Star Explorers News

I forgot to resize the new panels after adjusting the screen size.

I found a small issue with the star chart. You could manipulate it and select sectors even if you were looking at the mission panel. This was addressed.

I also added a nifty static animation over the new mission panel dialogue images.

Enjoy!

This is something I had wanted to fix, but it slipped my mind.


So, some players have crashed the game by setting the screen size to a wrong value, especially when going full screen. If you enter a resolution that is not actually supported by your monitor, the game will get messed up.

With this fix, it checks available resolutions on your monitor, and will only set the screen size if it matches a resolution supported by the monitor.

If not, it will just load the default resolution.


Also, I thought I had fixed the issue of loading the game with a monitor smaller than 1280 x 720. It was not quite working the way I expected. This should be resolved, and will open at a screen size smaller than the recommended 1280 x 720.

It might not look great at lower resolutions, and there may be some weird problems with text and panels, but it should work.

I have once again updated the testing version of Star Explorers.

It's been a crazy week, and I was not able to do much. I added a few illustrations to the dialogue with the mothership, to show who you're talking to, and give some semblance of a narrative.

I have come across a number of different ideas I really want to implement. However, I think I will hold back for now. I wanted version 3.0 to really just stabilize everything already in the game, rather than adding lots of new content.

New content is fun and all, but it can also introduce new bugs. Version 2.0 was a learning experience, where bugs I thought I had squashed were re-introduced because some of the new content stirred things up in ways I did not anticipate.

So I may swap out some menu artwork, and I will update the manual, but otherwise this represents what I will release as 3.0. I will test the game for a few days before making it official.

Let me know if you find any issues, or have any concerns.

I should probably add a letter or something to the end to highlight these smaller updates, but anyway...

I found another exploit in the star chart script which could cause problems. I have fixed that. However in the process, I found yet another bug.


If you are in the star chart, and have selected a sector, then you click out of the star chart, to the mission command, then you click back into the star chart, and without selecting any sectors, you click on "stars" then the chart will go crazy . It fixes itself if you go back to "sectors" and click on a sector, but it's still a bit of a mess. I will look at fixing this in the next update.


The game was designed to run at 1280 x 720. If a player tries to star the game on a monitor that is smaller than this, it will open a strange window with only a part of the splash screen and/or main menu visible.

In this latest version, I added a script that detects the current monitor resolution, and will adjust the game window to match if it is lower than 1280 x 720.

I would add a similar script for larger resolutions, but the game does not always display things correctly at larger screen sizes, so I still strongly recommend playing at 1280 x 720.

Anyway, hopefully new players with smaller monitors will be able to at least start the game.

For version 3.0, I will finally try to resolve this issue, and make sure the game can run at any resolution without the problems it currently encounters.

A user reported a crash when opening the Star Chart. If you clicked on it quickly, more than once, it caused the game to crash.

I was unable to reproduce the crash, however I did confirm that the game was running the function multiple times even after the chart was open. So now, if the star chart is open, the game will ignore any further clicks on the Star Chart button.