New Stars News

This is a summary of development for New Stars in January. The 'Meta' update focuses on stabilizing and optimizing the game with long-term improvements, while also implementing some features based on player feedback.

Last January focused on reworking core calculations to support a client/server model, but this January focuses on reworking core calculations to use parallel processing for long-term performance improvements.

[h2]Improved Ship Pathfinding[/h2]
Ship movement and pathfinding has been redesigned and is now a lot more stable.

[h3]Before[/h3]
Previously ships often got stuck when moving around planets.



[h3]After[/h3]
Ships now curve around planets instead of following a polygon around the planet, resulting in smoother movement.



Ships also better avoid collisions with other ships in battle, or while in formation.

[h2]Multithreaded Optimizations[/h2]
New multithreaded optimizations are being introduced for heavy CPU calculations with a lot of potential to reduce lag spikes, implementing parallel processing.

[h3]Fleet Pathfinding Optimizations[/h3]
Fleet pathfinding now uses parallel processing and large lag spikes no longer occur when pathfinding across long distances.



[h3]Galaxy Size Changes[/h3]
Huge: Now spawns with 300 stars instead of 500.
Large: Now spawns with 250 stars instead of 400.
Medium: Now spawns with 200 stars instead of 300.
Small: Now spawns with 150 stars instead of 200.
Tiny: Now spawns with 100 stars instead of 150.

Galaxy sizes were way to large, and increments of 100 stars didn't make much sense for the size of the game.

[h4]Duel - New Galaxy Size[/h4]
In addition, a new 50 player map has been added, which is most suitable for 1v1 scenarios or quick games.



[h3]What's to come...[/h3]
There is significant potential with parallel optimization in terms of reducing lag, however it requires an extensive codebase redesign, but I believe it'll be worthwhile. Hence, updates during this period may be slower than they were before.

View all changes at newstarsgame.com/changelog.

New Stars continues to be in active development, so if you would like to inform future updates/improvements you can do so via this form.

[hr][/hr]
[h3]Stay tuned for more updates...[/h3]
Feel free to comment your suggestions below.

🪵 View the Changelog: newstarsgame.com/changelog.
🕹️ Playtest New Stars: adamjr.xyz.
⭐ Wishlist New Stars to support development.

This page is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.

Pushing previous beta update to all users.

[hr][/hr]
More optimizations, new galaxy sizes, and provisional removal of half-added features.

[h2]Added[/h2]

• Add: Map -> Map -> Duel map size - 50 stars galaxy.
  
• Add: Create Map -> Option to select duel stars galaxy map.
  
• Add: Create Map -> Recommended settings for duel stars galaxy map such as player count etc.
  

[h2]Optimized[/h2]

• Optimize: Resource Manager -> Reworked to use multithreading for most monthly resource calculations.
  
• Optimize: Pathfinding -> Reworked to use multithreading for calculating routes, to reduce lag spikes.
  
• Optimize: Fleet -> Eliminated large lag spikes when moving fleets (on modern CPUs).
  

[h2]Fixed[/h2]

• Fix: Start Game -> Does not open Ubiquity and spawns in the center of galaxy.
  
• Fix: Ubiquity -> Regular starbase labels appear huge.
  

[h2]Changed[/h2]

• Change: Resource Manager -> Space entity players no longer have resource calculations, reducing lag.
  
• Change: Map Generator -> Star counts for each map size are now `100`, `150`, `200`, `250`, `300` instead of `100`, `200`, `300`, `400`, `500` for new games.
  
  • 400-500 stars is impractically large.
    
  • Double the smallest map size is too large of an increment.
    
  • Galaxy visuals were generally poor on map sizes of >300 stars.
    
  • Loading saves from old map sizes has been tested to work as normal.
    

[h2]Removed[/h2]

• Remove: Celestial Squid -> No longer spawns in galaxy, because it is currently too broken.
  
  • The celestial squid may appear again when more bug fixes and polishes have been done.
    
• Remove: Blue galaxy smoke from gold galaxy.
  

View changes from previous updates: newstarsgame.com/changelog.

Experimenting with running monthly calculations on multiple threads, to reduce lag spikes.

[h2]Fixed[/h2]

• Fix: Pop manager -> Population of clans does not increase.
  
• Fix: Ubiquity -> Opening a system is very laggy from new ship pathfinding system.
  

[h2]Optimized[/h2]

• Optimize: Pop manager -> Reworked to use multithreading for colony population calculations, which should slightly reduce monthly update lag.
  

View changes from previous updates: newstarsgame.com/changelog.

[hr][/hr]
Here is the changelog for the update released exclusively to the beta branch:

Total redesign of ship movement, and rescaling of ubiquity star systems, focusing on fixing pathfinding bugs.

[h2]Fixed[/h2]

• Fix: Ubiquity -> Ships often get stuck around planets, or struggle to move around them, especially during battles.
  
• Fix: Loading screen -> Some text appears to overflow their backgrounds.
  
• Fix: Combat system -> Ships collide with each other in combat.
  
• Fix: Ubiquity -> Space squids -> Beelines into planet roundabouts (so does fleet ubi position).
  
• Fix: Xeno Exterminator -> Raze Colony -> Multiple raze orders can be queued.
  

[h2]Tweaked[/h2]

• Tweak: Ubiquity -> Systems now always spawn at 0,0 instead of at a slight offset.
  

[h2]Changed[/h2]

• Change: Ubiquity -> Reduced size of star systems by 10x [due to limitations with new pathfinding system].
  
• Change: Ubiquity -> Starbases of unknown players no longer have empty HUDs.
  

[h2]Note[/h2]
Following the post-release updates, there is a need for more careful and slower updates, like this one, deployed to the beta branch first. This update was delayed by a few days, since it was a huge rework and introduced many bugs that were internally fixed [20+ internally fixed bugs are omitted from the changelog].

This will likely introduce some bugs I have not found, so the update will be deployed on the beta branch first to gather feedback. Sometimes a step backwards is required to take 2 steps forward.

[hr][/hr]
View changes from previous updates:

Hotfix for colony siege not triggering, and some other fixes.

[h2]Fixed[/h2]

• Fix: Colony -> Siege -> Colony siege is sometimes not triggered [due to an issue with new fleet stats].
  
  • This bug appeared after the previous update which modified siege calculations.
    
• Fix: Ubiquity -> Fleet -> After opening a system, fleets initially don't appear in fleet formation and appear inside each other.
  
• Fix: Load save -> From in-game -> Fog of war duplicates and is not cleaned up [behind the scenes] when loading a save, which may cause memory issues.
  
• Fix: Load save -> Sometimes shows galactic core is visible at first in the initial star system.
  
• Fix: Load save -> From in-game -> Empire borders are not cleaned up [behind the scenes] when loading a save, which may cause memory issues.
  

View changes from previous updates: newstarsgame.com/changelog.

The first update of 2024. A step towards making the game stable.

[h2]Fixed[/h2]

• Fix: Endgame screen -> Does not auto-pause time and allows controlling time while open.
  
• Fix: Endgame screen -> Scrollbar does not work and appears duplicated.
  
• Fix: Colony siege -> If nobody is enforcing siege, it should auto reduce.
  
• Fix: Solace ship builder -> Opens with the previous ship that was loaded automatically instead of unlocked preset.
  
• Fix: Colony panel -> Build queue is not visible when viewing an unoccupied enemy colony, when the starbase is occupied by self.
  
• Fix: Colony siege -> Civilian ships should not progress siege.
  
  • Siege progress is now determined by base damage, as opposed to ship strength.
    
• Fix: Cross-scene -> Music button -> Tooltip starts off as empty.
  

[h2]Improved[/h2]

• Improve: Diplomacy panel -> Agreements -> Show if we grant the other empire border access.
  

View changes from previous updates: newstarsgame.com/changelog.