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Greetings citizens, it's time for another dev blog. We've had an exciting few weeks since the last blog and a lot to get through so let's get right into it.
We asked last time for you to ask some questions to the dev team and we'd answer as many as we could. You can find the replies in that previous dev blog thread here. Thank you everyone who asked, it's always exciting to hear what the community is interested in.
Which brings us to our next big thing. Applications are open for the inaugural elections for our Council of Intergalactic Representatives. This is a great opportunity for anyone who has a passion for the Starmade community. You can apply by visiting the council page on SMD, remember to read this first so you know what you're getting yourself into. We'll be voting soon, so we encourage everyone to check out the applications once they go public so you can make an informed decision. You'll be able to vote for multiple applicants and be able to order them by preference. Who voted for who will not be made public, so if you're from a particular server or community don't feel you have to vote for those from your server or community purely because of association. Choose who you think will best serve the StarMade community as a whole, at the end of the day that's all they're there to do, serve the community not themselves. You'll hear more about the council as we move into the election.
For those who play the latest dev build you may have noticed that it's been a little funky recently. The rail system is taking shape as is all the overhauls that are required for it. Schema has been working his tail off rewriting some major parts of the game and it's exciting to see it start to come together in a tangible way. At the moment we have a semi-stable dev version up and anyone can test it. You will need to use the 64px texture pack though as the dev textures for the new blocks are only in that pack. But if you go through all that you will find the new concept for docking is there starting to be implemented.
A lot of people have been asking how the rail system will work. Really what you should be asking is how the new docking will work, as both turrets and the rail system will be built off the new docking system.
Fortunately we won't leave you in suspense. So get ready to get the scoop on what's in store.
The old docking system has served us well, but it's never been our end goal for docking. The new system is entirely new, it's exciting, and jam packed full of features.
The new docking system is essentially based off the idea of magnets. Magnets attract, they stick together, and with electromagnets you can couple or decouple them together. This is where we draw from with our new docking system. Essentially with the new docking system you will be able to define with blocks, points on your ship where your ship can dock to things. You can define the orientation and can define the points on the other entity where you will dock to. No more stuck in a single forward facing orientation every time with no control over orientation.
There also will no longer be any defined docking area (the giant green box), no more floating space between the docking blocks like we had with the previous system, and the docking collision system has been totally reworked for this new system of docking. Basically you will only be able to dock if your ship doesn't cause any overlapping with any other blocks, and the only other restriction on docking is purely mass based defined by enhancers. This is one feature I know a lot of you will be excited for, as it makes things like smaller integrated escape pods and the like now achievable as you don't need to try and build around the docking area box.
The old system will slowly be phased out once we release this new system, eventually resulting in the current docking beam becoming an activation beam only.
In the current dev build you still need to use the beam to choose which block you connect to, and I will go into more of an explanation later down in this blog, but eventually the idea is that instead of using a beam, you will actually have to fly and align your ship to dock where you want to dock and then you will dock. Imagine two magnets as you bring them close to each other they snap into place, it would work the same way. We feel this makes docking that much more of an experience, and we're still working on how exactly that whole process will work, but we want to take docking from just a one second zap from a beam to a larger experience for the player.
As we mentioned we will be building the rail system and turret system off the new docking system. The rail system essentially making docking moveable. And while this might seem limiting, consider that we already have chain docking existing in the game. Suddenly it's not docking a ship to a rail and moving it. It's docking a ship to another platform that is itself a ship that's docked to a rail, adding to the experience. And what if you have a rail on that platform that you dock another platform to. Suddenly you're getting a lot more complex movements. This is why we're building the rail system off our docking system, and rebuilding our docking system from the ground up.
With new systems there's always the need for optimization and a look at expanding functionality, so we will be introducing some new logic blocks as part of this whole new system.
We will be adding in a new wireless logic block that will enable sending logic signals between entities. We realised this was something we definitely needed due to how the rail system would be utilized, and it's a well sort after feature as well. The exact implementation of it is still being worked out, we have our design of how it should work we're just finalising it to make sure it will work in the game environment. It will be extremely intuitive and if implemented as designed, simple to use.
The next logic block that will be making its way into the game is one we all want to use but until now have had to build from scratch. A button logic block. Building this in-game takes on average four blocks once you factor in the delays and logic gates, but it is one of the most common logic circuits that players build, and so we will be integrating the whole circuit into just one block. Switching it from off to on will result in it staying on for a half-second then going off. It may seem simple, but it will help reduce the size of your logic circuits and help new players better enter into the world of logic.
The third logic block we will be implementing is essentially a flip-flop, or a toggle logic block. This one requires a bit more explanation. This block, what we've called for now the flip-flop block, will change its state from one to the other (off to on, on to off) every time it receives a signal that goes from an off state to an on state. It will only change when one of its inputs fulfills that condition (going from off to on) which doesn't seem like much until you consider what this enables you to do. With this block having two button blocks going into it you could make an airlock control with two switches, or a light with two buttons that toggle the light on and off. This block comes out of a functional need for the rail system, as well as performance improvements, reducing the needed blocks to achieve the function provided from over 6 or 8, to just 1 block. I clearly am very excited about these logic additions.
You can see just from above there's a lot happening, a lot being added in, and already some incredible functionality being introduced, and we haven't even touched on the rail system which in itself is an incredible new addition that I'm very excited for. Even just in the last hour some new additions into the system have come about that have yet again made a completely new way for players to be able to use it.
That's all for this dev blog, it's a long one but as you can see well worth it. If you would like to learn more about how to test out the new docking in the dev build then keep reading below.
Until next time.
- Bench
Ok sweet you're sticking with us, let's go into dev build time and look at how you can try out the new docking system for yourself. It's semi-stable so there's a lot of bugs. A few things to note; sector changes do not work yet with docked rails, you will need to use the 64px texture pack to see the test arrows on the blocks, and the weapons bar is bugged and will only allow the rail docker to be assigned if there is nothing else in the weapons bar. So the dev build introduces two blocks, Rail Block and Rail Docker. In this example we're going to use the Rail Docker on the ship we will be docking, and use the Rail Blocks as what we're docking to.
Both of these have arrows drawn on them, this is their orientation. When you dock the arrows will align so they're flat against each other facing in the same direction.
Here you can see the Rail Docker block and it is orientated up on our ship.
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And here you can see the Rail Blocks with their orientations pointing in four different directions.
We'll place our Rail Docker in our hotbar like so.
And then we fire it like a docking beam.
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For this first example we will fire it at the Rail Block pointing to our left, the result is as follows.
You can see the two blocks have aligned themselves together. There's no space between the blocks, they sit flush against each other. If we fire our Rail Docker beam at the Rail Block pointing up now, we get the following result.
You can see how they have aligned again, with the arrows pointing up.
If we go back to our ship that we're docking, and flip the Rail Docker upside down, it would look like this.
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If we fire our Rail Docker beam at that same block with the arrow pointing up that we were just docked to, you will see the two blocks are against each other, but our ship is now orientated the opposite way.
This dev build has a number of features of the new docking system, while it is still buggy and some of the functionality isn't in its final form you can already test a number of features, like the new docking collision system and the lack of a docking area bounding box. Enjoy.
