StarMade Surprise Update

[Ithirahad]

Planets are getting an upgrade. Will this melt my computer more or less this time? ;P

The two main goals of the planet overhaul seem to be increasing planet size, and increasing planet performance.

 

[StormWing0]

The two main goals of the planet overhaul seem to be increasing planet size, and increasing planet performance.

lol every time they "Increase Performance" people like me cringe. >.>

 

[Ithirahad]

lol every time they "Increase Performance" people like me cringe. >.>

?

Most performance increases have been legitimate, except for a select few atypical systems that end up experiencing a performance decrease or in the worst cases complete inability to run the game :P

The thing that happens more often, though, is that the optimizations are 'overzealous' or miss a case and you end up with a new bug. With this release cycle that issue shouldn't come up as much.

 

[whooplaah]

I have a quick suggestion/request relating to your planet-side features like trees and mountains and hills. Will you be making them 'smoothed' with angle blocks, or is everything going to be made of cubes? I'm thinking of the planets that have spiraling purple tentacle-like growths, and ice-spike mountains - smoothed features would look much better (in my opinion) that just cubes.

It's an artistic decision, and one that is important to address at the start of the feature implementation rather than in an overhaul later on. Ships are smoothed, and bases are smoothed, so how are they going to look on a planet of cube-mountains?

I appreciate what you are doing, and am looking forward to all the different ways these biomed planets can be developed and expanded.

 

[EricBlank]

Getting them smoothed would be awesome, but simultaneously a pain in the ass where generating those smoothed slopes correctly is concerned.

 

[Valiant70]

It's likely that "blockiness" will remain the telltale sign of natural generation, sort of a thematic "marker" for nature versus construction.

 

[kiddan]

I'd personally prefer simpler, blocky terrain (for the sake of generation speed) and some build-mode tool for manually smoothing it yourself. If you find yourself walking around a lot in a certain area, smooth that patch of ground!

 

[Lecic]

I think it'd be best if the natural terrain was blocky for ease of generation, but if we could place shaped variants ourselves for landscaping.

 

[EricBlank]

schema I've a question regarding the universe update vaguely related to this: Will star systems, and thus orbiting planets and asteroid belts, be moved off the grid they're on now, so they're not created in 16^3 sector cubes and maybe like a sphere of sectors centered around a start or center of mass of two stars or something that aren't placed on the grid? It's just been so weird seeing everything being in straight lines and evenly spaced and equal in size irregardless of the supposed mass of the star in the middle.

 

[dvdbot]

Is there a estimated time of arrival for the update?

ATM i'm doing a planet based start and I cranked the planets size up as far as possible but they still seem a little small :P