Star Explorers News

This version addresses a few issues...

[h3]Radiation on Planets[/h3]The existence of radiation was not being stored correctly, so a planet with no radiation might have radiation the next time you landed on it, or vice versa.

[h3]Radiation's Effects on Animal Life:[/h3]Radiation has a profound effect on a planet's wildlife. Animals on radiation planets may be missing their heads, and have random eyeballs and tentacles on their bodies. Because of issue #1 above, sometimes these features would exhibit on planets where the animal life was normal the first time around, or vice versa.

[h3]Animal Color:[/h3]The color of animal skin textures was also getting changed between visits.

These issues have all been addressed in version 4.5, and radiation and animal appearance should be consistent from one visit to the next.

[h3]Log File:[/h3]Star Explorers produces a log file in the save folder. This file just records certain things that are happening in the game. It is only really useful if the game crashes and I want to see where it crashed. Anyway, due to a problem with the script, the log file was being written into the same file on each play session. Over many sessions the file may have become much larger than it should. Now the game will overwrite the log file during each game session, and it should remain a reasonable size.

Version 4.4 fixes a pretty big bug that was encountered recently.

It seems that planets with biped aliens would not be able to be reloaded after the first visit. The bug was introduced around the release of version 4.0, when I went through the script and made sure certain pointers were not used until the game object being pointed to was actually loaded.

This made the game much more stable, but apparently introduced a big bug that just got caught today.

The game would have stopped working when re-visiting a planet. On the loading screen, you would have seen "Updating Storage Data" under the loading bar.

IT should be working now, but as always, let me know if you encounter any further issues.

The testing version of Star Explorers has been updated. It is probably the smallest update ever. Only one thing has changed.

As you should already know, when you are exploring, you can use the scanner tool to drop map icons. These can be used for whatever you want, to not locations of treasure chests, determine where you took a turn, etc...

Well, prior to this update, there was a limit of 25 such icons you could drop. Now you may drop up to 500.

If you do try this out, let me know if you experience any trouble...

I have updated Star Explorers to version 4.2. Existing players will once again, not experience any changes. However, for new players, the game will default to the "Old-School Pixel Graphics" shader.



Why the Change?
You may also notice that the store page and trailer have been updated to represent this pixel shader look. There are two main reasons I have done this.

• I like it. Ever since I added the shader to the game, I have liked the look of it. It gives me a nostalgic feeling of the good old days of gaming. Even though 3D graphics were not really done this way back in the day, it still has this effect on me, and I'm hoping other players will respond similarly.
  
• Setting expectations. I may have done this myself a few times, but Star Explorers seems to get compared to No Man's Sky quite a bit. This is unfortunate, as that game is an amazing technological achievement that took thousands of man hours over a period of three years and a team of up to 13 full-time developers. The game costs $50 and I think it is an unbelievably cool game. Since Star Explorers has a similar premise, it seems natural to compare the games. However, Star Explorers is much smaller in scope, and was made by a single developer (me) working in his spare time. I am hoping that giving the game a more retro look will set player expectations accordingly. I really do not want to misrepresent what this game offers.
  

How Can I Stop This?
If you prefer the original look of the game, you can easily un-click the "Old-School Pixel Shader" in the Video Options menu. Again, old players should not have any change, as the game should load your existing settings.

Star Explorers was not starting up for an unfortunate player. However, he had the good sense to let me know about it. By getting a little bit of feedback and having him run an updated version of the game under the testing branch, we were able to zero in on the cause.

4.1A includes this slightly modified script that should mitigate the issue for any future players who may have encountered the problem.




For anyone interested, the problem was caused by a script that looks at the available monitor resolutions on the host computer. For reasons I cannot remember, the script only allowed up to 29 different resolutions. This caused the script to get stuck in a loop when it was run on a computer with a higher number of possible resolutions. I have increased the number of possible resolutions to 300, so hopefully it will not happen again.

I will be having a closer look at that script though, since it should not have behaved that way to begin with. It would be best if it did not have any limit to the number of resolution ratios, to keep it future compatible.




If you are someone who purchased the game, and were not able to start it, please consider trying it again now. I know a lot of people who encounter a crash like this, and I don't really blame them, will simply leave a negative review and get a refund.

But, I am grateful to all of you folks who brought the problems in this game to my attention. In this case, it was actually pretty easy to fix. Sometimes these things can be tougher and take more time and patience. In any case, this game would never have become what it is today without the help of players who give feedback. So I thank you all!