Starcom: Unknown Space News

Kepler 21540 is a very minor patch to address some text scaling issues for Steam Deck verification.

Next week I'll be traveling with my wife to attend the Nordic Game conference in Malmö, Sweden.

This is actually the first time I've ever attended a game developer conference: when I first started out doing indie game development, it was not at all clear that this would be a profitable endeavor, so I resisted any expense that wasn't absolutely essential for making the game I was working on.

At a certain point the Starcom games became successful enough that a conference would be a reasonable expense, but I was so overwhelmed with the literal thousands of tasks that I rarely felt like I could spare the time, and when I could it didn't necessarily align with an industry event I was interested in.

Now that Starcom: Unknown Space has been out of Early Access for 8 months, I'm still making updates, but they aren't critical patches: mostly QoL improvements, bug fixes and addressing the few remaining areas where players need a bit more guidance.

This felt like the ideal time to take a workcation and see what other developers are doing, and the Nordic conference fit our schedule.

So the regular weekly updates may pause or be irregular for the next two weeks until I get back, although I will be checking emails and the forums periodically.

Until then!
- Kevin

(Posting a day earlier than usual because I'm out of town this weekend.)

On Sunday I posted build 21533 which addressed a few QoL type issues and aimed to fix several of the remaining "stuck" issues. These are spots where the main storyline appears to stall out. Most of these cases arise from the player doing something different from how I expected and therefore missing or not triggering the next directive.

One scenario that I've seen multiple reports for at this point is where a storyline is waiting for the player to return to Celaeno, at which point Cdre Yu will give an update and/or new assignment. So one of the new changes is to have a crew member suggest returning to Celaeno if Yu has an active "attract" conversation (i.e., a conversation that causes the Operations button to glow) for an extended period of time.

This was a bit tricky for technical reasons. When I designed the conversation system, I was not overly concerned with the performance cost of initializing and evaluating a dialogue tree: it was something that happened only at the start of a conversation, so spending 1 ms on the operation wasn't exorbitant. As I later discovered, the evaluation can leak a small amount of memory under some circumstances. But as long as this evaluation is rare, it's not a big deal.

But if I want to check if Yu has an attract conversation, I have to do this evaluation regularly.

As I've previously discussed, the mission system evaluates missions every 0.16 seconds. Even though that's somewhat infrequent, I think that's still too frequent to perform a check that costs 1ms in order to resolve a scenario that most players may not be encountering.

Fortunately, the mission system uses "short-circuit" evaluation so that if one condition fails, no later condition in the same check even happens.

So here's my solution:



By way of analogy, imagine the first lane is someone with a stopwatch who starts it when Yu's conversation button starts glowing, and resets the stopwatch when they notice it's not glowing anymore. Also, they're kind of distracted so only check every ten seconds.

The second lane is someone looking at that stopwatch. As soon as it hits twelve minutes they tell the Biomed officer to say something. A second prompt can occur after that point if the player returns to Celaeno.

Based on the game's anonymous analytics, I know that players have been triggering these prompts. But due to limitations of my analytics, I don't have a super clear picture of where they are in the game when they happen. So rather than spend a lot of time trying to add instrumentation, I'll just ask here:

If you've gotten a prompt in game to return to Celaeno, where in the game were you, what was it that Yu was waiting to tell you and did the timing seem reasonable?

FYI, I won't be responding to discussion posts or feedback for the next few days. Until next week!
- Kevin

Various fixes to areas where players have reported being stuck with no clear way to advance the main storyline, plus some QoL improvements:

• Visited trade planets are considered "explored" for purposes of dimming explored stars (existing saves may need to revisit system)
  
• "Highlight investigate" will also cause unexplored star systems to pulse
  
• Add First Officer tip about star dimming
  
• If Cdre Yu has a new "glowing" conversation topic for an extended period of time, eventually a crew member will suggest returning to Celaeno
  
• The Heretic Portal "Kaleidoscope" hint no longer advances when the player revisits the portal, instead it waits for the player to activate it
• Add hint lane to Southern Chariot if player hightails away from Chariot before it jumps
• A random void system with an ocean planet is added mid-game to ensure Floral Blight can always be completed

Very quick update this week:

On Monday I posted a small patch that adds the ability to load a blueprint even if you don't have the requirements while in planning mode (plus a few minor other fixes).

I've also started work on another minor update that will attempt to address some of the remaining cases where the main storyline has appeared "stuck" for some players.

Until next week!
- Kevin