Hello players,

the NPC faction update has finally been released. Be sure to backup. Read the full news here:

StarMade News - StarMade v0.199.349 - NPC Faction Update

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema and the Schine Team

You've probably been sitting around twiddling your thumbs in anticipation for the next release, savouring any piece of news or updates you get about it. So here's a Dev Blog to help take away those hunger pains, at least for a little while.

While we had anticipated the Faction Update to be ready to go by now, we'll talk a little bit about why things are currently taking longer than usual, and more importantly what the implications are.

For those unaware, the Faction Update is one of our largest updates we've ever undertaken so far on StarMade. It introduces procedural Factions; NPC ships and stations that spawn in the galaxy and begin to expand their borders.

We can already see the experiences that this update will bring to gameplay just by flying around in the dev builds. Mining fleets appear and travel around; Scavenger fleets appear after a battle to try and scavenge what they can from any ships that were destroyed. There's a lot more data and interaction between factions, with a faction news tab and faction diplomacy screens now. It's all slowly coming together.

This update has a lot of parts that all need to work together to not bring the whole thing down. One of the main problems is creating a huge amount of possible entities and systems without causing scalability issues. Each NPC system has its own fleets and more. All this needs to be organised and spawned correctly. Not only that, but the fleets all have to have something to do.

Overall, the goal with this update was not to just give the illusion of an alive universe, as that would have been a lot easier to do by just spawning in a...

Greetings, Citizens ~

Terra here. There’s a new Launcher update live (v2.1.1!) and as it’s fairly notable, I’d like to take a few minutes to discuss its features. I’ll go into a bit more detail than what’s listed in the…

Changelog
First, I’ve added a changelog that will give a quick rundown of everything new with this (and all future) releases. As you’d expect, this will display once per version, and you may view it again within the options window.

Backup Dialog
While restating the changelog entries (especially in order) seems redundant, one feature in particular deserves specific mention: the backup dialogue. It’s always prudent to have a backup of your settings and data prior to updates, and this makes doing so simple and painless.

Clicking the [UPDATE] button presents the dialogue, which allows you to pick which sections to include in the backup, and its archive format. Alternatively, you can choose to skip the backup and simply continue with the update or cancel altogether.

The backup format defaults to .zip on Windows and .tar.gz on Linux and OSX. (From my testing, the latter seems to have a better compression ratio.)



After completion, the dialogue will tell you the location of the saved backup. To support concurrent installs in the future, this location is in a backups folder within your StarMade game directory, e.g. S:\Steam\SteamApps\common\StarMade\StarMade\backups or X:\games\StarMade\backups or ~/games/StarMade/backups

The...

Hello players,

the NPC update has a lot in store. Read all about it here:

StarMade News - StarMade Dev Update: NPC Factions

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema and the Schine Team

Greetings citizens, ~

due to the scale of the update, its impact, and amount of parts, we unfortunately weren't able to release the NPC update this week. However, we created a video for you watch, outlining how the NPC factions will work.

Watch it here:



As mentioned in the video, an after and with the NPC faction update, AI will be revamped and upgraded on all fronts. It was always the plan to wait with that for NPC factions so all parts can come together. We also will adress and overhaul weapon/ship-structure/resource balances in these coming update circles.

Thanks for playing StarMade,

- the Schine team