Star Explorers News

This is the second of a series of small updates primarily addressing the Alien City.

• I made sure the planet on which you will find the city will have Ammonia in the liquid state - it had the potential to be in vaporous form previously, and this was not what I had in mind.
  
• Now the pink fog should only appear if you go under the ammonia canal.
  
• Rain has been limited, so it will not appear in the city. In the future I may allow for rain, if I can find a way from preventing it appearing in buildings, but until then, I am just not having it appear on the planet.
  
• More NPC dialogue options! NPCs in the mothership and the alien city will have more to say.
  
• Removal of repeat statements. NPCs should no longer repeat the same phrase more than once. If you are loading an old game, they may still repeat themselves, but for new games this will not happen.
  
• Star particle effects had a problem where they got stuck in the middle of the star. This should no longer happen.
  

This is the first of a series of small updates primarily addressing the Alien City.

Here I have included a city collider model, which should prevent players from jumping through windows, and getting caught in the map.

Next I plan to fix the issue with the fog level, where the map turns pink in the canal. I will also be adding more dialogue entries so each NPC will offer a wider variety of information.

It's going to require another new game at this time. Again, sorry. Also, I have some fixes in store, but the new functionality is in place. I wanted to get something up this weekend, just to test it a bit before I go crazy.


• NPC names - human and alien
  
• NPC dialogue - humans and friendly aliens only. This will get an overhaul soon. They just give you three phrases right now. They can repeat the same phrase and there are not a lot to choose from, but I have a longer list to add to the game. I will also prevent them from repeating in the next build.
  
• Alien City - It still needs a proper 3D collider, so you might get stuck in some of the windows or details. I am working on that now. For now, I recommend staying on the ground and using the proper doors as much as possible. There are also some weird issues I will fix soon, like it rains inside the buildings (if it's raining) and alien NPCs seem to switch trade items with each visit. But overall it seems to work, and adds a new environment to the game. GOOD LUCK FINDING IT!
  




If this works out, I may add one more unique alien city to the game. That would again require a new game at this point, but I will see if I can work around that.

[h3]UFO Debris[/h3]
The debris produced by an exploding UFO worked only for the first storage compartment. This was actually true for debris from asteroids as well. This feature should now be working correctly.

[h3]Misplaces Sitters[/h3]
It appears that for new games, the seated NPCs will appear in the correct positions. I am not sure why this problem happened, but it appears to be working properly for new games, so I am not going to worry about it at this time. If you have a saved game, and you want to correct the position of the seated NPCs, you can go to your game's save folder in "C:/users/-your username-/AppData/Local/Star_Explorers" and find your game's save folder. Open that and delete the "mship_storage1.txt" file.

This should correct the positions, but it will also reset all the NPC inventory.

[h3]UFO Update[/h3]

• UFO's should no longer be brought back if you destroy them. This will not work retroactively, so you will have to destroy them one last time.
  
• UFO Bipedal Aliens should now behave properly. They were getting stuck in the previous build, and would not react to the player. Their guns would appear, but would remain stuck in the middle of the alien's body. Now they should hold their guns, and either attack the player (if hostile) or behave neutrally if not.
  
• UFO Bipedal Aliens should now spawn inside of the UFO rooms. They were in a bad habit of spawning between the walls. They still might shoot through walls, but I have reason to believe I will be able to fix that in the next update.
  
• UFOs will now produce space debris if you destroy them. Capturing this will put alien tech item's into your ship's storage.
  

[h3]Vsync[/h3]

• I have included a file in the game's save folder called "Vsync.txt" which you can edit. It will be set to 0 by default, enabling Vsync. If you want to disable Vsync, open that file in "C:/users/-your username-/AppData/Local/Star Explorers" and change the 0 at the end of the line to a 1. If you don't know what vsync is, just ignore this.
  
• Previously vsync was set to be disabled by default, and there was no way for users to change it.
  
• I will look into adding an in-game button to enable/disable vsync.
  

[h3]Problem[/h3]

• All the seated NPCs in the mothership seem to have moved a foot or so (in game space) forward, and are now intersecting the tables at which they sit. This is true for games that are reloading the mothership, I am not sure if it effects games in which the mothership has not yet been entered.
  
• If this is only for reloaded motherships, I will probably not fix it. I would test it now, but I cannot work on it any more today, and I did not want to delay the update.