StarMade Dev Blog 15 March 2018

    DukeofRealms

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    Greetings citizens, ~

    Development

    Weapons Update

    The first prototype is about 1-2 weeks away. We will going to do a full news blog for all the changes and additions when it hits to give players something to explore and test for themselves, since trying it out is always better than just reading about it. The goal in the weapon update is to make ship battles more interesting and give armor, weapons, effects, as well as all combinations a valid purpose. For that, all weapon types, as well as armor and effects have undergone some major changes while still keeping their basic principles. As an example, we increased the destructive power of cannons immensely by adding an effect that would emulate explosive damage. In other words: cannon now make big holes. Also, the new minelayer support weapon will be introduced.

    Stay tuned.


    HUD Improvements

    Now that the base functionality of Power 2.0 is in, we're actively working on improving the flight HUD to represent all ship vitals better and integrate newly required information (consumptions/efficiencies). The changes may not be mechanically or thematically drastic, but a concerted effort is being made to improve the legibility above all.


    Bi-weekly Development Q&A

    We answer a lot of questions in our weekly Twitch stream as well as in other locations such as the forum, tester slack and private conversations with some of our members. Feedback from this has been invaluable, however, one concern has been that these conversations are not easily accessible. To address this, we’ll be creating a thread on SMD every two weeks to gather questions for a bi-weekly development Q&A. Our answers will be posted in a news thread on SMD, Steam and potentially other locations. Hopefully this will provide a central location for further information, without having to go through stream recordings or spread out conversations.

    We’ll still be interacting over the board in all different locations, as well as this development Q&A :)

    Our first Bi-weekly Q&A can be found here: Schine Bi-weekly Q&A - 15th of March


    Community Translations

    With the release of Power 2.0, over 3K translations strings have been modified and 1K new strings added into the game. With only 5.4K strings in pre Power 2.0 StarMade (now sitting at 8.4K), over half of all strings have been changed in some way. Our community translation project has been hard at work since the release of Power 2.0. We’d like to mention a couple of our standout translators in these last few weeks.

    oasisdog (Japanese) has been translating StarMade into Japanese since November of 2015, during his translation time he’s translated a total 7659 strings (64,439 words), almost solely translating all of StarMade’s text into Japanese. He’s been diligently keeping Japanese up to date with all our updates. Since the release of Power 2.0 he’s brought Japanese back up to 100% translated (42 percentage point increase).

    ua2hk (Chinese Simplified & Traditional) has been translating StarMade into Chinese Simplified & Traditional since November of 2017. In total he’s translated 6889 strings (64,439 words) and made significant contributions to both language projects. He’s brought Chinese Traditional and Chinese Simplified up 40 and 20 percentage points respectively since the release of Power 2.0.

    Both have made amazing contributions to StarMade, allowing many more people to experience our game in their own language. We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to our translation project, it’s sometimes tough work translating schema's English ;)


    Thanks for playing StarMade,


    ~ The Schine Team
     

    Sachys

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    Nothing for stations then? Very sad about that. As much as I dont like the new power, I would continue to play and build (and report bugs and exploits) if stations were remotely viable. Please consider that for the next update. Ta!

    Also I can localise the game for Scots, Yorkshire and Skalla.
     
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    Awesome job devs!
    Great to see development is on track, and props to the translators as well.

    Glad to have you guys back :3
     
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    The fact this blog has been up for around a day and only has 10 comments... (11 with mine) makes me worry about the future of Starmade...
     
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    Nice to hear that we'll get regular info on development again. - And can't wait for those revived weapons! :)
     
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    The fact this blog has been up for around a day and only has 10 comments... (11 with mine) makes me worry about the future of Starmade...
    yeah, but equally it has 21 likes... so if we go by the fact that not everyone who liked it commented, not everyone who saw it might have liked it - it may well have had many, many views...

    the real test will be the response to the Q&A :)
     
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    Glad to see you guys finally release a dev update again. But please do something about integrity... It should only be applied to power blocks alone in my opinion since the whole point was to (stop spaghetti ships).. Cannon barrels for example don't need integrity.. Or if it must, then a weapons barrel integrity penalty should be far more relaxed than a reactor block.
     
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    These are some major things I have wanted to see improved and discussed, and now you just drop to fix several of them in one post!
    Awesome, looking forward to the updates, and experience the beginnings of finally real engaging space combat :)
     

    Raisinbat

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    The fact this blog has been up for around a day and only has 10 comments... (11 with mine) makes me worry about the future of Starmade...
    Don't let that bother you, there's no sense worrying about things that don't exist.
     
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    Explodey cannons make me very happy. Will be interesting to see how the other weapons will be balanced to account for it.
     
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    I think the point is that explosions are the balance. Cannon accuracy used to make them worse than beams & missiles for everything but breaking docked armor. With docked armor no longer being able to to be used to trump beam weapons, cannons would be be non-meta in all situations without some kind of relative boost to their abilities. IE: radius damage.