Star Explorers News

This iconic photo taken of the surface of Venus has always inspired me. Sure, it's a lifeless, uninhabitable world of sulphuric acid and extreme heat, but it's a world!



So Star Explorers has some similar worlds, but lately I've realized they are extremely rare due to factors I had not really considered when programming the game.

The boiling point of sulphuric acid is quite high at 610.1 Kelvin. So for these sulphuric vapor worlds to exist they have to be very close to a pretty hot star. Most sulphuric worlds will be a bit further out and either be liquid or frozen. But I know they exist because someone took this screenshot...



The only problem with this screenshot is that is has some kind of RTX shader thing happening which creates a reflective surface. This shader does not exist in the game itself, but is an overlay from a program called reshade.

I would love to see some screenshots of these rare, Venus like worlds without this reshade effect.

The reward is the journey! But really, I will give a free beta key to the first person who posts a screenshot of a Venus like, sulphuric vapor world (with no plants or trees or other life features preferably). Empty and rocky would be great!

The beta key will be for my new, upcoming game called Cyclopean. It's an old-school dungeon crawler set in the Dreamlands of H.P. Lovecraft.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2958790/Cyclopean/

A helpful player pointed out an issue that caused the game to crash to the desktop in the testing branch.

If you approached the mothership for the first time, then instead of clicking on the computer panel, you chose to first travel to another solar system, it would then crash once you clicked on the computer panel.

This was easy to fix, it was just one of those things that I failed to anticipate people doing. So it's always helpful to get this sort of feedback!

Also I just noticed I did not write the correct version number in he uploaded game. It should be 0.1.2, but it shows 0.1.1. I will fix this in the next version as it should not effect gameplay at all.

Two issues have been addressed and resolved in this update.

[h3]Biped Weapons[/h3]
Bipedal aliens that carry weapons were still utilizing the old inventory system, so the weapons were unusable. I have updated this so those weapons can be used after they are dropped. I also prevented the bug that allowed players to take the alien weapons while they were still being held (although I am thinking about re-introducing this as a possible feature in the future).

[h3]Alien Bits[/h3]


The animal type aliens have been updated too. In the past when they were killed their body parts would fling off in different directions. I am not sure what happened but that feature no longer worked. I was able to update it so that it is working again.

I found out recently that the game engine I am using (3D Gamestudio) actually prefers pcx and dds files to bmp, jpg and png files. I have been using a variety of image files for Star Explorers and I occasionally have encountered some "bad file format" errors.

So in an effort to eliminate these kinds of errors, I am going through all the image files and replacing them with the recommended formats.

It is a long process and I am just starting. One good side effect is that I am saving disk space in the process, as well as eliminating a bunch of unused functions in the game script. So by the end of this process I think Star Explorers will become a much tighter program that takes up much less room on your hard drive.

In the process I was able to identify some textures that were missing from the game files. However, I am guessing I will mess up in the process and some textures might be missing (if I failed to reference the right file or something).

[h3]Day/Night Cycle Issue[/h3]
I was also able to identify and fix the bug that caused planets to go to night time after players left a cave, so the day/night cycle should be more consistent now.

There was a bug in the blueprints. When crafting an item it used the older values and the resulting item would have strange features like having a negative value for trade.



I had updated items which appear in caches and merchant inventories, but forgot to update the items when crafted with blueprints.

This will not fix items that were already crafted, but should produce the right results when crafting any new items. The blueprints themselves should be fine, so don't get rid of those.