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Well overdue for another Dev Blog, here we are. After TwitchCon it sort of felt like the quiet before the storm for some of us, as we prepared to go into this crazy season of new directions for the game. Thanks to everyone who attended, and if you did in fact attend and took a photo at our booth and didn't get a TwitchCon Badge let me know and I'll get it sorted.
But enough about the past, let's look towards the future. A lot of cool features coming while we finalise the details for the bigger RP elements.
Transporters
Nothing screams "the future" like transporters. You might be asking, "but Bench! Transporters are something you build, I thought we were heading into RP and all that." and yes citizen you'd be correct. But transporters also tie into a lot of other plans for RP and crew and all kinds of fun things that honestly will blow your minds and go, Woah... I did not expect this! So trust us that we have some really cool stuff in store.
Transporters are being worked on and if things go to plan will appear in the next release.
There's so many ways that they could work so what are we planning for them? Well thanks VoidrayX for his suggestion on crew teleporters that took a different interpretation that made transporters a lot more interesting then just pick location and go.
So transporters will have a module players stand on, and a computer they're linked to that when used lets you aim the transporter. When the transporter is aimed at the location of another transporter it'll start to lock-on similar to lock-on missiles. Once locked on you can trigger the transport and the players on the modules will be beamed to any available modules on the other transporter. When beamed though, your shields will drop to allow them to be transported through, and they will need to recharge. That's the price to pay to make sure all your limbs make it in one piece.
These mechanics will adjust slightly once we get to adding in other plans with features like crew as obviously getting back is a bit tough, but for a first prototype of the functionality it's pretty cool.
Activation Gates
If you've been playing around with the dev build you may have seen these appear. They work like warp gates but instead of warping you to another location, they simply send out a "true" signal to any logic it is connected to. In this case they operate similar to area triggers, however rather than placing individual area triggers which can end up resulting in a lot of lag if they're extremely large, with activation gates you just build a ring like you would a warp gate. This is great for easier detection of larger objects.
Competitive Racing
No this is not from Saber this was something Schema had planned for a while and was just waiting for the right time to just go ahead and add it, and with activation gates going in it seemed like a good enough time as any.
Competitive racing uses Race Gates, similar to Activation Gates in construction and its ability for detection but with features designed to allow for racing. Linking race gate computers in a chain creates a race track. They can be placed on stations and on planets, across sectors etc.
Once you've built your chain of race gates, you can hit [R] on the first race gate computer to bring up the race dialog options. Here is where you can create a new race that then other players can join by hitting [R] on the same race gate computer or by a popup menu that appears when a new race is created that can be seen by everyone. The creator of the race might set a buy-in price of credits with the total amount going to the winner, or might set the number of laps etc. Players can also fly by to spectate and if set, they could also bet on who they think will win the race to get their own winnings of credits.
Races begin when either a ship flies through the first gate once a race is created, or by a logic signal going into the first race gate computer. As a ship flies through a race gate they then move onto the next one, finishing with the last one or continuing with another lap. First one doing all the laps and all the gates wins!
Even if you're not in the area to watch the race, you can still see a dynamic leaderboard on your screen of the active race.
Refits for Player-created Stations
With rails update out some player-created stations became a bit outdated. We're now opening it up to all the creators of stations in the current version of the game that if you want to do updates to your station please let Criss know otherwise we'll end up doing it ourselves. But if everyone was able to do their own it'd save us a lot of time.
Improvements to Physics for Projectiles etc
For TwitchCon we had some physics improvements go into the build that saw a massive improvement with beams like salvage beams on planets, projectiles with collisions etc. You should notice from before TwitchCon to now a massive improvement in performance in this area.
Warp Gate Fixes
With the addition of some new types of gates presents some spaces in the data structuring to allow for some other fixes for warp gates. While not yet in dev build we'll be looking at implementing the following fixes for release:
• Warp Gate computers will be able to be toggled active or inactive either manually or via logic.
• Astronauts travelling through warp gates will appear in the appropriate spot in front of the receiving warp gate.
New Launcher Soon
We've had unavoidable delays with the launcher. Unfortunately it's taken much longer than planned but needless to say we're getting there with it. However we'd like to show some of the features and screenshots of what's currently implemented in the launcher.
Login and Play or Play as Guest
You'll be able to either log into the registry straight away or play as a guest, not requiring a log into the registry. Playing as a guest is good for when you have friends around who don't want to register to the registry, but they will be restricted to servers that allow guest account and aren't restricted to just registry account.
Citizen Registry
Right there in the launcher you will be able to create a registry citizen account, including opting in to receive our StarMade newsletter.
Welcome Screen
New players who haven't run the launcher before get an introduction.
News Home Screen
The main launcher panel gives you a lot of options including all the controls we're familiar with in the current launcher. Get some help on the sidebar with getting started and on the right the latest news from Schine on the game, version details etc. Choose build types from the bottom bar as well if you want to play the game normally or start a dedicated server for other clients to play on. You can also see build versions, do checks and even detect the last build version you played on etc. Finally the bottom right the launcher auto-detects the build type you've picked and checks if you have the latest version released and will prompt you to update.
Council Page
As the activities of the council grow within the community, their news will be fed through to the council page, as well as different info on the council and eventually council-run polls so that your elected community representatives can better source community feedback about the game to better advise us developers in the development of StarMade.
What's left
There's an entire community content section planned where random popular content from the community content here on StarMade Dock is fed through. Be inspired by awesome ships from the community, check out the latest hot mods and more. There will also be a support section with a FAQ of common questions.
OS Support
The launcher will be supported on Windows, OSX, and Linux for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.
Java Bundled
Did we also mention it comes with java bundled with it. No more trying to find the right java for your computer to get the best performance.
Game Direction
We'll be sharing more about the direction of the game soon. There's a lot of exciting elements to the game that are planned, just have to trust us at this time. Some things might not make too much sense at the moment but we're in it to push the limits of what StarMade can be, and bring you the most enjoyable game possible.
Think Big.
Until next time,
- Bench
