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Starcom: Unknown Space News

Weekly Update: Mar 7, 2025

Last week I mentioned I was getting over an illness. It doesn't seem to have been Covid or the Flu, just a really bad head cold. Maybe due to not having had one in over five years, my immune system was out of practice? Still not 100%, but definitely feeling much better-- thanks for all the well-wishes.

On Tuesday I updated the default build with a series of patches that had been deployed to the opt-in branch, addressing minor issues since the last major update. I have a fairly robust testing procedure that has mostly avoided major issues hitting the default branch. But mistakes happen and this time some recent change had broken the music system. Game and UI sounds are handled using Unity's own sound system, but music is handled using the 3rd party audio middleware "Wwise". It's a fairly complex tool with a lot of settings and things that can get upset, so I had a panicky spell trying to figure out what broke.

Fortunately, it turned out to be something really simple: I had accidentally set the "enable Wwise" toggle to "off". Within a few hours of players reporting the issue I had a hot fix uploaded. Not exactly game-breaking, but a major issue in my categorization and a stressful few hours.

In other news, the Russian and Ukrainian volunteer translation teams have gotten the game into a solid state for their respective languages-- I've now marked both those languages as supported. A big thanks to those players for having dedicated their time to improving the localizations and also identifying outstanding missing symbols!

The combined update list for recent patches up through Kepler 21519:

  • Shipyard rotate hint not showing correct controls for controller
  • Several minor controller hints
  • Changed navigating module selection with controller: DPAD up/down now cycles category, DPAD left/right now cycles module. Instead of wrapping, moves to next category.
  • Mitigate potential memory leak when on the Operations Panel of the station
  • Fix minor memory leak from saves
  • Volunteer localization updates for Russian
  • Fixed issue with Ukrainian localization causing exceptions in a few dialogues
  • Various (ML) localization update to fill in missing symbols since initial creation
  • Fix to dialogue option not shown for Sepharial Guild Envoy
  • Several minor typo fixes

Until next week!
- Kevin

Kepler 21519 Patch

Hot patch to fix issue with music not playing in latest update.

Kepler 21517 Patch Notes

Kepler 21517 Patch:

  • Mitigate potential memory leak when on the Operations Panel of the station
  • Several minor controller hints
  • Fix minor memory leak from saves
  • Changed navigating module selection with controller: DPAD up/down now cycles category, DPAD left/right now cycles module. Instead of wrapping, moves to next category.
  • Numerous missing localization symbols
  • Volunteer localization updates for Russian
  • Fixed issue with Ukrainian localization causing exceptions in a few dialogues
  • Various (ML) localization update to fill in missing symbols since initial creation
  • Shipyard rotate hint not showing correct controls for controller
  • Fix to dialogue option not shown for Sepharial Guild Envoy
  • Several minor typo fixes

Weekly Update: Feb 28, 2025

Another quick update this week. Just after last week's post I started to feel a bit of a scratchy throat and by Saturday I had my first full-on head cold in years and it was a rough one.

By Wednesday I was starting to feel a bit better and was able to get a patch build out to the opt-in beta branch yesterday. This one mainly adds a number of missing localization symbols for the various translations, plus a few minor bug fixes and tweaks to controller input.

Until next week,
Kevin

Weekly Update: Feb 21, 2025

Very quick update this week.

In the past week I spent a little bit longer investigating the memory leak on the Operations Panel I discussed last time, before posting a patch to the opt-in beta branch that mostly mitigates it.

Apart from that, I've:
  • Made progress with the help of some volunteer translators on eliminating the remaining few instances of untranslated symbols in the game
  • Started investigating reported Deck / Controller issues
  • Misc. business planning/annual tax stuff

Until next week,
Kevin