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- Feb 17, 2012
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Hello and welcome to StarMade,
after a long time, the simulation update is finally ready. Please note that due to the massive changes, there might still be some unknown bugs.
AI Simulation
Despite spawning AI, the universe of StarMade still felt somewhat lifeless, especially in single player. While the AI was now a potent opponent, it lacked the ability to fly across the universe on its own. Also, multiplayer servers were cluttered with spawned ship files of enemies that were very rarely used.
After lots of hours of work, a new system has been implemented: AI Universe Simulation. This system is a new layer on top of the AI, that is already in place. It abstracts a ship to a name, and can move it across the universe whether it’s currently loaded because a player is near, or only an entry in the database. The whole database migration from the beginning of the year was targeted to do exactly that as performant as possible.
The system works in ticks and can handle thousands of ships at once.
One of the first example of this new system is that shooting a shop now actually has consequences. If a player repeatedly shoots a shop, the trading guild will send out a fleet against him.
Furthermore pirates now operate much more focused. They will randomly patrol the space, and try to raid enemy ships. They will also send out parties from their stations to nearby players, as long as that station is not destroyed. Patrolling pirates will avoid faction space stations, but pirate stations will still attack as long as they are not destroyed.
Not only the pirates but also the trading guild sends out ships across the universe (and those to NPC factions are just the beginning). If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might get involved in a space battle between NPCs.
Pirate Space Stations
A whole new type of station has been added to spawn in the universe. Most parts of this new station is randomly generated, and it’s planned to make it even more random.
One deciding feature of pirate stations is, that they use a new placement systems, that enables randomly generated structures to use advanced blocks like weapons or docking. The challenge was that, blocks had to be placed and connected either afterwards or right away to a controller block that may or may not have been placed yet.
Furthermore, the system is now able to spawn specific follow up structures, in this case, turrets.
This means a pirate base will spawn fully capable of defending itself. Also, as a bonus for defeating a pirate station, it has treasure inside.
Ruins
The new system not only benefits the stations, but also any other structure. While this feature is just at the beginning, you can already find something mystical when you explore enough desert planets.
Sector exporting/importing
As players build more and more creative structures, the was a demand for an easy and fast way to save and export specific parts of the universe.
With this new system, whole sectors can be exported and imported anywhere in any universe. It’s even possible to clone the same saved sector over and over.
This will make server-resets not as hard.
As an extra, bulk exporting and importing has been implemented, so admins can note all important sectors in a file and export or import them with only one command. So if a server reset is due, the players can tell the admins all sectors they want to have saved.
Synchronization redesign and Network performance
A long lasting source of bugs were within the network code. Debugging on network is one of the most exhausting tasks in software development. After very head spinning hours, it has been finally managed to find a bottleneck that resulted in diminishing network performance, as well as a memory leak that was caused by exactly that.
Furthermore, the synchronization system has been redesigned, which laid open a few very serious bugs, that are now finally gone. Teleporting on clients has been reduced greatly, and object positions are now fully synchronized on both clients and server even for connections with 500+ pings.
Weapon balanche change
This update is also the first to put a cap on weapon power: Weapon values now scale x^0.5 like. But don't worry, the shield capacity has also been nerved to the same curve. The goal is to balance it in a way that you need about as many weapon blocks with all points into damage to take out a shield with exactly the same amount of blocks.
Notable Bugfixes
- fixed homebase being salvagable sometimes
- increased performance to draw large structures
- fixed crash due to language specific encoding (ParsingError)
- fixed power capacity module (checkerboard scaling)
- cloak & jamming now deactivates if there are no more blocks left
- hopefully got rid of random re-building of visible objects
- fixed bug where shops are vulnerable from missiles
- fixed player not being hittable in astronaut mode
- fixed bug that would corrupt in-memory blueprint data causing disconnected modules on spawn
- thrusters can now be used even if the current total power is smaller then one unit of thrust consumption (-> thrust reduced by percent)
- fixed docking area going red when blocks where placed outside
- fixed docking area showing as not big enough when it should be
- updated server/client transformation synchronization
- increased network performance
- network does no more stalling from high ping clients
- implemented way better synchronization
- fixed docking merge bug
- added confirm dialog for suicide button
- fixed turret power source (hopefully)
thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema
after a long time, the simulation update is finally ready. Please note that due to the massive changes, there might still be some unknown bugs.
AI Simulation
Despite spawning AI, the universe of StarMade still felt somewhat lifeless, especially in single player. While the AI was now a potent opponent, it lacked the ability to fly across the universe on its own. Also, multiplayer servers were cluttered with spawned ship files of enemies that were very rarely used.
After lots of hours of work, a new system has been implemented: AI Universe Simulation. This system is a new layer on top of the AI, that is already in place. It abstracts a ship to a name, and can move it across the universe whether it’s currently loaded because a player is near, or only an entry in the database. The whole database migration from the beginning of the year was targeted to do exactly that as performant as possible.
The system works in ticks and can handle thousands of ships at once.
One of the first example of this new system is that shooting a shop now actually has consequences. If a player repeatedly shoots a shop, the trading guild will send out a fleet against him.
Furthermore pirates now operate much more focused. They will randomly patrol the space, and try to raid enemy ships. They will also send out parties from their stations to nearby players, as long as that station is not destroyed. Patrolling pirates will avoid faction space stations, but pirate stations will still attack as long as they are not destroyed.
Not only the pirates but also the trading guild sends out ships across the universe (and those to NPC factions are just the beginning). If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might get involved in a space battle between NPCs.
Pirate Space Stations
A whole new type of station has been added to spawn in the universe. Most parts of this new station is randomly generated, and it’s planned to make it even more random.
One deciding feature of pirate stations is, that they use a new placement systems, that enables randomly generated structures to use advanced blocks like weapons or docking. The challenge was that, blocks had to be placed and connected either afterwards or right away to a controller block that may or may not have been placed yet.
Furthermore, the system is now able to spawn specific follow up structures, in this case, turrets.
This means a pirate base will spawn fully capable of defending itself. Also, as a bonus for defeating a pirate station, it has treasure inside.
Ruins
The new system not only benefits the stations, but also any other structure. While this feature is just at the beginning, you can already find something mystical when you explore enough desert planets.
Sector exporting/importing
As players build more and more creative structures, the was a demand for an easy and fast way to save and export specific parts of the universe.
With this new system, whole sectors can be exported and imported anywhere in any universe. It’s even possible to clone the same saved sector over and over.
This will make server-resets not as hard.
As an extra, bulk exporting and importing has been implemented, so admins can note all important sectors in a file and export or import them with only one command. So if a server reset is due, the players can tell the admins all sectors they want to have saved.
Synchronization redesign and Network performance
A long lasting source of bugs were within the network code. Debugging on network is one of the most exhausting tasks in software development. After very head spinning hours, it has been finally managed to find a bottleneck that resulted in diminishing network performance, as well as a memory leak that was caused by exactly that.
Furthermore, the synchronization system has been redesigned, which laid open a few very serious bugs, that are now finally gone. Teleporting on clients has been reduced greatly, and object positions are now fully synchronized on both clients and server even for connections with 500+ pings.
Weapon balanche change
This update is also the first to put a cap on weapon power: Weapon values now scale x^0.5 like. But don't worry, the shield capacity has also been nerved to the same curve. The goal is to balance it in a way that you need about as many weapon blocks with all points into damage to take out a shield with exactly the same amount of blocks.
Notable Bugfixes
- fixed homebase being salvagable sometimes
- increased performance to draw large structures
- fixed crash due to language specific encoding (ParsingError)
- fixed power capacity module (checkerboard scaling)
- cloak & jamming now deactivates if there are no more blocks left
- hopefully got rid of random re-building of visible objects
- fixed bug where shops are vulnerable from missiles
- fixed player not being hittable in astronaut mode
- fixed bug that would corrupt in-memory blueprint data causing disconnected modules on spawn
- thrusters can now be used even if the current total power is smaller then one unit of thrust consumption (-> thrust reduced by percent)
- fixed docking area going red when blocks where placed outside
- fixed docking area showing as not big enough when it should be
- updated server/client transformation synchronization
- increased network performance
- network does no more stalling from high ping clients
- implemented way better synchronization
- fixed docking merge bug
- added confirm dialog for suicide button
- fixed turret power source (hopefully)
thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema
