Star Explorers News

The 0.0.1 release had a few missing files, models, textures etc...

No new content has been added since the 0.0.1 release, but now that content should work.

Okay, I have come up with an absurd naming convention. I can't call it 4.x, because the newest version is not compatible with the earlier 4.x games. I don't want to call it 5.0 yet, because that is what it will be called when it is ready. So I'm calling it the 5.0 Pre-Release 0.0.1 and that's what's gonna happen.

Anyway, what's going on here?

There are some major improvements happening. First, I plan to focus on fixing and streamlining content that already exists. Then I have plans to add lots of new content. So far, I have accomplished the following:

[h2]Improvements:[/h2]

• Improved Load Times - Loading times for planets, caves and space has been cut by about a third (so it should take 2/3rds of the time it used to).
  
• Improved Frame Rate - Planets, especially those with grass and more dense surface features should see an improvement in performance. I plan to do more with this in future updates.
  
• Geysers should now become invisible on foggy planets when you move away from them. Also, geysers should no longer switch on and off when your character jumps from one side of a planet to another, it should be more smooth now.
  
• Lava Smoke should also stop jumping as well.
  
• Radiation clouds should form more randomly, they used to form in horizontal lines.
  
• Nebulae in outer space would freeze your spaceship's lasers, this should no longer happen.
  
• Sonic Cannon Fixed - the weapon should now work ... sorry it did not do anything for some time.
  

[h2]New Content:[/h2]
[h3]Storm Planets[/h3]
Some planets you land on will be Stormy, with severe high winds and other dangers like tornadoes and crystal rain. This was added after learning about some real life exo-planets that have similar conditions.



[h3]Volcanoes[/h3]
The old volcanoes have been replaced with bigger and better volcanoes. These will do damage to the player if they get too close, and they also spit out exploding globs of lava ... watch out!



[h3]New Cave Textures:[/h3]
Now caves will have different wall textures based on the surface type of the planets they appear on.

[h3]UFOs[/h3]
I have focused more of my attention on UFOs, which have undergone some major changes.
First, UFOs will now form a permanent part of the Star Explorers galaxy, leaving a star system, and returning to it, should reload the same UFO(s) in the same condition.
Friendly UFOs now exist. You may approach and board these UFOs with no trouble, and interact with the aliens aboard.
Aliens are now on UFOs, previously, only robots "lived" on UFOs.
Derelict (damaged) UFOs now have a different look, with all sorts of holes and stuff (see image below)
UFO interiors now have better collision detection, so going up stairs is much smoother than before.



[h3]More to Come: [/h3]
UFOs are not done, I still have to make sure the aliens aboard will reload with the same items and quests, like they do on planets.
Alien AI on UFOS still needs some tweaking too.
I also want to offer at least three different types of UFOs, one for each alien type, and have some more interesting differences between an undamaged UFO, and one that has been damaged.

I also have a number of ideas about terrain, animals, plants and other stuff. I look forward to diving in to this game again, and I hope you will join me for the ride!

Star Explorers has been updated to version 4.6.5B.

This addresses a couple issues.

1. Sonic Cannon - this weapon should be working again. Somewhere along the way it stopped working, and I am not 100% sure why. I was able to track down the cause though, I think it was actually way back when I updated the game's engine from A7 to A8. Sorry it took so long to fix ... I do remember someone mentioning it a while ago, but sometimes these things slip my mind!

2. Invisible Barriers - One of the recent changes that should help the character getting stuck in caves actually introduced a new problem. It was causing the character to get stuck on outdoor terrain! So I have been able to identify that one part of the last update was not actually essential to the issue, and was responsible for causing this secondary issue.

The good news is that the character should no longer get caught up in any invisible barriers.

Happy exploring!

A new feature has been added that *should* help solve the problem of getting stuck in caves.

Occasionally, trying to jump over stalagmites can get a player stuck between the stalagmite and the top of the cave. I've attempted to solve this a few times, but each time it turn out that the problem does not quite go away.

Now you have two options if and when this happens. First, jumping (space bar) will slightly reduce the character's bounding box, and potentially allow you to escape from this situation.

[h3]Crouch[/h3]
I've also added a crouch command - currently set to the CONTROL key. This will similarly reduce the height of the character, and allow you to crawl out of those tight situations.

I wish I could say it is absolutely fixed, but it is nearly impossible to test every possible cave formation. Hopefully it will resolve enough of these kinds of situations to make the problem insignificant!

Thanks to the wonderful and growing Star Explorers community, I was able to identify and fix several small bugs, including a game breaking bug that somehow avoided detection for many years! It was game breaking, but it was actually very small and easy to fix, so remember, if you find any issues, please report them here on the forum. Sometimes it only takes 10 minutes to fix something that might seem really challenging at first.

[h3]Save Game in Star Chart[/h3]
Surprisingly, if you saved the game while viewing the Star Chart, it would not load properly the next time you try to play. This was a huge problem, but maybe it only effected a tiny set of players. Anyway, it only took 10 minutes. So please report bugs :)

[h3]Damage Panel[/h3]
Somewhere in the process of adding wide screen support, the damage panel got neglected and no longer scaled to the size of the screen. This has been fixed.

[h3]Missing Towel[/h3]
If you put the towel in your ship's inventory, it would show up with the wrong icon. Nothing major, it was just a matter of fixing the pointer to the correct icon. Now, rest assured that if you put your towel in storage, know you can get that soothing relief you long for when you return from a challenging mission!

In the near future, I plan to put the pre-release 5.0 beta up on the testing branch for the more adventurous players to test. I'm still working on finalizing my other game Paradox Vector, but once that is done, version 5.0 will have my full attention - as much as humanly possible. Thanks for your continued interest in Star Explorers!