Star Explorers News

I found a couple bugs and was able to fix one of them.

[h3]The Black Sphere[/h3]
The first was a strange black sphere that appears inside the sapceship and mothership. It turns out it is the bottom of the actual space background intersecting with the ship interior. It's not really a bug, but poor level design on my part. I fixed it in the ship, but I still have to address the possibility in the mothership. In any case, if you see it let me know, but it does not actually impact the gameplay.

[h3]Planet Crash[/h3]
The other bug is a rare crash that can happen when landing on a planet. I have only encountered it a couple times over several weeks of playtesting. The game would stop responding when landing on a planet on these rare occasions.

The worse part was that when you reload the game, sometimes your ship would crash into the planet. So I have made a few changes that should prevent this bug from crashing the game. However, instead of removing the suspicious code that I think was causing it, I added an error alert, so I know that was actually the part that triggered the bug. There were actually three separate places that I thought might be responsible, so I included a different warning for each.

The first one is if the planet's star is not recognized. This is the worst case, and it will still crash the game if this happens.

However, I don't think that was the cause. The other two were bits of code that were important in a very early version of the game, but became unnecessary in later editions. Since they did not seem to be causing trouble, I guess I left them in there without realizing it. If one of these is the trigger, as I suspect, they should no longer crash the game, but they will issue a warning.

Please let me know if you see a warning message when attempting to land on a planet, and note which warning was issued.

[h3]HUD update[/h3]
The HUD can be toggled on and off with the F11 key. This is for anyone who wants to take screenshots or video. This feature was already in the game, but it has been improved to include turning off the crosshair as well as the health panel.

This morning I accidentally uploaded the game with a certain variable set for testing purposes. It included a readout of game parameters and some other minor issues that I use for internal testing. The only issue that would have effected gameplay is that NPCs and aliens would have had their first quest set to finding acknexium, rather than a random quest.

Sorry for any confusion or inconvenience.

In other news my current play through of the game has been quite stable so far. No major issues have been discovered. It looks like we are getting very close to the 5.0 release!

So I have labeled this latest update as 0.6.0, skipping over the 0.5.x range. The reason is that I was using 0.5.x for the now defunct versions of the game in which the whole saving and loading system had been rewritten. I will probably not return to that version, but I am keeping it for reference.

Anyway, a helpful player identified a few issues like missing texture files and more importantly, not being able to get on the mothership, in yesterday's update.

I forgot to mention, I have increased the warning level in this version of the game. This means that error messages will pop up that might normally be ignored by the engine. It could cause the game to be more unstable, but it should immediately indicate what is causing the issue. So if you see any warning messages pop up, please let me know.

Anyway, I was able to resolve those issues, and you should now be able to board the mothership again.

I also fixed another issue on the mothership, where NPCs were not generating any quests in the first slot. This should now work properly, but if you are loading a saved game, they will not have those quests. To get your NPCs to have a quest in the first slot, without having to restart the game, you can go to: "C://users/-your username-/AppData/Local/Star_Explorers" and open your saved game folder.

Find the file called "mship_storage1.txt" and delete it. This will reset all mothership NPCs, and they should generate new quests.

I also changed very slightly the way the game sets resolution. There was a problem when I set the game window to have no border, and it would appear on screen larger than it should have. So if you set it to 1280 x 720, it would actually appear at 1286 x 747. This is because the no border command would not actually change the size of the window, but would expand the game to fill the existing window size, which included a border.

I am hoping this helps to resolve some issues players were having with setting the screen resolution.

I also have done a couple other experiments on this version. First, I used a tool that should allow Star Explorers to access more than 1200 MB of RAM. This was a limitation that was built into the engine. Hopefully this might prevent some crashes due to the game exceeding its RAM access.

Another thing is that I have set the game to ignore DPI scaling settings in Windows. I know this caused some issues for players who used DPI scaling, especially if they wanted to use window mode.

So lots of housekeeping has been done, and I am going to continue testing and clearing out bugs for the next couple weeks.

Well, I ended up going back to the previous version of the testing branch after all. I tried to work with a brand new saving and loading system, as well as a brand new star chart. However, as I was building these, they ended up pretty much as convoluted as the originals.

So here we are at version 0.4.9. I was able to update a few small issues that were also included in the now defunct branch I'd been working on.

[h3]Fixes and Features[/h3]
The big bug that happened with star formation was addressed, as it was in the default branch. I believe this one was responsible all these years for the "Star Missing From Database" error. I guess we'll see. Basically, there was a weird loophole that allowed stars to form without being assigned a star number (something important, but internal to the game's script) so they would not be saved correctly in the database. Starting a new game will be required if you want to avoid this issue.

Smoothed out the warp/orbit movement script. There was a horrible jitter that could happen when trying to get the spaceship to face a star or the mothership. This should go a lot smoother now.

Pulling away from planets has been improved here too. Now you no longer have to hold the back key (S by default) in order to successfully leave orbit. Pressing it once should make your ship automatically back away and upward, so you will not end up backing into another planet or get sucked into a star's gravity well.

I also found several missing texture issues that were resolved. These would not have cause crashes or errors on their own, but may have contributed to any instability players have experienced.

[h3]Next Steps[/h3]
I really want to get to the 5.0 release. I feel like the game has been filled out in almost every way that I originally intended. I plan to test this current version and fix any issues that pop up until the end of Summer. I also plan to have another major look at the screen resolution script very soon. I think that is the biggest issue the game has at this point. Expect some more updates to this in the near future.

Somehow the new version had too many changes and I somehow created an endless loop which refuses to allow the game to load.

I will be looking at it more closely, but for the time being I am rolling the testing branch back to the last working version 0.4.7.

This uses the old save load system and the old star chart. It does not have some of the recent improvements like backing away from planets and better aiming towards stars and such. Those things were not dependent on the newer save/load system, so if I cannot get the latest version working, I will re-introduce those improvements in this branch.

Sorry about all this, it seemed to be going so well until today. Give me a couple days and I will either figure out what went wrong, or start back on this older branch. Thanks for your patience!