Between the Stars News

Hello everyone!

It’s been quite some time since our last update. These months have been very complicated.

As we announced on Discord, we’ve started out the year on a bad foot. At the beginning of January, both me and the other developer of Between the Stars were hospitalized. Besides that, our translator decided to leave the team in the middle of the chapter without any warning. He simply stopped responding and blocked us.

But we are happy to communicate to you that we are completely recovered and we are back on track. The translation is already well underway and next month we plan to implement a large patch in the public beta with the continuation of the third chapter, among other things.

• Fourth chapter in the main campaign: Infiltrate the ranks of the Children of the Sun as one of their Captains and reveal the true plans of Emperor Nartos.
  60 new events that continue the story, doable in different order, making up for a total of seven different endings for the chapter.
  
  
• New hand drawn event picture captions: We've hired a concept artist to work the event imagery. The intention is to have images throughout the entire game's events and we'll work them in during Early Access. Here are a few samples:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• New wingman system: Now your allies can accompany you throughout your adventure.
  
  
• New playable ships: We will be adding new ships to the latest sectors available in the game.
  
  
• Visualization of enemy ships: One of the most recurring topics on the forums was the inability to view the Children of the Sun’s ships properly. We’ve corrected textures and added new outline shaders to increase their visibility considerably.
  
  
  
  It can be turned off from the options menu so you can play as you’ve been playing up until now if you like.
  

We hope you enjoy what's coming and wanted to thank you for your time and patience.

Steam Awards 2019 votes started a few hours ago. It's a great chance for indie games to stand out!

You can now support our game by voting for Between the Stars in the "The Outstanding Story-Rich Game" category.

Thanks you so much for your support!

In this update we've modified the loot system, added new salvageable items, and we've upgraded the departments and workshop tabs and inventories.

Now the inventory is divided in three windows in order to upgrade the amount of inventory space and crafting and scrapping is now much more quick and easy.

• The compression of some textures has been improved to increase performance. The game will now occupy less disk space (2.70 GB).
  
• We have modified the code to make it render better during battles. During Early Access we will continue making this aspect even better.
  
• We have modified the loot system. Now you get more material types as well as salvageable objects. We have also incremented the possibility of gaining weapons. In future updates we will adjust the earnings to balance the game.
  
• We have added “junk” items. These items serve to sell them or salvage them.
  
• Now the inventory is split into three sections: Weapons, Inventory (items) and Passengers. By doing this we have tripled inventory space.
  
• We have re-designed the Departments tab. With this redesign we have tried to: lessen the number of clicks needed to do any task, speed up actions and semi-automate the departments themselves.
  
• Now departments have a 4-slot queue space. This way the player doesn’t have to be as on top of them as they used to.
  
• We have added a window to select the language where it shows the translation status of each language.
  
• Now when you launch the game for the first time it shows the language select screen.
  
• We have added the following languages: Russian, Chinese (simplified), Dutch, German, French and Italian. These languages depend on community translations there are still numerous texts without translation. During Early Access the languages will continue to be translated. Thank you so much to the volunteers that are helping us!
  
• A bug in the damage in the upgraded IL55 Laser Interceptor has been solved.
  
• We have solved a bug in saves that duplicated one of the discovered cures.
  
• A bug that repeatedly triggered the last of the Ancient Tablet events when the player doesn't have the tablet has been fixed.
  

Our plans are to have the next update be based on chapter four of the story, and we hope to have it ready by the end of december on the beta branch.

A new update is now available on the new beta branch. For this new version we need testers to ensure there are no major errors.



It’s easy, all you have to do is go to your Steam library, right click on Between the Stars, select Properties, and select “Beta -“ in the BETAS tab. The game will update to the latest beta version.



IMPORTANT! Before testing the beta version please make sure to back up your save files. You can find your save game data in the following folder:

C:/Users/YOUR USER/AppData/LocalLow/Isolated Games/Between the Stars/SavedData

These are the changes that our latest BETA version brings:

• The compression of some textures has been improved to increase performance. The game will now occupy less disk space (2.70 GB).
  
• We have modified the code to make it render better during battles. During Early Access we will continue making this aspect even better.
  
• We have modified the loot system. Now you get more material types as well as salvageable objects. We have also incremented the possibility of gaining weapons. In future updates we will adjust the earnings to balance the game.
  
• We have added “junk” items. These items serve to sell them or salvage them.
  
• Now the inventory is split into three sections: Weapons, Inventory (items) and Passengers. By doing this we have tripled inventory space.
  
• We have re-designed the Departments tab. With this redesign we have tried to: lessen the number of clicks needed to do any task, speed up actions and semi-automate the departments themselves.
  
• Now departments have a 4-slot queue space. This way the player doesn’t have to be as on top of them as they used to.
  
• We have added a window to select the language where it shows the translation status of each language.
  
• Now when you launch the game for the first time it shows the language select screen.
  
• We have added the following languages: Russian, Chinese (simplified), Dutch, German, French and Italian. These languages depend on community translations there are still numerous texts without translation. During Early Access the languages will continue to be translated. Thank you so much to the volunteers that are helping us!
  
• A bug in the damage in the upgraded IL55 Laser Interceptor has been solved.
  
• We have solved a bug in saves that duplicated one of the discovered cures.
  

If you find any errors in the beta version, please, let us know and we will correct them before updating the normal version.

And if you want to form a part of the translation community in order to help translate the game to your language, all you have to do is enter our Discord server and get in touch with us: https://discordapp.com/invite/betweenthestars

Thank you all for participating and helping us to create this wonderful game!

• A bug impeding restoring health of crew members has been solved.
  
• The compression of some textures has been improved to increase performance. The game will now occupy less disk space (3.2 GB).