Star Explorers News

Is this really a Major Update?

Well, you see, it went from 5.2.9 to 5.3.0 so that seems pretty major. But in reality, I just want some attention.

The update is pretty simple actually, vendors on the Mothership Altair will now restock some items with each visit. Previously they would only restock when you completed a part of the main quest.

Now every time you visit, they have a random chance of restocking any empty item slots, up to the first seven or so. The likelyhood of restocking is tied to the difficulty level on which you are playing. Easier modes will have a higher likelyhood of restocking than harder modes.

I just added a small message to the Video Options menu letting players know how to get UI scaling to work.

The whole system is still a bit of a hack, so I am reluctant to make it the default method of using Full Screen. I am not saying I will improve upon it, as I am not sure exactly how to fix some of the underlying issues. I am also reluctant to make any major changes to the way resolution works. It is far from perfect, but changes have a tendency of causing a lot of unforeseen consequences, and I would prefer to keep things working for the majority of players as it stands...

There is a more in depth discussion about resolution and how it works here, if that helps anyone:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/502720/discussions/0/5401527630819996792/

Okay, screen resolution issues still happen in Star Explorers. In order to help prevent the game from making itself unplayable, I have added an extra button to the main menu...



You can see a small reddish oval in the upper left corner. It says "click here to reload the game with default video settings." Somehow the game can still fail to get the setting right, and on some occasions under certain hardware configurations, the game will open in a window that is too small to be playable.

Previously, there was no way to fix this unless the user manually found the configuration file and deleted it (or edited it) but this was not a good solution.

So I offer a slightly less bad solution, which is this button.



If this happens again, the player can simply click this button and it deletes the configuration file for you, restarts the game and loads the default settings.

[h3]Interactive Guide[/h3]
The interactive Guide is still available. However, instead of being on by default, I have turned it off. It (also) still has some issues and may be responsible for preventing the ship's computer from recognizing Acknexium when it has been found on a planet.

This is a bug that I am having a hard time reproducing. If anyone can offer any insights as to when and how this happens, I am very interested in hearing it. In general, if this happens, you can still complete the quest by finding Acknexium and trying again (on the same planet or another) but for obvious reasons it would be great to have it actually work consistently.

I have never gotten this problem to happen, despite many attempts. If anyone wants to record their play-throughs, that would be of great potential benefit, as I might be able to see what's happening.

In general, if you are using the guide, try to follow what it says exactly, and don't go off course until the guide says it is over. I will continue to try to reproduce this problem myself. Maybe I will get (un)lucky one of these days.

No not new alien bugs in the game, but bugs in the alien scripts!

Thanks to some super helpful user feedback I was able to eliminate two potentially game crashing bugs when encountering certain bipedal aliens, as well as aliens with "breath" attacks.

If your game crashed wile visiting a planet with bipedal aliens, they will no longer appear on that planet, but other alien types should continue to spawn. This is because bipedal aliens are each unique NPCs with their own names, quests and items to trade.



The good news is that since the bugs have been isolated, any new planets you land on should not cause the crash. Also, any planets you landed on previously with bipedal aliens, without crashing, should continue to load as before, with the aliens intact ... unless you killed them.

One of the things I enjoy about Star Explorers is giving it that retro look and feel. The posterizing shader option (on the video options menu) will now include a PS1 style dithering effect. When combined with the "Old-School Pixels" option, the game really begins to look like something from the early 90s.

For those of you who enjoy higher resolution and more colors, you can always disable these. But, honestly I don't think the game has ever looked better. To each their own.

Here are a few images with the latest shaders...