Star Explorers News

More New Features are being tested...

I was able to identify a problem with some textures on alien UFOs. Occasionally, the levels would appear with dark areas. It turns out some of the textures I was using were formatted incorrectly, so it was actually pretty easy to fix once I found the problem.

[h3]Crashed UFOs[/h3]

Probably the most dramatic change is the existence of crashed UFOs on some planets. You can enter these destroyed craft and explore then, just like the ones in outer space. You won't find the crew on board, but you may come across some other surprises.

[h3]Star Chart Upgrade[/h3]
The star chart now remembers your last position when you switch back to the ship's helm. This should improve the ease of navigation a lot. There is a bug in the star chart too, if you switch back and forth between stars and sectors, or between planets and stars, occasionally the star chart will have an error, and will not know what to focus on.

If this happens, just switch back to the last working focus (i.e. if you were looking at sectors, and then switched to stars, then switch back to sectors). You may have to re-click the star or planet you are trying to zoom in to. I will continue to troubleshoot this issue, but it does not seem to cause any game breaking problems.

[h3]Sand Planets[/h3]

Sand planets already existed in Star Explorers. However, they will now have some different aspects that set them apart from other planets. The new sand planets will be flatter than others, and they will be lacking grass, trees and plants, though they may still have surface liquids and aliens if conditions are right. They also will be lacking caves, but they can still have ancient ruins or crashed UFOs to discover. This is just to add a little more variety to the game's possibilities. I plan on adding more planet and terrain types in the next update.

New Features are being tested...

Aliens on UFOs should now be persistent between visits. So if you meet an alien, and it has an item or a quest, you should be able to come back later and purchase that item, or fulfill that quest.

Star and planet names now appear at the ship's helm. Previously you had to go to the star chart to see the names of stars and planets. This should make navigation much easier than before. You do still need to visit the star chart to enter custom names for stars and planets.


Here you can see the selected star is named "Big Red."


Mercuria, a desolate world, orbiting a dead star in a far off corner of the galaxy.

I already announced this, but I wanted to show you some of the new cave textures that you may encounter in your travels. The caves now reflect the surface type of each planet...

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!