StarMade News

Hello players,

 

with this update the thrust system will finally be addressed to make gameplay, especially fighting, a lot more interesting.

 

Thrust System

 

Corrected Inertia

Inertia is now physically correct to mass distribution. This means, that if you bump a stick by either end it will rotate slower that if you would cause any rotation on the axis along the stick.

 

This also applies to your ship’s thrusted rotation. However, you can now influence the effect with thrusters. More on that later.

 

Max Speed Differences

Max speed is now thrust dependent. Your thrust to mass ratio determines how fast you can go. This should make smaller fighters a lot more interesting as scouts and agile fighters.

 

The minimum you will go is 0.5 server speed. The max is up to 3 times (with overdrive even 4.5 times) the set server speed at a 2.5:1 Thrust:Mass ratio. Going beyond this ratio will not increase your max speed. You can see your current values in the build mode stats.

 

Also, note that taking Structural HP damage will decrease your max speed.

 

Please make sure your server speed isn’t set to more than 100 m/s (to start with at least) after updating.

 

Thrust Customization

This often requested features gives players the ability to customize thrust.

We don’t think having to balance out directional thrusters by themselves is all that fun, especially on bigger ships, so we tried to make a simple solution that will in later stages also be usable in a crewed ship.

 

To change your thrust balance go to the “Ship”->”Thrust” tab in your top task bar when you are piloting a ship.

 

You can change what axis you want to put your thrust in: forwards/backwards, right/left, and up/down. You can also put thrust into your rotational thrust to make your ship turn faster. Changing thruster settings does take a little time though, 15 seconds to be exact. All these values are adjustable in the blockBehaviorConfig.xml, which is since the last hotfix also available as a mergeable custom config (check the customBlockBehaviorConfig directory in your StarMade installation folder).

 

You can now also inherit all the thrust of docked ships. Simply press the “Inherit Thrusters from docks” to enable this on your ship.

 

Flight modes

We have now included a newtonian flight mode to all ships. The old, dampening mode is still there of course although you’ll most likely not use it a lot anymore. The newtonian mode comes equipped with an option to enable dampening if you leave the ship, like a parking brake, so your parked ships aren’t floating away into deep space.

 

Capacity limit switched on

Personal stash will now have its limit switched on (you can still switch it off in the server config is needed).

To lessen the blow to people that didn’t follow the last update, all personal inventories that are overcapacity will automatically create a “block storage” meta item with all your blocks in it. You can take out as many blocks as you need at a time but you can’t put any blocks back into that item (except as admin, who can use this item to create rewards). You can move the item around and empty it in a high volume chest.

Next update we’ll enable chest bleeding when over-capacity. If a chest/factory/shipyard goes over capacity, it will drop blocks over time till it’s under capacity again!

 

The give_metaitem admin command has been updated to automatically adapt to current and all new meta items. Its description will also automatically be updated.

 

Also we forgot to mention in the last news, but as most of you probably already saw, you can now tether any storage from a friendly ship in the same sector. Just go to the storage you want to use and toggle the “Use as personal Cargo” button. Then a new tab will appear in your personal inventory to access it at any point, as long as you are in the same sector.

Asteroid spawning fix

The asteroid spawn system is based on temperature. Some asteroid types spawn near a star, in high temperature zones and others spawn near system edges where it is cold.

Some asteroids, such as blue Larimar would only spawn in very cold zones. Unfortunately this meant it only spawned consistently in system corners, the place where asteroid belts almost never cross.

 

We’ve adjusted all asteroid spawns now and you should be able to find the ones you need without a problem.

 

Because there’s not a lot of known information about what asteroid spawns where, Kupu has made some nice infographics to illustrate it, you can find them here: http://starmadedock.net/threads/asteroid-belts.22386/

New Blocks

Pink hull sets have been added to the game, including Crystal Armor variants, slabs and lighting options.

 

Faction Config Change

By request, a mining factor for unowned system is now available. Server owners and others that use a custom faction config must insert this new value into their config, else the game will not start (ParseException)! A better solution (by xml merging) will follow in the future...
 

Config changes

We implemented some changes to accommodate for the new thrust system

• Total Thrust has been reduced by 25%. This is just to compensate for the new system, most ships should still be capable of moving as fast as they could before.

• Cannon projectile speed is now 12.5 times the server speed, used to be 10.

• Missile projectile speed is now 2.48 times the server speed, used to be 1.98.

• Overdrive has been reduced to a maximum of 50% efficiency. However you do need 4 times less blocks to reach maximum effectiveness now. It also consumes a little bit more power now, 10 per block per second, used to be 6.66.
   

We’ve adjusted the complex crafting recipes for coloured hull.

• Standard armor: 1 basic hull with 1 standard hardener.

• Advanced armor: 1 standard hull with 1 advanced hardener.
   

Both hardeners use 1 asteroid ore which wasn’t used for much else before + some alloyed metal meshes.  

• Standard hardener: 5 fertikeen capsules + 10 alloyed metal meshes

• Advanced hardener: 4 fertikeen ingots + 20 alloyed metal meshes

Asteroid spawn chances are more or less equal so we can finally tweak other crafting recipes. There are several resources not being used at all and some get used too much. We don’t want the same resource costs for everything though but decreasing the gap between them seems to be a good idea.

 

Other changes include a new config option to increase mining  yield in un-owned systems. That’s set to 3x now, with other territory still sitting on 6x and faction owned territory on 12x.

 

Starting players now receive a lot more essential blocks:

• 350 basic grey hull + 100 wedges + 50 corners + 50 heptas + 50 tetras

• 100 power reactor blocks

• 100 thruster blocks

• 2 salvage computers + 50 salvage modules

• 2 faction modules

• 5 ship cores

They still get their meta items of course, but you don’t get any weapon computer or cannon barrels. If you want to arm yourself you’ll have to buy it from a shop.

 

We’ve also adjusted the volumes of all basic resources:

• Raw ores/shards and mineral blocks are 0.01 volume

• Refined resources like capsules are only 0.001 volume, to allow easy storage.

 

There were more volume and cargo changes planned but those got reverted, we need more cargo feedback to get a feeling of what you want, and what you definitely not want.

 

If you don’t like some changes and you know something better, feel free to make a suggestion here: http://starmadedock.net/threads/game-balance-suggestions.22101/

Bugfixes

 

T1000 Structure HP condition triggers don't work for thrust

T984 ratio to mass uses block count and not thrust amount

T951 Micro assembler can't be linked to cargo space blocks

T949 Infinite money Glitch.

T948 Planet textures disappearing.

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

T937 No way to reclaim large item stacks

T931 can't split or merge multi slots when over or near capacity limit

T926 Cargo mass does not update correctly.

T870 Slabs act like full blocks with rails

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

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

T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking

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

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,

- the Schine Team

 

Hello players,

 

#HOTFIX 0-19522: Fixed some balance issues. Fixed some performance issues with cargo on larger servers (more optimization will follow). Fixed som crashes related to cargo. Implemented blockBehaviorConfig merging (after one start in that version, go to the newly created ./customBlockBehaviorConfig folder for more info).

#HOTFIX 0.19520: Personal inventory can now go over capacity without consequence to allow better adaption for players, including personal <-> storage interaction. ​​​​​Next release will have added features to allow a smooth transition to the full enabled cargo system​. Planet optimization has been switch off until it's working right. Factory over-capacity logic signals will now work as intended.
We also forgot to tell you about personal cargo: now you tether any storage in the same sector to your personal inventory and switch to it. So you can build a huge station/ship with having cargo ships nearby, without the tedious walking back and forth.
Also there are now teal blocks and lights available for use.

 

 

cargo has finally arrived. It is meant to improve gameplay mechanics having a physical representation of loaded goods on a ship while at the same time, being as usable as possible.

 

Cargo

Cargo is a physical representation of things loaded in your ship or station/planet. The more you have loaded, the more boxes you will see appear in your cargo area.

There were some main concerns for it in terms of scalability, organization, usability and migration which I hope we solved sufficiently.

 

Since it’s impossible to organize your things into different little boxes with limited capacity, your storage block will still be the main piece to use. Because having a limit on both slots and stack capacity would be tedious, we decided to just have a overall capacity for a storage with unlimited slots. Each item’s needed space in the inventory is represented by its volume (which defaults to mass, but can be adapted in the block config if needed).

 

So basically, you can fill up your storage with as many slots as you like, as long as the total volume of all items is within capacity.

 

Because of this sudden change, penalties for being over-capacity are turned off by default in the server config. These penalties will be switched ON by default in future updates. A player whose inventory is over-capacity will move more slowly, and a ship which is over-capacity will leak items out of storage over time.

 

So how do you increase that base capacity each storage gets?

 

It’s simple: just get a few Cargo Area blocks and connect them to your storage. Each block adds capacity to your storage block. They are non-physical and not visible as long as they are empty, but they will fill up with the inventory reaching its capacity.

 

Keep in mind that items in storage now also add mass to your ship. It’s a lot less mass than it would add if you would build the blocks on your ship by using the patented “warp storage technology”, which stores most of the mass in the void.

 

Also please note that the balance is by no means final. We put it at the lower end, because buffing it in future version is a lot easier than nerfing (and also causes less anger amongst players ;) ).

 

Factory changes

 

This same cargo capacity concept also now goes for factories and shipyards. Factories also now only pull as many items as they need to do one tick, so they won’t fill up. And instead of sending a signal to adjacent Activation (full <-> not full) and ‘OR’ blocks (empty <-> nonempty), they will send it to connected ones.

 

Docked Cargo pulling

 

Cargo can now be transferred from or to docked entities. Just connect your docker and rail to the storage you want to pull from or of, then deactivate pulling on the one you want to be pulled from, and it will pull to the other just like it would on the same entity.

 

Docking on contact

 

You can now also dock to rails by physically touching them with your docker block. After undocking you will not be able to re-dock to that rail for 5 seconds. In the future this time interval will likely be switched to a distance limit, where if you move a certain distance from the rail you will be able to re-dock.

 

Optimizations

There has been a nice optimization done for planets which should add some fps for you (after the planet is loaded in)

 

Balance changes

Thanks to player feedback and the help of the council, we’ve changed several values that should improve your gameplay experience.

 

• Power soft cap has been increased from 1 000 000 to 2 000 000

• Max shield regen under fire has been increased from 10% to 25%

• Shields sharing is disabled when you go under 25% shield capacity instead of 50%

• The system penalties you receive when you suffer damage are now less harsh.

• Starting cash is now 50 000 credits instead of 20 000 credits for new clients and station cost price has been decreased from 1 000 000 credits to 50 000 credits

• We’ve introduced multi-slots for lights and their respective light rods, the delay-signal is now also sitting in a logic multi-slot. We’re planning to add controllers + modules next release.

• Missile + cannon its missile speed has been buffed from 0.5 to 2.0, now it can go 6 times the max server speed.

 

 

Bug fixes

T917 Emissive mapping make rod lights appear on when they're off

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

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

T680 Ships not checking for collision before docking

T655 Shipyards give free cores

T258 All blocks are rotatable

 

Power Supply and Power Drain textures are now correctly labeled.

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,

the Schine Team

 

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

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

Hello players,

The Schine Team has been hard at work since TwitchCon, and we are super excited to finally be able to show you what we’ve been working on!

 

Side Note: We will be jumping back into our planned 2 week release cycle schedule, with our next release scheduled for November 6th.

 

Transporters

A long awaited feature is finally here! Transporters! Transporters allow you to instantly warp between transporter platforms within a short distance (the current sector, and any adjacent sectors). Be careful though! Using a transporter between ships will temporarily bring down shields on both the sending and receiving ships. If shields drop from transporters, they will recharge back up at the ship’s set shield recharge speed.

 

Much like other systems within StarMade, the transporter system comes with a transporter computer and transporter modules. The modules are simply pads that you stand on, while the computer is used to control and activate the module. Make sure that you can either reach the computer while standing on the module, or have someone manage your transporter room. Logic will be added to the system in a coming update.

 

Destination setting can be done from within the computer. All available destinations will become available. Any transporters that are located within the current ship or any of its docks will be available as a destination. Any transporters that are on other entities located either in the current sector or adjacent sectors, can also be made available by setting them to “public/faction access”. Be aware though that upon warping to a transporter on another entity, the shields of both entities will be dropped and have to be recharged! So never leave your transporters open; or you might find your shields dropped or a boarding party invading your vessel.

 

Transporter Beacon

The transporter beacon is a personal tool that enables the user to warp to a transporter as long as the vessel is in vicinity. Just use its beam to mark the transporter controller you want to be warped to, then open your inventory, right click on the item, and hit ‘transport’ to be warped to that transporter. This is very handy for exploration without a proper way to get back. In a future update there will also be a ship beam that lets the player set a manual target for a transporter.

 

Activation Gates

Activation Gates work just like Warp Gates with the difference being that instead of warping, they will emit  a ‘true’ signal when a ship is passing through. This is only activated on actual passing of an entity. This feature will help for logic with much bigger structures where the trigger area blocks start to lag.

Race Gates

This is a feature I wanted to do for some time. It seems a bit random but is part of a bigger picture. There are most likely several bugs with the race gates, however they should be mostly functional for basic racing.

 

To create a race track, you will have to create a chain of Gates. These gates can be on the same or multiple entities. To link gates, the same method as the warp gates is used: the marker beam. Right click with the marker beam on the computer of one destination gate and left click on the gate you want to create the link from. Continue to do this process for each Gate in the chain, linking the Race Gate Computer to the next gate’s computer.

 

Then you can create a race by activating the Race computer with ‘R’. The computer you use is going to be the starting gate of that race. Players can join either from the computer itself (if it’s public access), or from the menu on the top (messages/quests) if you have any dialog open.

 

To start the race, you have to link from an activation module/button to the race computer you used to create the race (the starting gate). The race will start when a true signal is received in that race computer, so it’s possible for the builder to set up logic count downs and other mechanics that all racers can see.

 

The race creator can even set laps and buy-in money which is then paid out to the first 3 finishers. We will keep an eye on how this works in the real world and tweak the settings if needed in a future update.

 

Raycasting Optimizations, aka a lot less lag from extensive mining

Planet eating miners that in the past brought down a server in seconds now only create a fraction of the lag they did before.

 

Database update to get rid of block data for found stations

Databases now load the NPC stations without copying them to the database as long as they are not modified. This means a huge decrease of database growth.

 

Admins can retroactively apply the feature to their db (as it only is applied to newly spawned stations) with the startup parameter:

-cleanuptransient

PLEASE NOTE: Depending on size, this can take hours (we are talking 48h+ for 200gb. This will most likely be optimized with the next update), as the program looks through every file looking for similarities and header matches.

Also PLEASE BE SURE TO CREATE A BACKUP before doing this.

 

Asteroid replenish server option

 

There is now an option to periodically let the server replenish asteroids in the server cfg. To trigger, a sector will have to be unloaded and completely empty. If the time of the time it last replenish is beyond the waiting period set in the config, the sector will regenerate. This will help bridge the time until a better system takes its place.

 

Bug Fixes

One bug that had haunted me for a long time is (hopefully) finally fixed. Players should no longer fall out of moving ships upon sector change.

 

T796 Items can't be dragged into inventory menus

T795 game crashes when trying to view relations of another faction

T782 Transporter unreliable in multiplayer/synch bugs with transporter

T769 Null pointer when pasting linked modules in un-initialized chunks.

T768 "create docking" doesn't check for already existing entities, duplicate method

T719 Shipyard exploit while server is updating block count

T711 ship core can be destroyed completely

T671 Not all weapons trigger response fleets

T663 Shipyard running out of power causes loss of blocks

T658 Shipyards cut off parts of a ship

T654 warhead explosion lag allows damage without warhead destruction

T653 Null pointer/GL_STACK_OVERFLOW when you look at rail blocks in build mode

T646 Game config: ship limit affects station and planet entities

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

T639 Nullpointer when using "search by name" with meta items

T637 Shipyard Item Duplication Bug

T621 Keyboard help does not update without game restart

T614 Tech info shows confidential information

T576 Amount sellable appended instead of replace when overselling using sell amount

T561 creative mode allows you to drop blocks in a shop -> infinite blocks

T539 ship core not producing power when first spawned

T490 Planet part entities does not vanish even without any blocks

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

T428 Stay attached to ship while being logged out

T400 Warpgate faction permission issue

T384 Power/Shield Drain and supply beams power issues

T379 Removing containers places there content in an offset position

T323 COLLISION_DAMAGE_THRESHOLD does not work

T313 JVM Crash detected: incorrect dialog

T297 Player hp doesn't get saved

T234 no meta items in storage filter system

T233 Chat kick and ban options

T199 able to lock on in zoom mode

T185 Multi slot items don't show tooltip

T86 Planet segments have 0 mass

 

Next update

As noted above we’ll be returning to our planned 2-week release schedule. This will help make development a lot more predictable for the community and especially servers. To get us back on schedule our next release will be later this week and will be addressing a lot of bug fixes and performance optimizations that come out of this release.

 

Thank you for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team.