Star Explorers News

I had a crash when entering a cave, and a player recently reported the same thing. It appears the cache models were using bitmap textures with no alpha channel. Normally this seemed to be okay, but occasionally it would cause a Directx error because the shader was looking for an alpha channel.



(to those who don't know what I'm talking about, just know that I fixed it).

I hope this solves the Directx error, but let me know if you see it again.

Okay so here is what's going on ...

A guy posted a Youtube video about Star Explorers a while ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9F1LjrK2zs

The video reached a lot of people and so, despite my best efforts, people are still playing Star Explorers!

This means, invariably, that they will find more bugs. And this, obviously, means I will feel compelled to fix them.

I wish one day I could work on Star Explorers as a full time gig, but that is unfortunately not possible right now. So I am taking the following approach:
1. I will be working on it during weekends
2. I will keep all changes in the testing branch for now, until I am thoroughly satisfied that it is better and more stable than the default branch
3. Once that happens I will release it as version 6.0

So if you want to try out the latest changes (and don't think that I am asking anyone to do this) you can do so by selecting "Star Explorers > Properties > Betas"
Once you are on the Betas tab, enter "rocketship1234" in the password field, and select the "testing - External Testing" branch.

[h3]What's New?[/h3]
So I have actually made some significant changes to the star chart and saving/loading functionality already. Actually I did most of this work last year, but lost interest in it and decided not to have it go into the game. This weekend was spent taking that old script and incorporating it into the latest version of the game

[h3]Star Chart:[/h3]
The star chart and in fact the whole way the game generates and saves the galaxy have been completely overhauled. The hope is to completely re-write the star database so that several long standing bugs can finally be squished.

The new star chart works differently than the old one. Here are the major differences:

• As you scan stars and sectors, they will appear on the chart (like before) but you no longer need to click on a sector in order to view its stars. All stars will be visible on the star chart, regardless of what sector you are in.
  
• Clicking on a star will automatically cause any scanned planets to appear. Unlike stars, only planets of the currently selected star will be shown.
  
• You can now choose to locate a star that has been selected in the star chart. This will cause your ship to face that star once you return to the helm. This used to happen automatically, but it is now presented as an option, i.e. you don't have to face it
  
• You can now choose to warp to stars from the star chart***
  

*** Okay, this is still very buggy, I would suggest not using it yet.

If I am correct this should solve the problem where planets were not being recognized properly by the star chart. It has yet to be thoroughly tested, so it may generate new errors of its own.

I have not tested this new star chart and save/load function when trying to go through the main quest yet either. I don't think the new system will recognize finding Acknexium crystals yet. It may also have issues when trying to enter caves, because I had a crash when entering a cave (though that could have been totally unrelated).

In other words, try this at your own risk. It will not work with previously saved games either.

Next week I plan to address the known issues:

• Warping from the star chart works, but if you select anything while warping it will create a bit of a mess.
  
• Possible bug when loading caves
  
• Getting the game to recognize when the player finds Acknexium (it might work, but have not tested yet)
  

So the ship's computer voice would warn you when there were "service hazards" instead of saying "surface hazards" as it should have. This was a minor issue, but I have edited the audio so it just says "hazards" now.

For anyone interested, there is also a modified computer voice mod available:
https://www.moddb.com/games/star-explorers/addons/female-robotic-voice-pack

I have not tested it myself, so use at your own risk.

Also, something I have been meaning to do for a while ... to help make the User Interface a little less confusing, I added "day" or "night" to the temperature/timing readout.



So this shows the temperature range (256 - 270) and after that the current time (7 day) which means it is about 7 units after the sun rose at the landing place.

It mentions how this all works in the TAB menu (press TAB to toggle), but in case you are not familiar, when you orbit a planet, you can see what time of day it is at the landing place. This will help you determine whether the temperature will be higher or lower - higher during the day, lower at night - and whether it's safe to land.

The timing works as follows. Day starts at 0 and continues to count upwards to 180. That indicates sunset, and the timer will switch to -180 and night will begin. Then it counts from -180 back up to 0 and starts all over again. Adding the word "day" and "night" should help this to be a bit easier to understand, especially for new players (I hope).

Here it is in all its glory:


Enjoy!

PS: The dither shader is linked with the posterize shader. It automatically posterizes the look of the game so gradient colors look less smooth, so if you turn off posterize, it will automatically turn off dither. There is no way to unlink these two effects since posterizing is part of what happens in the dither shader. I hope this makes sense.

The PS1 style dither effect has been removed from the default shaders. The "Posterize" effect will now behave the same as it used to.

HOWEVER

If you liked the dither effect, you can still turn it on if you change the configuration file. To do this, go to: "C:\Users\-your username-\AppData\Local\Star_Explorers" and open the "options_1.cfg" file.

Change the following line: ps1 style dither effect,0:

to: ps1 style dither effect,1

and save the file.

Now when you play, and have "posterize" turned on, it will use the PS1 style dither effect.

Thank you for your feedback