Star Explorers News

The planet error detector seems to have been a bit too sensitive. It seems like it was flagging planet files as corrupted to much. I am going to run it through a lot more testing to make sure it is not giving false positives.

So every once in a while when a player is landing on a planet, something can happen that will corrupt the planet file. This has presented itself such that when attempting to land on that planet again, the game will freeze during the re-generation process.

So I was inspired to write a script that checks if a planet file is actually valid before attempting to load it. Surprisingly it worked relatively easily!

So now if a planet file has gone bad, the game will reject it and generate a brand new planet for you. You will see this message when you load the planet:


This will still cause some less serious issues. The new planet may have different things on the surface, but should more or less have the same basic properties. So if it's a frozen planet, the new one will still be frozen. But if there was a cave in a particular place, that cave may longer be there.

I am concerned this may lead down a path of many more issues and potential bugs, but I think those will be better than the game just freezing and refusing to load a planet. The previous solution for this issue was to manually delete the planet file and load a new on anyway, so at least the process is automated now.

I have a feeling I will need to refine this script a bit, but so far it's doing what I intended. I hope it helps!

[h3]Ancient Ruins[/h3]
It was possible for certain treasure chests to spawn inside of a large rock formation or even a volcano, and occasionally under ice, making them inaccessible to the player. I have attempted to create a script that should prevent this behavior. Even on planets where the player has already encountered these obstacles, I am hoping the script will remove the offending obstacles and make the chests accessible.

[h3]Robot Fire[/h3]
Enemy robot sentries were encountering a problem when trying to shoot at the player or at other nearby aliens. I believe this is now resolved and I was able to test successfully. Robots should now shoot at the player and other alien life forms.

[h3]Suffocation Bug[/h3]
A bug was reported a while ago, which I thought I had fixed. However it was reported again so I had a more careful look at the issue and was able to discover the root cause.

Basically if you ran out of oxygen on a planet and then took damage, the effect was reversed and either your suit condition or health would start going up instead of down.

[h3]Meteor Sounds[/h3]
Some players have complained that meteor explosions are too loud. I agreed with this and finally got around to fixing it. I also adjusted the volume of the sound meteors make while still in the air.

Basically there is a better volume curve. If the meteor is very close when it crashes, it will still be quite loud. But the further it gets the more noticeable the drop in volume. Same applies to the sound it makes in the air, which allows that sound to fade in more gradually as the meteor gets closer to the ground. I hope it helps!

So if you are a new player, probably just stop reading after this first paragraph. Just know there was a bug and now it is fixed :)

...

Are they gone?

Okay so what happened is when I updated all the weapons a while back, and allowed bipedal aliens to carry different types of weapons, I added a variable that lets the game know if a particular rocket is coming from the player or not. So the ancient alien blaster weapon is treated as a rocket in the script, but I forgot about this and failed to included that updated variable for blaster shots. In effect the game did not think the blaster should do any damage to enemies.

Watch me blow up some rocks...
https://youtu.be/nvFb08Po658

The game also was failing to show the right texture for the blaster. This should be working now as well.

I hope you enjoy the ancient alien blaster and all the fun that entails...