StarMade News

Hello player,

the last update sparked a lot of discussion. I understand both sides, but since both arguments are very play-style specific (casual, hardcore, fighter, etc) it's not easy to make everyone equally happy. I'm trying to add more and more options for servers to find a setting their players can enjoy.

But as a game mechanic, buying blueprints from credits destroys any effort to make an economy. In game economies there are always "in"s and "out"s. You want to minimize the "in", else something like "demand" cannot be generated. Something that basically generates blocks from nothing is an infinite "in" which is ok for creative, but not ok in any other setting, since the "in" should be the blocks themselves (which are practically infinite already, but they take work to process)

So here are the changes:

• Possible asteroid size has been increased by 30%
• Raw resources in asteroids have been increased by ~30%
• Doubled mining bonus in territory (both for owner and others)
• Max stock for shops increased from 10k to 50k
• Initial fill and refill of shops is now 10 times more
• Added server.cfg mining multiplicator to basically allow the server admins to decide how hard it should be to mass up blocks.

Hotfixes:

• Fixed Planet Cores being vulnerable in protected sectors
• Fixed blueprints not being destroyed (and refunded) when blueprint is deleted or changed
• Fixed Scanner Antenna not showing up in blueprint lists

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,

- schema

 

Hello again,

a little update with a major gameplay feature: Shops instead of selling ships of blueprints for credits, they will now sell blueprint metaitems that the player has to fill up with exactly the blocks the ship of the blueprint requires.

Should the blueprints you bought in any way differ in materials when you spawn it (if it's been deleted, or modified), it will give you back all your materials.

Yes, this means that credits will lose a lot of value, but that's intended as crafting should be the thing that drives economy. If you disagree, I added a value in the server.cfg to revert all that to the old system.

This is basically the first step towards shipyards, which will use those blueprints as input and will gradually put your ship together. So please keep in mind that this current system is not final. Also the fact that you can spawn the blueprints in anywhere is a test and by no means final (you still need to buy the meta items from a shop).

To give credits still a value, all support/weapon meta items are now available to buy from the shop NPC's.

Also there have be some minor balance fixes for weapons, though nothing has been buffed or nerfed, but accuracy of values has been increased.

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema

Hello players,

as Steam release is getting closer (can't confirm a date yet), I'll focus on bug fixing.

Here is another release full of fixes and re-fixes of things that weren't fixed yet.

One bigger thing is a complete redesign of the core of how beam ticks are counted. There should be accurate now.

There is also an optimization for servers without SSD, where they should have longer lags as the database marked entries as "dirty" wrongly causing a huge write to the hard drive where only maybe 0.001% is actually needed to be written. I can't say yet if my method works, but in the worst case there is no difference.

Here are the fixes so far, and thanks to all the testers as always:

Resolved 9
1224	Inconsistencies In blockBehaviorConfig.xml
1334	GLException: simple lighting quality
1119	linked storages have visual logic laser line links on startup.
1300	Physical entities such as shops, planets and stations not appearing in Galaxy Map
591	Undocking stuck turrets from their motherships can cause both mothership and turret to fly off stuck at very high speeds
1059	Undo max config setting doesn't get saved.
950	Radar Jammer and/or Cloaker is not working against homing missiles
292	Beams displaying wrong DPS in weapons menu.
941	Copy&paste 7 and even more lines into blueprint descriptions.
Closed 15
1319	Beam + Cannon Draws Negative Power
1161	Beams 'skip' their first damage tick.
1332	Cloakers, jammers and jumpdrive ignore docked mass
951	Small weapon with 100% stop effect can stop huge ships and affect shield
970	Linux: Updating creates mirror folder - original untouched
1043	Missile support has incorrect damage scaling
1044	Weapons fire from AI ships becomes severly maloriented, beam animation renders significant distance away from ship.
720	AI has a fixed range.
894	beams and pulse not killing astronauts
1012	Chain Docking: Blue box is facing the wrong direction.
1113	Using joystick throttle gives more thrust than without
1291	Faction List Bug
1317	Houdini Blocks - Undone Blocks Reappearing After Exit/Resume
1293	Item loss when using undo
1078	"Search currently installed" under Options&Repair without function

 

Stay tuned for the date announcement of the steam release. Also the stations will be there very soon (I apologize for the delay).

Oh and as you probably noticed, there is a new launcher version. This version fixes some issues (some linux love), as well as support parallel downloading to speed up updating by a lot.

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema

Hello players,

here is a balance update as well as some bugfixes.

EDIT v0.18392: The simultanious fps drop issue on servers has been fixes, as well as a random ClassCastException.

 

Balance Changes:

Ratio Fixes

Since not many people were happy with the change in distribution in ratio, I went back and rewrote the module to make it possible to redistribute in any combination. This means ratio of master to slave will once again just be 1:1. Effects are independent once again and are also 1:1 to master.

This is NOT the old system. The change still fixes the bug that forced me to change it in the first place. It is also not a buff or a nerf, as the dps will just stay the same. With 50 modules you get that 50 modules worth of dps no matter how you distribute it (as long as you don't go over 100% ratio)

I apologize for any inconvenience and players having to adapt ships again, but the truth is that balance just is not easy to achieve. Moving things around affect 1000 other things, and that's why sometimes drastic measures are necessary only to find a more elegant solution later.

 

Salvage Change

Salvaging was broken for a longer time. Putting more than one module in a group didn't matter at all, and power consumption didn't represent the actual gain in blocks.

A salvager now works more like the damage beam. it does "virtual" damage to a block, and if that damage is enough, the block will be mined. The block doesn't take actual damage of course. The default salvager now comes in bursts, but can me made a constant beam by combining it with a cannon.

The virtual salvage damage done to a block is just like the damage beam dependent on how many blocks are in a group. That means simply: The more salvage modules in a group, the faster you will mine.

 

Other Beams

All the other support beams have also been adapted to use the new tick-rate style the same way damage beams do.

 

Missiles

The radius missiles do and the potential block destruction make missiles very powerful. The default radius has been decreased a little but the radius for the missile+pulse combination has been upped by a lot for all your doom device needs.

AS ALWAYS: all of these changes are not final. Balancing is always a hard topic, since it's very subjective in a lot of cases, and believe me: I'm not actually trying to make the game worse for players, but the opposite. I'm doing my best to do so, and even if sometimes it might seem a little drastic, I only have the best for the complete picture in my mind.

Bugfixes

The game crashed when using pulse on an astronaut, and beams still didn't hurt them. Undo had a bug where there could be leftovers of the undo when relogging, or saving it as blueprint. While astronauts now take damage from suns and inside black holes, that shouldn't be the case if you are on a ship.

 

Charity Livestream

Raiben will soon do a live stream to help the family of his deceased friend. As somebody who knows how hard it is to lose people close to you and since Raiben is a friend, I will support his cause. Here is the go-fund-me page http://www.gofundme.com/hjbw48.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcLMBSw-oC8&feature=youtu.be

Small Announcement

 

 

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema

Hello players,

this update contains a big bunch of bugfixes of some of the most annoying bugs which have been in for a while, small additions, and a brand new tutorial.
The tutorial consists of various new features added to the game in terms of scripting. A lot of the functionality in it, I did with the goal of reusing the same mechanics for a mission system. The tutorial station was made by Dalmont.
(Also sorry for typos. Since nothing is hard coded in the tutorial, it will be an easy fix for helpers)
There has also been an update for the textures. Kupu added brand new ultra crisp textures for all the terrain and flora.
There have also been some fixes for bottlenecks on servers to reduce lag in some situations.

The stations of the contest winners will probably be added in the next few days, as a few builders wanted to do some fixing on their stations first.

EDIT: Update to fix the minable pile in the tutorial. Also the textures for the overlays for minable blocks have switched around (since one looked more like ore before when it was actually crystal).

About the ratio

The weapons DID NOT get nerfed. It was a bug fix:

2/2/2 did more dps than 6/0/0. This was a bug and it got fixed. It had to be fixed, there is no reason why it should be that the same amount of blocks should do more damage in other setups, because then it would be the only thing people would use.

You don't need to add more blocks, you just need to redistribute. Power usage is also less now without the bug so there is absolutely no nerf involved other than the ability to get more dps by using effects, which shouldn't be.

You don't have to put more stuff on your ship. The damage has NOT been reduced, just the ratio needed, if you have now 50% on your machine gun, all shots will do double damage as when they were at 100% minus a very small amount from the bugfix.

the system is now:

combiPercent = slave : master+effect
effect is still = effect : master

 

 

Here are the bugfixes:

Resolved 26
597	Adding an effect computer and zero effect blocks gives 100% effect status
1101	current amount of Power not stored in blueprint / ship
1241	Effect Modules Add Double Damage To 1:1 Slaved Weapons
1224	Inconsistencies In blockBehaviorConfig.xml
951	Small weapon with 100% stop effect can stop huge ships and affect shield
1040	ANY sector change ejects players in gravity
1274	Drain beams unbalanced
1091	Items destroyed if inventory is full
950	Radar Jammer and/or Cloaker is not working against homing missiles
1134	Random damage numbers appearing in space
1120	USE_PERSONAL_SECTORS = true results in NullPointer
1044	Weapons fire from AI ships becomes severly maloriented, beam animation renders significant distance away from ship.
1178	2 config values under explosive effect do not work
1148	Adv. Build / Remove: Replace with active slot doesn't auto connect
720	AI has a fixed range.
894	beams and pulse not killing astronauts
1184	Block removal and auto linking not working correctly
495	Docked Ships do not use Gravity correctly
1252	Explosive defense system does NOT protect against stop, push or pull
932	Jump Drive ignores sector permissions
828	Leaving the gravity of ships not aligned with "C" is disorientating
1171	Missiles can damage docked entities from any point on a ship
646	Shops don't get restocked with the new blocks.
1186	Sitting + Planet gravity field
1213	Turret settings not saving in blueprints
972	Non-Repeating Delay and Delay have no texture difference anymore
Closed 24
1049	Cant over write blueprints
1235	Local blueprint isn't correctly saved
1014	Player position does not appear to save properly
1259	Scan report does not give location of galaxy system owning structure and owner
1179	You can place more than 1 scan/jumpdrive computer
661	Activating gravity block rotates charakter
1135	Door wedges affecting rotation of adjacent wedges
1050	Factories pull from chained storage and ignore filter
1194	Map: color coded areas not fully showing after logging in
1177	Mass counter doesn't update when docked
1263	Remove unnecessary icons/buttons from shop
792	Shift+V Logic Connection on plexlights (All types) does not work
1074	Shift-V only half-works with new door types
898	'Undo' doesn't restore connections
1237	Astronauts unaffected by black holes or star heat damage
1267	Crash with Joystick connected Joystick.cfg error
917	Ion effect defense not effecting docked entity though % calculation uses total ship mass including docked entities
1227	scanner computer/antenna dont have crafting recipes.
949	Ship mass still heavy after detaching docked ships and/or turrets
1130	carved Lukrah and carved chabaz missing and incorrect recipes.
1116	massive item lose when creating subblocks (mini slots bug) in factories
1230	Factory Blocks indistinguishable types
671	Typo in weapon firing notification
463	Typos in startup tips

New features are in the works, too. Stay tuned :)

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema