Star Explorers News

Schmidt Workshops is barely a game studio and the one, single employee can hardly be called a programmer much less a game developer. Still has has the audacity to attempt to write music via in-game algorithms and compile recordings of those things.

Not only that, he is now asking money for these atrocious things he calls "songs."

So do not buy them under any circumstance! It is a shameless cash grab to help fund his game development habit. If you pay money for this, you are more likely to be subjected to another one of his "games" in the future, so just don't.

I am a fool.

So, I saw that players were encountering crashed UFOs, and the interior would spawn in such a way that the entrance would lead directly to a dead end. I checked and double checked the code several times over many months. I could not quite figure out what was going on.

Then I woke up this afternoon (after a nap) and thought I would check again.

There was nothing wrong with the code! The code was perfect!

It was the models. The different interior UFO tiles were named incorrectly, and some that should have had a western passage (leading to the exit) actually faced east, and blocked off the west side. So I've just renamed the proper files and all your UFOs should be fully explorable now!

The ancient alien ruins were triggering the game to re-generate a planet. But I found the cause and it should be working now.

Updated again, this time I found the culprit. Planets with those tentacled, floating aliens were being flagged as "corrupt" by the planet file checker, but only because it was reading the wrong number of variables stored. Now the planets should only be showing an error if the file was actually incomplete.

This is a new and improved version of my planet file checker. This time the game had been modified in a few other seemingly minor, but important ways.

[h3]Music Generation[/h3]
Music generation happens when you land on a planet for the first time. The music data is saved to the same file as the planet data. However, the way the script was written, music generation would take a bit longer than generating a planet, and the game would not finish writing the file until the music was done.

That seemed to be the reason some planets would not reload properly. If the game was turned off before that file was complete, it would cause an error the next time you landed on it.

I have now streamlined the music generation script and it should be a lot faster. This should have he repercussion of making it far less likely to create a bad planet file.

[h3]Planet File Checker[/h3]
So every once in a while when a player is landing on a planet, something can happen that will corrupt the planet file. This has presented itself such that when attempting to land on that planet again, the game will freeze during the re-generation process.

So I was inspired to write a script that checks if a planet file is actually valid before attempting to load it. Surprisingly it worked relatively easily!

So now if a planet file has gone bad, the game will reject it and generate a brand new planet for you. You will see this message when you load the planet:


[h3]Other Stuff[/h3]
I also made some slight adjustments to how the music starts and ends when entering a new area. Before, the music would start off at full volume when you loaded a new level, and sometimes this was a bit grating on the ears. Now the music should ease in very gradually.

Also, there was an audio glitch when leaving a level after the sounds all faded out. I have addressed this as well, so once the sounds fade out, there should no longer be any loud audio burst.

I am going to ask a few people to test this new version out before making it the default. But if you want to try it go to "Star Explorers > Properties > Betas" and select "testing" from the drop down menu.

This is a new and improved version of my planet file checker. This time the game had been modified in a few other seemingly minor, but important ways.

[h3]Music Generation[/h3]
Music generation happens when you land on a planet for the first time. The music data is saved to the same file as the planet data. However, the way the script was written, music generation would take a bit longer than generating a planet, and the game would not finish writing the file until the music was done.

That seemed to be the reason some planets would not reload properly. If the game was turned off before that file was complete, it would cause an error the next time you landed on it.

I have now streamlined the music generation script and it should be a lot faster. This should have he repercussion of making it far less likely to create a bad planet file.

[h3]Planet File Checker[/h3]
So every once in a while when a player is landing on a planet, something can happen that will corrupt the planet file. This has presented itself such that when attempting to land on that planet again, the game will freeze during the re-generation process.

So I was inspired to write a script that checks if a planet file is actually valid before attempting to load it. Surprisingly it worked relatively easily!

So now if a planet file has gone bad, the game will reject it and generate a brand new planet for you. You will see this message when you load the planet:


[h3]Other Stuff[/h3]
I also made some slight adjustments to how the music starts and ends when entering a new area. Before, the music would start off at full volume when you loaded a new level, and sometimes this was a bit grating on the ears. Now the music should ease in very gradually.

Also, there was an audio glitch when leaving a level after the sounds all faded out. I have addressed this as well, so once the sounds fade out, there should no longer be any loud audio burst.

I am going to ask a few people to test this new version out before making it the default. But if you want to try it go to "Star Explorers > Properties > Betas" and select "testing" from the drop down menu.