Star Explorers News

This is a small update. I was able to retro-fit the video options menu to manage filtered/unfiltered textures.



In the process I removed an old shader I called "smooth pixels" and made this manage the texture filtering shader. Texture filtering will be off by default, so you should see each pixel clearly, as in this image:



If you set texture filtering to "on" - still called "smooth pixels" in the menu - you will see the textures no longer have clearly identifiable pixels.



Note, there are other options like old-school pixels (off by default), which effectively lowers the screen resolution, and posterize (on by default), which decreases the depth of the colors. These can be adjusted to suit the player's preferences.

So ... this update introduces some interesting changes to the Star Chart as well as how planet temperature is handled.

[h3]Star Chart:[/h3]
The most significant changes here is that you can now manually move the star chart overlay temporarily when viewing the star chart. By default, you will use the arrow keys to do this. The effect is similar to the "target sector" function. It will temporarily move the overlay to a sector that is not actually present in the star chart - a sector your ship has never visited - and it will allow you to see that sector's stars highlighted at the helm of your ship.

This is a feature that has been on the to do list for a while and several players have requested something like this recently. The reason this feature is necessary, is because sometimes it is difficult to identify stars or sectors that have not been visited. Now by moving the overlay around in the star chart, you can have an immediate idea of where those unexplored sectors are. The TAB - help menu has been updated with instructions on using this feature.

Another minor issue caused a star overlay circle to appear at a random location when the overlay was active, with no star to justify its presence. This should no longer happen.

[h3]Planet Temperature:[/h3]
The recent temperature range update has caused an interesting gameplay issue. Players had to guess whether it was day or night on a planet, and often landed when temperature conditions were not ideal. Now you can see the current time of day of the planet you are orbiting from the ship's computer.

NOTE: Day and night are indicated by a number between -180 and +180. Negative numbers (between -180 and 0) indicate night-time (low temperature). Positive numbers (between 0 and +180) indicate day time (high temperature). The sun will set when that number reaches +180, and the "clock" will switch to -180, dropping to night time temperature. At time 0, the sun rises, and the temperature will go back up.

[h3]F11: [/h3]
The F11 key (by default) will temporarily toggle the HUD. I had to fix an issue where it was not operating correctly, so it should be fine now.

The Black Sphere of Death:
This was a problem when visiting the Mothership Altair. The mothership interior sometimes intersected the model for the outer space background, and it would appear as a great, black wall inside of the mothership. It did not actually cause any issues in the game, but it looked very weird. Hopefully after this update it will not frighten anyone any more.

[h3]Bugs:[/h3]
With any new changes, I try to be careful and make sure there are no adverse effects. However, sometimes things get past me and will cause problems for players. If you encounter any new issues, please don't hesitate to let me know.

I have added a redundancy to the screen resolution script, so hopefully it will not try to open the game in an impossible window size - thereby defaulting to a size too small to actually play. This will not give any error messages, but if an impossible window size is attempted, it will default to 1280 x 720.

A player discovered a problem when running out of oxygen. Somehow it caused his health to increase, and thereby increased his movement speed to absurd levels. This should now be resolved, but let me know if you encounter any related (or unrelated) issues.

I forgot to reset a certain variable and it caused the game to produce too many UFO encounters. It should now go back to normal, random UFO encounters as before.

UPDATE: I re-uploaded the game with some slight changes. I had accidentally left on certain warning messages in the last build. I also was able to correct the missing textures from the alien landing craft. I suppose it could have waited till tomorrow ... but it just took a couple minutes.

5.0.6 Update - Many small changes were made based on player feedback. Just for the record, I do not integrate all player feedback into the game. But if it's an idea I agree with, and it's not too difficult to do, I will sometimes implement it right away.

Since the 5.0 release, I have been getting a ton of great feedback. However, I can only do so much in a given day. If you don't see your ideas showing up, don't hesitate to remind me. I try to keep track of everything, but it's not always easy. I am thinking of making some kind of document where people can put their feedback, and maybe vote to rank things higher or lower priority. I do not have a ton of experience in this sort of thing though, so any ideas are welcome.

For this update, here's what's changed:

• Fixed the stretched star background in mothership
  
• Added Muzzle Flash for player and enemy guns
  
• Fixed innacurate temperatures on some planets
  
• Reduced oxygen usage slightly - to match the updated walk/run speed - I did also reduce the amount used when running a bit compared to the last version. I thought I had made it approximately 2.5x higher than walking, but it was actually 3x higher by accident. Now it is closer to 2.5x as I intended.
  
• Increased physical and environmental damage when suit condition = 0 - this may alter gameplay quite a bit. It was possible to run around for quite a long time in extreme conditions before.
  
• Added option to rebind crouch and Hud toggle - "controls_5.cfg"
  

[h3]About Rebinding Controls[/h3]
The game's options menu has a Controls menu where you can rebind keys. However, the HUD toggle and crouch features were added later, and did not fit on this menu. If you want to rebind those keys, you can still do it though.

In order to do so, first you will need to rebind any key via the in-game Controls menu.

Then, go to "C:\Users\-your username-\AppData\Local\Star_Explorers" and find the "controls_5.cfg" file.

Open that file and type in your key of choice after the last two entries:
crouch,ctrl, (replace ctrl with your key of choice)
toggle HUD,F11, (replace F11 with your key of choice)

Please be careful not to delete any commas. Use the following codes for keys...
"a" - "z", "0" - "9", "f1" - "f12", "bksp", "enter", "esc", "alt", "ctrl". "shiftl", "shiftr", "space", "tab", "cuu", "cud", "cur", "cul", "pgup", "pgdn", "home", "end", "ins", "del", "car", "cal", "slash", "equals", "period", "comma", "brackl", "brackr", "semic", "bksl", "apos", "minusc", "grave", "apo", "minus", "plus", "sz", "ae", "ue", "oe", "scrlk", "pause", "caps".

I have not tested every possible key or how they all function - I don't even think my keyboard has a lot of these options ... grave?. If you encounter errors, it may be a good idea to just delete the "controls_5.cfg" and start over.