Star Explorers News

Slight Adjustment to the previous build...

I have adjusted the planet rotation so that it turns in the opposite direction from the spaceship. This was more cosmetic, but it was strange to see the planet rotating faster than the ship in the same direction. I also fixed an issue where the time of day could be different from that shown at the ship's helm.

I'm getting some good feedback, and have made a couple small changes to the game.

1. Players can now orbit a planet faster in order to speed up the day/night cycle. This is important especially on planets with a cold night time temperature, but will help in any case where you want to arrive during the day. Previously, you could rest in the sleep/healing pod to speed up this process, but now you can also just press the "W" key (or whatever key you've assigned for forward movement) while in orbit to speed things up.

2. Looting alien caches will turn friendly aliens against you. If it's working correctly, you may open their loot with no repercussions, but if you take something, they will turn hostile immediately.

3. I have modified the way music is played. I'm not going to say it's better, but it is a bit different. The music should now play in a more regular tempo. Previously, the notes themselves would play slower or faster depending on the pitch. Now it can adjust the pitch, without effecting the speed at which the note is played, so it should sound more rhythmic.

A few issues were addressed.

1. Flashing damage panel. It seems if you were taking damage from some environmental condition on a planet, you would see the damage panel flash quickly whenever you returned to the landing craft to re-fill your oxygen tanks. This should no longer happen. Sorry for anyone who experienced this.

2. Crashed UFOs had a strange problem where some areas appeared to use the natural cave tiles instead of UFO tiles. This should be resolved, even in caves where it happened before. I would appreciate if anyone can corroborate this is resolved.

3. Also, some crashed UFOs could form with only one sad, empty room. I think this should be working better now. Let me know if you encounter this again.

Okay ... this is not actually newsworthy in terms of Star Explorers, but maybe you might be interested.

I found this article about an RTX shader this guy is working on. The images have a few free shaders as well as the not free one, all activated through "reshade." The article describes how to do it.

RTX OFF


RTX ON!


RTX OFF


RTX ON!


RTX OFF


RTX ON!


https://www.hardwaretimes.com/enable-ray-tracing-rtx-on-amd-radeon-gpus-using-this-mod/

This will work with any game, not just Star Explorers. The shaders I used here include ambient occlusion, bloom, HDR and the RTX one described in the article. I feel like it adds a nice bit of realism to the game, but it does have a strange interaction with some of the menus. Nothing game breaking, but a few strange visual artifacts...

So some kind players have suggested a better approach to repair kits that made a lot of sense. They were a bit costly, and having them sold in strange amounts did not make a lot of sense.



So now, repair kits, oxygen tanks and health kits that you purchase will be cheaper and will always have 100 units available (you can still buy less than 100 units but that's a different story).

If, however, you find the kit in a cave or other location, it will not have the full 100 units, just like before.

This will only effect newly spawned kits. If you are playing an existing game, the old, expensive kits will still be there until you buy them. Sorry about that, it is currently unavoidable.