Star Explorers News

So yesterday's experiment worked (kind of) but also seemed to introduce some fresh bugs that I was not ready to deal with. It seems the other programmer's script, while fine in and of itself, was clashing in unpredictable ways with the existing Star Explorers script.

So I have rolled back the changes. But I learned quite a bit from this experience, and so I have updated the existing screen resolution script based on that new perspective.

I am hoping this new script is more robust and compatible with different computers and set ups.

[h3]Full Screen[/h3]
By default, the game should open in full screen mode, at the same resolution as your current desktop.

[h3]Video Options[/h3]
You will only be able to access the video options from the main menu. When you change video options, you will need to restart the game. This is a limitation that I realize is inconvenient, but once it is set up, you should not have to revisit these settings.

Here you should be able to switch to window mode, and also optionally add a border to the window. Note, the window and border should not exceed the desktop size. If you set it at or above the desktop size, screen resolution will not work, and should go to a 1280 x 720 window. This is the minimum size at which Star Explorers can and should be run.

If you have any trouble setting the window size, or if it does not default in full screen mode, please let me know.

This is a pretty major update, and I am expecting some issues to pop up. I have reached out to another programmer who made a resolution configuration script, and we integrated it with Star Explorers. It looks like it is working as designed (mostly) and it feels a lot more robust than the one I wrote.

When you run the game, the resolution options panel will pop up automatically. It should store whatever settings you use, so once it's set up, you'll just have to click "Play!" to go forward.

[h3]Note:[/h3]
You can still change the video settings in the Options Panel, but do not try to set resolution there, it will not work.

[h3]Issue: [/h3]
UPDATE: As of version 0.6.2a the window (fullscreen) seems to have been resolved. It should allow you to set the screen size to 1280 x 720 (which is still my recommended size for the game) and have it fill your whole screen without giving you really small menus and text, as can happen at higher resolutions.

There is a new mode called window (fullcreen) that allows you to play full screen, but it is somehow not really full screen. One of the options here is to choose a lower resolution like 1280 x 720, and have it fill your screen, so the game would be kind of zoomed in. This option is not working correctly right now. But normal window mode and normal full screen modes should be working. God Willing!

I would really love to hear your feedback on this one, as would the programmer I am working with.

I found a couple bugs and was able to fix one of them.

[h3]The Black Sphere[/h3]
The first was a strange black sphere that appears inside the sapceship and mothership. It turns out it is the bottom of the actual space background intersecting with the ship interior. It's not really a bug, but poor level design on my part. I fixed it in the ship, but I still have to address the possibility in the mothership. In any case, if you see it let me know, but it does not actually impact the gameplay.

[h3]Planet Crash[/h3]
The other bug is a rare crash that can happen when landing on a planet. I have only encountered it a couple times over several weeks of playtesting. The game would stop responding when landing on a planet on these rare occasions.

The worse part was that when you reload the game, sometimes your ship would crash into the planet. So I have made a few changes that should prevent this bug from crashing the game. However, instead of removing the suspicious code that I think was causing it, I added an error alert, so I know that was actually the part that triggered the bug. There were actually three separate places that I thought might be responsible, so I included a different warning for each.

The first one is if the planet's star is not recognized. This is the worst case, and it will still crash the game if this happens.

However, I don't think that was the cause. The other two were bits of code that were important in a very early version of the game, but became unnecessary in later editions. Since they did not seem to be causing trouble, I guess I left them in there without realizing it. If one of these is the trigger, as I suspect, they should no longer crash the game, but they will issue a warning.

Please let me know if you see a warning message when attempting to land on a planet, and note which warning was issued.

[h3]HUD update[/h3]
The HUD can be toggled on and off with the F11 key. This is for anyone who wants to take screenshots or video. This feature was already in the game, but it has been improved to include turning off the crosshair as well as the health panel.

This morning I accidentally uploaded the game with a certain variable set for testing purposes. It included a readout of game parameters and some other minor issues that I use for internal testing. The only issue that would have effected gameplay is that NPCs and aliens would have had their first quest set to finding acknexium, rather than a random quest.

Sorry for any confusion or inconvenience.

In other news my current play through of the game has been quite stable so far. No major issues have been discovered. It looks like we are getting very close to the 5.0 release!

So I have labeled this latest update as 0.6.0, skipping over the 0.5.x range. The reason is that I was using 0.5.x for the now defunct versions of the game in which the whole saving and loading system had been rewritten. I will probably not return to that version, but I am keeping it for reference.

Anyway, a helpful player identified a few issues like missing texture files and more importantly, not being able to get on the mothership, in yesterday's update.

I forgot to mention, I have increased the warning level in this version of the game. This means that error messages will pop up that might normally be ignored by the engine. It could cause the game to be more unstable, but it should immediately indicate what is causing the issue. So if you see any warning messages pop up, please let me know.

Anyway, I was able to resolve those issues, and you should now be able to board the mothership again.

I also fixed another issue on the mothership, where NPCs were not generating any quests in the first slot. This should now work properly, but if you are loading a saved game, they will not have those quests. To get your NPCs to have a quest in the first slot, without having to restart the game, you can go to: "C://users/-your username-/AppData/Local/Star_Explorers" and open your saved game folder.

Find the file called "mship_storage1.txt" and delete it. This will reset all mothership NPCs, and they should generate new quests.

I also changed very slightly the way the game sets resolution. There was a problem when I set the game window to have no border, and it would appear on screen larger than it should have. So if you set it to 1280 x 720, it would actually appear at 1286 x 747. This is because the no border command would not actually change the size of the window, but would expand the game to fill the existing window size, which included a border.

I am hoping this helps to resolve some issues players were having with setting the screen resolution.

I also have done a couple other experiments on this version. First, I used a tool that should allow Star Explorers to access more than 1200 MB of RAM. This was a limitation that was built into the engine. Hopefully this might prevent some crashes due to the game exceeding its RAM access.

Another thing is that I have set the game to ignore DPI scaling settings in Windows. I know this caused some issues for players who used DPI scaling, especially if they wanted to use window mode.

So lots of housekeeping has been done, and I am going to continue testing and clearing out bugs for the next couple weeks.