Star Explorers News

[h3]Mothership Issues[/h3]
Mothership NPCs have been improved, with better lighting/shadows. Also, their inventory for sale has been adjusted so they will not have as many alien items. Vendors will now have a better budget with which to buy back items.

[h3]Cave Pits Removed[/h3]
Pits should no longer appear in caves. These are still a feature I want to add, but currently there is no way to escape them.

[h3]Wind Reduced on Storm Planets[/h3]
Storm planets will no longer push the player around constantly, however, tornadoes themselves will still push the player and damage them.

[h3]Issue with Missing Planets[/h3]
I found a strange issue where planets do not reload properly. I was not quite able to resolve why it was happening, but have applied a work-around for the time being. Hopefully this will not cause any new problems!

[h3]UFO Robots[/h3]
Robots have been reintroduced to hostile UFOs. They were replaced by bipedal aliens, which should still appear on UFOs, so now you should be seeing both.

[h3]Missing Lander[/h3]
During playtesting, I noticed the player's landing craft did not appear in the UFO hangar. However, when reloading a UFO, it appeared where it should be. Let me know if this is still an issue. I would resolve it, but it is not game breaking, and I wanted to upload the new branch tonight.

[h3]UFO - Ancient Ruin Bug - FIXED[/h3]
This update fixes a bug that was introduced when I added crashed UFOs to the game. What happened is that when a planet had either a crashed UFO or an ancient ruin, it would not allow that planet to reload on later visits.

It was easy to fix once I was able to identify the cause. I want to thank the players for reaching out and for their patience. This sort of thing is inevitable when new features are added, especially when it's me programming them :)

[h3]Galaxy Bug - NOT FIXED[/h3]
There is another bug that will prevent a galaxy file from reloading. It is actually easy to fix the file but I have not been able to identify the cause yet. If you encounter this, where the game will hang when trying to reload from the main menu - or I suppose it might happen when returning from a planet or the mothership - please let me know. I can fix your file if it happens, and it might give me a clue as to how it occurred.

I plant to test some ideas on why, where and when this might be happening.

[h3]Loot[/h3]
The most feedback about the mothership so far seems to be how it is causing some unbalance as far as loot and money are concerned. I like a lot of the suggested solutions to this, so I will be working on re-balancing these aspects of the game in the latest version. If you have any feedback regarding this, let me know here, or over on the discord server: https://discord.gg/vTxpb8Z

This is a pretty big update. What I thought would take a week or so, ended up taking over a month. The Mothership Altair is now becoming a location to visit in-game!

[h3]The Bad News![/h3]
First, I apologize, but this latest version will again require a new game. I hate to do this, and I try not to have this happen, but some times it is unavoidable due circumstances outside of my control. This usually means some error that I wrote into a previous version, but it is what it is.

[h3]Mothership[/h3]
It is still rough, very rough. I have to add some actual characters, new models, and work on improving the graphics, which somehow do not want to work the way I expect them to right now :)



Still, there are new shops for ship, suits and weapons that you could not access from the ship's computer before. That shop is still available, in case you just want to refuel or sell some stuff quickly.

The idea here was to create a different, more familiar kind of environment the player can visit. A kind of home base with friendly npcs to interact with. I do want to elaborate a lot on the look, feel and functionality of the place, but it is currently working and accomplishing a good portion of what it needs to right now. Having player feedback and ideas will be welcome at this point.

[h3]Fixes[/h3]
A few issues have popped up in the previous build, and i have begun to address those as well.

• Leaf alpha - some leaves were being rendered incorrectly. This only occurred on liquid ammonia planets, and only after leaving and returning to the surface ... so that was fun to test!
  
• Missing storage containers - this only effected the visible storage model, not your actual storage capacity. It should work properly now.
  

Lots of new stuff is happening in 0.0.6, including, but not limited to, the following:

• New fungus and plant variables. Different liquid and atmosphere types will influence what kinds of fungus and/or plant-life will exist on a planet.
  
• There are no new plant or fungus models, but the way they form and combine has been altered, so you may discover fungus trees, or branching fungus in your travels, among other things.
  
• Fixed a number of small issues.
  
• New spaceship rooms. Here is where I have spent the most time. I will let the screenshots say the rest.
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]
The last few updates have brought along their share of bugs and other issues, I spent a lot of time repairing those.

1. Star Names - Star names now appear at the man console at the ship's helm, in addition to the star chart. There was a problem where they would not appear correctly if you had not visited the star's sector (either with your ship or in the star chart) and it would show up as "NOT IN DATABASE." This should be corrected, and the star name should appear correctly.

2. Planets crash when loading - After adding sand planets, I introduced a bug that would prevent certain other planets from loading. I was able to identify the cause of this and resolve the issue.

3. Sideways rain - After updating the way rain works, I forgot to update the actual rain model in the Steam version, so rain would have appeared incorrectly. This should be resolved.



[h3]New Features[/h3]
1. New landscaping - There are six new types of "landscape" objects. These are the large scale rocky outcroppings that appear on some planets. The image above shows one of the new types.

Here are a couple more images of the various new types of landscape...


Natural arches...


Craters...