Star Explorers News

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.

I have now overhauled the whole inventory system and added some other cool stuff. It will also require a new game if you want to play it.

[h3]New Inventory System[/h3]
The old inventory items had a very confusing system and I revised the whole thing, so it will not be compatible with old saves games.

[h3]Menu Update Underway[/h3]
The menu and inventory graphics have all been spruced up to look more spacey, and I was able to add some nifty sound effects to these interactions. There is still work to do here, but inventory, quests and blueprints/crafting have all been improved.

[h3]Quest Panel[/h3]
This has been updated to include some helpful information about where to find certain items

[h3]Bugs[/h3]
During these updates I was able to discover and resolve a large number of bugs.

• Items should retain their correct values when trading
  
• A bug occurring when shooting the rocket launcher was fixed
  
• The "Place All" and "Take All" buttons now appear correctly depending on the item type
  
• UFO interior bug was causing staircase colliders to appear in the wrong place (these colliders are invisible so it's possible no one noticed it)