Star Explorers News

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.

The planet error detector seems to have been a bit too sensitive. It seems like it was flagging planet files as corrupted to much. I am going to run it through a lot more testing to make sure it is not giving false positives.

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:


This will still cause some less serious issues. The new planet may have different things on the surface, but should more or less have the same basic properties. So if it's a frozen planet, the new one will still be frozen. But if there was a cave in a particular place, that cave may longer be there.

I am concerned this may lead down a path of many more issues and potential bugs, but I think those will be better than the game just freezing and refusing to load a planet. The previous solution for this issue was to manually delete the planet file and load a new on anyway, so at least the process is automated now.

I have a feeling I will need to refine this script a bit, but so far it's doing what I intended. I hope it helps!

[h3]Ancient Ruins[/h3]
It was possible for certain treasure chests to spawn inside of a large rock formation or even a volcano, and occasionally under ice, making them inaccessible to the player. I have attempted to create a script that should prevent this behavior. Even on planets where the player has already encountered these obstacles, I am hoping the script will remove the offending obstacles and make the chests accessible.

[h3]Robot Fire[/h3]
Enemy robot sentries were encountering a problem when trying to shoot at the player or at other nearby aliens. I believe this is now resolved and I was able to test successfully. Robots should now shoot at the player and other alien life forms.