Star Explorers News

[h3]Character Speed[/h3]
Players have complained about how the speed of your character's movement is too fast, or seemingly modified by the framerate.

I thought I had compensated for this in my script, but my wife recently got a new computer. So I tried it and I saw that it was indeed much faster than it should be.

This new version addresses this issue, and I believe it resolves it. I saw that I was incorrectly using the games frame rate to adjust movement. This is actually necessary to do, if you don't adjust movement based on the frame rate, then higher frame rates will lead to higher movement speeds. In this case, the way I did it was incorrect and inconsistent.

To fix it I had to revisit every single function that moves an entity in the game, and adjust the formula slightly. It was not terribly time consuming once I saw what was wrong.

I think the actual speed might still be a little fast, but it at least appears to be consistent from one system to another. I can still tweak the movement speed as needed based on player feedback.

[h3]Star Chart Crash[/h3]
I was also able to resolve a major bug that would crash the game when attempting to open the star chart. Apparently this crash was being caused by something I configured incorrectly on Steam. The game worked fine on my computer and when run from other storefronts, but the Steam version was crashing.

After altering the Steam configuration, it appears to have been resolved. If you do encounter this (note: this was only in the testing branch) try uninstalling the game, restarting your computer, then re-installing the game.

[h3]Alien War[/h3]
Not a new feature, but I stumbled into this alien war while testing the game recently. These kinds of interactions may not be common, but they are interesting to see on those rare occasions. Presented for your enjoyment ... slow-motion added for fun.

Two issues have been addressed and resolved in this update.

[h3]Biped Weapons[/h3]
Bipedal aliens that carry weapons were still utilizing the old inventory system, so the weapons were unusable. I have updated this so those weapons can be used after they are dropped. I also prevented the bug that allowed players to take the alien weapons while they were still being held (although I am thinking about re-introducing this as a possible feature in the future).

[h3]Alien Bits[/h3]


The animal type aliens have been updated too. In the past when they were killed their body parts would fling off in different directions. I am not sure what happened but that feature no longer worked. I was able to update it so that it is working again.

I found out recently that the game engine I am using (3D Gamestudio) actually prefers pcx and dds files to bmp, jpg and png files. I have been using a variety of image files for Star Explorers and I occasionally have encountered some "bad file format" errors.

So in an effort to eliminate these kinds of errors, I am going through all the image files and replacing them with the recommended formats.

It is a long process and I am just starting. One good side effect is that I am saving disk space in the process, as well as eliminating a bunch of unused functions in the game script. So by the end of this process I think Star Explorers will become a much tighter program that takes up much less room on your hard drive.

In the process I was able to identify some textures that were missing from the game files. However, I am guessing I will mess up in the process and some textures might be missing (if I failed to reference the right file or something).

[h3]Day/Night Cycle Issue[/h3]
I was also able to identify and fix the bug that caused planets to go to night time after players left a cave, so the day/night cycle should be more consistent now.

There was a bug in the blueprints. When crafting an item it used the older values and the resulting item would have strange features like having a negative value for trade.



I had updated items which appear in caches and merchant inventories, but forgot to update the items when crafted with blueprints.

This will not fix items that were already crafted, but should produce the right results when crafting any new items. The blueprints themselves should be fine, so don't get rid of those.

The trade menu allowed players to cheat by manipulating the amount of an item bought or sold (I won't get into details).

I was able to reproduce the bug, and find the root cause. Now it should not allow for this kind of swindling to occur.