Star Explorers News

[h3]New feature! [/h3]
The Wormhole 2000 is a special alien item that you can find in the game. It is a small, portable wormhole that will establish a link between your backpack and your spaceship's storage. This way it will be much more convenient to manage all the stuff you collect on your explorations.



It's alien tech, so you'll have to look around in order to find one. Even if you do, they're not cheap!

[h3]Strange cave - texture issue[/h3]
New caves should no longer have the strange, green glowing areas with incorrect textures. This was not a common problem, but it was pretty ugly. Old caves that you revisit may still have this problem, but the cave area will be missing completely. I could not find any way to fix this, but going forward it should not happen in any new caves.

[h3]Cave pits[/h3]
Cave pits were somehow included in some of the recent builds of the game. These will be replaced with the standard downward sloping hallways. I do want to add pits again, but I will need to supply a way to escape them before I do that.

[h3]Alien NPCs[/h3]
Aliens in the alien city should now have consistent items in their inventories like the NPCs on the mothership.

No new features today, but I was able to fix a number of issues.


[h3]Fixed Stuff[/h3]

• Meteors will no longer disappear if the player goes off the edge of the map
  
• Meteors now have special sound effects
  
• Warp Effect no longer has that strange size limit. It should work properly at all resolutions
  
• The game was occasionally resetting full screen back to windowed mode, or more recently windowed mode back to full screen, which is now the default. This should no longer happen
  

Due to some reports of issues with screen resolution, I have made some small adjustments to the testing branch.

• The game will create a new file called "options.cfg" instead of using the old "settings_new.cfg." When you run it, it will go back to the default values.
  
• The game should now start in full screen mode, at whatever resolution your monitor is currently set to by default.
  
• Some code was cleaned up in the process, hopefully it will work better. I plan to get this working right before moving on to other bugs and/or features, so if you can provide feedback on how well it works or doesn't, that will help a lot.
  
• 4K seems to be a problem, but I do not have a 4K monitor to test on. The spaceship panel was not visible, and the health/stats panel on to was off center for some reason.
  

I think the game looks and runs best at 1280 x 720, but it should still work at any resolution higher than that.

Only one small feature has been added to the testing branch...


[h3]Meteor Showers[/h3]

• Be careful, they will do tremendous damage if they hit close to you!
  
• They will probably appear too often right now, but for testing it's better to make sure they work.
  
• They will appear more often on lava planets, but can appear almost anywhere.
  
• I still plan to add a sound effect, as well as making sure they respond to the player's position on the planet. Right now they may disappear if you move out of range.
  

Lot's of small fixes in this one.

[h3]Alien City:[/h3]

• I had to change which planet the alien city appears on due to the temperature being too high for liquid ammonia. At first I tried manually adjusting the temperature, but this did not work properly after reloading the game somehow. So I set the temperature like other planets , via star temp and distance from star
  
• If you already started a new game, the city will not be in the same location, but two planets further out. This may cause issues, and the city may be inaccessible if that planet is a gas giant. It should work properly for any new games though
  
• Next step will be to update the alien city model (from the outside) so it looks better
  

[h3]Aliens and Floaters:[/h3]

• Fixed issue where aliens were stuck up in the air after landing on a planet
  
• Furry aliens (also those with crystals or fungus) had a negative impact in frame-rate. This has been improved.
  
• Frame rate in caves with "floaters" - those eyeball like aliens - has been improved dramatically. Somehow it was creating way too many of them
  
• Fixed a problem where tree leaves were appearing without alpha - like big black squares.
  
• Fixed issue where floater explosion sounds were getting cut off early
  
• Fixed issue where floaters were not respawning after returning to a planet
  

[h3]Ancient Ruins:[/h3]

• Improved debris scattering on ancient ruins
  
• Stair colliders have been added to ancient ruins (inside and outside) so you should not experience as much jerky movement when going up