the council assists the dev team with filtering suggestions, running poles and discussions on topics or concerns the community has, amongst many other things. Currently, voting is open for the new council and will be closing in a couple of days. Any player with a Citizen Registry account can vote, so head over to http://council.star-made.org to view who’s in the running and cast your votes!

 

What’s Ahead

StarMade has been a unique development experience. The past few years have seen us build a solid foundation for where we want to take StarMade. It’s like we’ve been developing a toolkit for us to build the actual game of StarMade on, and as such there’s been a lot of justified criticism that there isn’t much to do yet. In our opinion it has been more important to get that foundation solid before proceeding into developing the gameplay, lest development get stuck in design hell. For every new feature or mechanic we’ve added in, we’ve always considered how well it would mesh with the rest of our plans for the game. We also find it equally important to consider the different ways that players could utilize a feature, as well as how it affects players’ differing gameplay experiences and play styles.

 

Our plans for StarMade are big, and while up until now we’ve purely focused on ensuring that we’ve had a solid foundation to build upon, this year we finally start using our proverbial toolbox to build the game we’ve all been envisioning. Here’s to 2016 and to what’s ahead ~

 

Thanks for playing StarMade!

  ~ the Schine Team