Starlight: Eye of the Storm News

We hope 2022 has been a great year for everyone. It's 2023 now and we're still working on the patch. This announcement is to share some of the progress updates.

[h2]Changes[/h2]

Difficulties has been revamped.

Easiest, Easy and Normal difficulties remain the same.

Player damage will no longer be nerfed on higher difficulties.

Hard difficulty will require a bit more skill and slightly more grinding to kill enemies. However, the main change is that now enemies will deal 2.5x more damage and enemy bullets now travel TWICE as fast in all aspects (acceleration and speed).

HARDEST/Bullet Hell difficulty is totally revamped. Enemies will now spawn with only 75% hp but their bullets will now deal 10x more damage and will travel 3x faster in all aspects. On top of that players' special powers will be auto regenerated over time and killing enemies will top up the power bar regardless of amount. (that means some enemies will straight up give you 1 or more power bars immediately)

There're exceptions however; enemy bullets travelling upwards as well as enemy projectiles will retain their original speed.

[h3]Why Change?[/h3]

The initial difficulty was incremental towards being harder to kill and therefore swarming the screen with more bullets. However, that wasn't the original design and it DID felt lazy to us.

The purpose of the higher difficulties is to challenge your reaction time, avoidance skills and still being able to counter-fire with or without drift abilities. Bullets will now 99% of the time kill you with just 1 shot for Bullet Hell difficulty. So it's not about having the screen full of bullets but rather bullets being far more lethal and faster.

[h2]Progress[/h2]

We've fixed up to 13 serious bugs so far. Some of them are seriously serious - if not game breaking such as missing ships or ships that spawned but got despawned without any reasons.

Full details will be revealed when the patch is released.

On top of that, the entire Arcade mode has been tested; twice on its default resolution of 1080p in 144Hz. We'll be moving onto doing testing in Campaign and Survival mode next.

4k testing will be broadcasted here - https://www.twitch.tv/jeremylee80 - follow this account to get informed on when we'll be doing the 4K test runs!

So what's wrong with 4K? Apparently, sprites tend to blink a lot more in 4K for some reason that is unknown to us. We suspect it has something to do with the way sprites are rendered because this doesn't seem to occur to 3d particles (ie, Standard Mass Driver cannons fired by 3D UNC Frigates in Stage 1 Arcade).

[h2]Conclusion[/h2]

With the exception of New Year's Day holiday, we've been working non-stop on the patch. Each test run is extremely tiring since I'll need to pick out graphical glitches, bugs and at the same time avoiding bullets and balancing the new difficulty. But we'll do our best to get the patch to you as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience! We're definitely getting there!

Regards,
Jeremy

Greetings pilots!

First of all, we wish everyone a Merry Christmas and happy Holidays ahead! We'll just like to provide some official updates on what's going on and why there seems to be a radio silence over the last few months.



We've been working on verifying and fixing bugs that was caused when StridesLib shifted from 32-bits to 64-bits. Apparently, there're quite a few issues - some totally unexpected - cropped up during the upgrade. A 64-bits adoption is but a necessary step towards the future and was decided when we thought v1.05b was stable enough. Apparently not.

Therefore, v1.06 will be 64-bits ONLY. Based on our checks, most of us has moved onto 64-bits platform already and should NOT pose a major problem.

[h2]Current Progress[/h2]

We're currently finishing up on verifying Arcade Mode and will be going into Campaign Mode asap. v1.06 will not introduce any new game modes YET.

Our focus will be to first fix all the bugs reported and ensure that you guys have a playable game to play!

[h2]What's next?[/h2]

We'll be canonizing a few new fighter designs, bringing the total selectable fighters from 3 to 6. We'll also be introducing at least 1 new special power for now.

After that's done, we'll formally start working on the Boss Rush mode. Trust me, there'll be quite a few Boss Rush modes.

[h2]What about 32-bits users?[/h2]

We'll include a legacy "beta" mode to preserve v1.05b. The bugs reported will still be there unfortunately but there're workarounds - though joystick will not be usable for Campaign Mode. We wished there's a way for refunds to work - you could still request for it and see it Steam would approve.



This is just an update on what we've been working on. As soon as the patch is released, we'll accompany the patch release with patch notes.

Also, going into 64-bits meant that there's a much larger code footprint. Which in turn, meant that RAM usage will be higher, though no more than 2x than it is now. A machine with 4GB of RAM should still be sufficient to run this game without any issues.

We hope that'll assuage some of the concerns - some were posted on the discussions which we're grateful for!

Looking forward to the v1.06!!

Regards,
Jeremy

Dear all,

In the recent days I've come across certain errors with setting the game to fullscreen mode. When you do that, the game may suddenly go unstable or renders incorrectly.

Here's a possible reason why it's happening:


Apparently, if the scaling mode is set at aspect ratio it may prevent you from setting even a screen resolution on other games.

The correct option should be:

No Scaling

Once that's set, you should have no issues setting to a full screen resolution. This should also apply to other games as well.



So what's the point here? Well, playing in full-screen windowed mode has a rough performance penalty of 15%. You may encounter stuttering as resources are shared between different applications.

By setting to fullscreen mode, you dictate that all resources is to go to the game; (no matter which game) and therefore will most likely perform at its best.

We hope this tip can help you in gaming across the board, not just for our games.

Thanks,
Jeremy

Patch v1.05b has been released! Before we begin, I'd like to lay down a principle of Strides Interactive; that is - regardless of how good or badly the game has been received, regardless of sales, we'll continue to maintain the game as much as possible according to the roadmap.

At a bare minimum, the game must be functional. If it's broken, we'll fix it. We'll never leave a broken game in release - that'll be pretty unprofessional of us.

[h2]Regression[/h2]

As the engine improves, some workflow will be changed and this will more or less lead to regression bugs appearing even when it used to work in previous versions. Therefore, as much as we try NOT to upgrade the game along with the engine, sometimes this is unavoidable. On our end, we do as much testing as possible with our limited hardware and software even.

[h2]Support for Windows 7[/h2]

Technically we still support Windows 7, but we no longer have the means to test the game on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 already. This is due to a recent upgrade we've made to our test machine which now runs on Windows 10.

The test machine will remain on Windows 10 until such a time that most players have moved on to Windows 11.

Unfortunately though, some issues that are found on the newer OS versions do not appear in older Windows 7 and since our previous development laptop had neared its expiry, we weren't able to test for certain behaviors on that laptop either.

Therefore, right now, we'll only dare affirm that we support Windows 10 and 11. Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 will still be technically supported.

[h2]New Features[/h2]

None. This patch is mostly a bug fixing patch.

[h2]Changes[/h2]

- Game runs on VS2017 runtime now; this should NOT affect you since we've already selected VS2019 redistributables that includes VS2017.
- EMP Cannon level 1 and 2 will now fire more frequently, making it usable like a normal weapon. However its damage is halved as a result. Nevertheless, the tactical value of the weapon has been improved tremendously.
- Do note that ships can no longer be perma-disabled by EMP cannons.
- Added some arguments which certain players can key-in to get around certain problems. Namely the recently CPUID crash encountered by one of the players. This is not an issue as I've tested on both Ryzen 7 4800H and i5-12400 without any issue. However, to get around this issue which most likely to be a CPU issue, here're 2 commands REQUIRED:

-skipcpudetection -forcesse2

Place these 2 commands under Launch Commands to get the game to get around CPU detection.

Right-click on Starlight > Properties > General > Launch Options

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

1. Fixed a bug where joystick RT and LT buttons do not work AT ALL
   
2. Fixed a bug where joystick buttons can be assigned but doesn't work in-game
   
3. Fixed a bug where joystick preset can lead to erroneous assignments.
   
4. Fixed a bug where keyboard preset works even when there isn't any
   
5. Fixed a bug where damage-persistent weapons do not inflict ANY damage.
   
6. Fixed a bug where multi-hit damage-persistent weapons do not inflict ANY damage.
   
7. Fixed a bug where damage-persistent weapons report the incorrect amount of damage dealt to the target and subsequent damage inflicted.
   
8. Fixed a bug where the game STUTTERS before almost every wave in all game modes. While the game will still lag with heavy combat situations, it should NOT stutter anymore due to the game itself.
   
9. We cannot guarantee stutter-free gameplay if there're many background apps running that may bottleneck the CPU or if the CPU is throttling due to heat or power limitations.
10. Fixed a weird movement bug in Stage 4 boss where the boss will strangely move off-screen and suddenly pop back into position.
    
11. Fixed a weird regression bug whenever you collect Shield Bonus and the incorrect particle appears like a random scrolling of different sprites.
    
12. Fixed a weird regression bug in the ending where certain 3D explosions look like multiple small dots.
    
13. Optimized the game slightly when it comes to turret creation and re-instantiation of certain effect objects.
    
14. Fixed to a certain extent where mines will start blinking when they appear in large numbers. This still appears for certain ships and we'll try to fix it in future patches. They can still be hit; it's just a little jarring.
    
15. Fixed a major bug with Survival mode where it'll get stuck in Survival #3 forever.
    

I've gotten questions like - oh why are you still working on Starlight etc.. thing is - there're 2 points:
1) The game must remain playable without major breaking bugs and controllability issues.
2) The roadmap promised to customers must be fulfilled.

Whether the game is profitable or not or whether there's a huge player base or not is irrelevant.

As long as we have people giving good feedback, we'll do our best to investigate and fix the issue if possible. The only reason why we can't fix it? - that's because we do not have the means to access the issue in its full scenario.

The stuttering issue only came up AFTER we upgraded our test rig to Windows 10. The direct cause of it wasn't even a performance issue but rather a synchronization issue between the logger and its threads who might be waiting to dump logs at the same time. The starvation period is what led to the stuttering.

Therefore, please be assured that we're doing our best. Patches do take time and some changes require the ENTIRE game to be tested from head to tail. For v1.05b that was certainly the case. Apart from the Arcade tutorial, I've tested EVERY SINGLE STAGE, through campaign and survival to ensure that the patch legit works for everyone.

Thanks again for your support!
Strides Team

This is a bug fix patch meant to address several issues, some outstanding ones, together at once. No contents added.

1. Fixed a bug where weapons that hit only once but is damage-accumulated inflicts full damage upon contact. Ie, a projectile deals 50 dmg, encounters a 10 dmg bullet, should only inflict 40 dmg on a target.
   
2. Fixed a bug where keyboard controls in the options menu while in-game can become somewhat unstable. ie, some keys registered, others aren't.
   
3. Fixed a crash bug where if you press multiple joystick buttons at once, it can sometimes lead to a crash.
   
4. Fixed a soft-lock bug in Controls where waiting for a key to be pressed causes the game to go into a limbo. This is a regression bug; not an existing bug previously. It was introduced during one of the upgrades that unfortunately broke this part of the game.
   
5. Fixed a small issue with players pressing really quickly to traverse menus; a short delay is now added between traversals (ie, Start Game > Arcade Mode). Scrolling the menu itself won't be subjected to the delay.
   
6. Fixed a bug where the Planet Atmosphere doesn't appear anymore. Now it does.
   
7. Fixed a bug where Right-Side D-pad isn't supported. Now this D-pad is fully supported.
   
8. Fixed a bug in the 3D ships where the battles do not have ANY collision between the bullets and the 3D capital ships.
   
9. Fixed an internal implementation with the input listener and the single-threaded listener both working at the same time, sometimes causing multiple controls to be triggered at once.
   

Issues reported will be taken seriously and worked upon once the issue is established to be a bug. Bug fixes tend to be released on Fridays, however, in some cases like these where there's a crash bug, the bug fix patch is released ASAP.

Thanks for reporting the issues; we look forward to hearing from you soon!

Regards,
Starlight Team