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It's always a good day when a new dev blog comes out. Hola! If you haven't seen one of our dev blogs before, this is when us here at Schine get to talk a bit about what's been happening and the exciting things that are on the horizon. As always, you can check out some of what's planned on our public roadmap.
v0.19361 : Flash Light, Ship Scores, on-ship spawning & bugfixing
Is that the title of a new release or the wish list of a legacy player? Both, no doubt.
One issue that players always had was the dark areas being too dark. Well fret no more, the flash light helps with that. It's exciting to see a new element of dynamic lighting added into the game. Now some players might start asking can we get the flashlight as a block for our ships. The problem with this is the one thing StarMade is big on, scalability. See this isn't like some of those other voxel games where you're restricted in a particular axis, in StarMade if you want to build big you can build big. If you want to build small, then build small. But all the systems need to work harmoniously within that scalable setup, and also perform well. Performance is key, and we know that it is always an issue during this Alpha period of the game's development. We're constantly having to reinvent the wheel because we change the road it runs on. The problem with dynamic lighting in a scalable environment is it can have an incredible impact on performance. So that's why it's both taken this long for some form of flashlight to be added in, as well as why it's limited to just astronauts and not as a block.
Also in the release we see ship scores. We've always said we're never going to force a particular classification system for you to use on your ships, specifically with regards to a naming convention. We're not going to tell you, no that ship right there, that's not a Titan, that's a Dreadnought. But we do see the benefit of having some sort of arbitrary numbering system that assists in classifying ships.This opens up so many opportunities, like better filtering, better spawning of pirates etc. In fact, this could even assist you in knowing if you, in your current ship, with your current fleet, have a high chance of success in completing a particular mission.
Also one of the big features is on-ship spawning. Another hot topic for quite a long time, you finally return to your ship after logging off. While it doesn't include on death respawning, it's still an exciting feature nonetheless.
TwitchCon
If you haven't heard TwitchCon is Twitch's first gaming convention, celebrating the joy of gaming and sharing that gaming to the world through online streaming through Twitch. This year it's being held in San Francisco from the 25th to 26th of September. For those familiar with StarMade, you will know that it's a big game for streamers as well, so we're going to be there! Come say hey, meet the dev team and support the game you love. Not only that, we'll help you get there, use the code ZFTKSF when ordering tickets to get a 10% discount on your tickets.
New Launcher Soon
The new launcher is just around the corner. I for one got to try out some of the features of it recently and can say, you are going to love it. You will have your current launcher abilities like managing build versions easily, memory settings etc. As well as also making it easy for things like logging in with your registry account, or browsing the latest popular community content or StarMade news.
Closed-Captions and Russian Subtitles on Update Videos
Have you been enjoying the build release videos on our YouTube page? Well to continue being all inclusive we've started to ensure our update videos come with closed-captions, for those who are hearing impaired, that's no reason why you should miss out on staying just as informed. You can select closed-captions for the video, or if you click "More" next to "Share" you can also get access to the Transcript as well. Also we've been working with some of our friends from our Russian community to start having our captioned videos also translated into Russian. Other languages are available through YouTube's translation system built into the closed-captions setup as well.
So as you can see it's been an exciting couple weeks. Stay tuned for more news in the weeks to come and thanks for playing Starmade.
Until next time, time for me to board a plane.
- Bench
