StarMade 0.077: Asteroids and Random Encounters news

Hello and welcome to StarMade,

Asteroid types

Initially there are 5 different types of asteroids, that all vary in their composition and richness of different materials. Some materials are rare and can only be found in the inner core of certain asteroid types.

Here are some screen shots of asteroid fields with maximal viewing distance:

The Icy-Asteroid:

The Rocky-Asteroid:

The Lava-Asteroid:

The Mineral-Asteroid

The Golden-Asteroid

New Materials

There are 10 new Materials in the Game now:

• Gold
• Iridium
• Mercury
• Palladium
• Platinum
• Lithium
• Magnesium
• Titanium
• Uranium
• Polonium

Their commonness, value, and use are not yet fully determined, but you can already use them to put on your ship or space station.

Random Encounters

You will now encounter random groups of enemy fighters in sectors. They only use one ship type as of now, which is not all that strong. If you leave the sector, they will stop following you after a while, but be warned: the AI-ships also have the ability to jump to another sector, and will do so, if they are near you while you jump. The probability of encountering enemies in an asteroid field is 50% (for testing purpose) at the moment.

New Point System

This version also replaces the old weapon system with a less architectural restricted point system. For now, only the weapons have integrated this new system, as it is still in the test phase. For every weapon module you now get 4 points, which will get distributed equally in weapon capabilities: distance, weapon speed, reload time, and damage. One big advantage is, that you can now change the distribution of those points for each weapon group individually.

Long range cannon? no problem! Fast firing machine gun? Done. As of now, there are no restrictions, on when and how often the player may change his distribution, but there will probably be a few, so players don't use just one weapon for every purpose.

If you build additional weapon modules, or delete some, the point will automatically redistribute according to your settings, so you only have to adjust the setting one time (if you like).

AI-Persistence

AI is now persistent, and will not loose its settings if a game has been shut down.

New Block Type: The Build Block

This new block is for support. You can place it on a space station, and enter it to edit from there as you would edit a ship. When you're done, you can take the block with you and continue editing at another position.

Space Station Stubs

There are now space station stubs available for the player to build his own space station fully from the scratch. For now there is one permanent stub available in the sector (0, 1, 0).

Noteworthy Bug Fixes

• Blueprints are no longer overwritten when updating to a new Version
• Sector changes won't reset weapons anymore on AI or player controlled ships

(from v0.074)

• Updating segments will no longer flicker: When you shot a missile at a structure before, the segments went a way for a short time, which caused some ugly graphics. Also the code for re-requests is now a little more optimized, since the removal of the bug also brought the removal of some useless instructions with it.
• Missiles and Blasters could not do damage: This was real evil bug, that was introduced with the endless universe update. As the server saves to disk every 5 minutes, a wrong instruction caused it to clean up all loaded segments, basically leaving every object empty. Only newly requested objects would be solid until the next auto-save. This wasn't visible at all in the game, but it took effect in some nasty glitches, like flying into objects getting you entangled in that objects, as well as of course weapons doing no damage at all.
• Turning speed is now relative to mass

• Server Crash with instantly exploding missiles: A crash that could happen, if an object was created and then instantly destroyed lead up to a ghost object on the server as the client tried to response to an object that was not on the server anymore.

• Kicked out of ship bug: There was a strange bug, that sometimes got you kicked out of your ship

• Re-Synchronization Bug: These were actually two separate bugs at once. One long known that caused a Re-Synch on everyone when another player joined a game. A Re-Synch is a critical error, which can be recovered. However it should not happen as this is a last resort. The Re-Synch could mess up the mass calculation and the weapon graphics (no lasers displayed, only explosions (Elladan encountered that afaik)). This is now fixed and a re-synch is fully working now. Also, I finally found out, what is causing the re-synch in the first place.

What comes next

The salvageable materials will get a purpose. Shops will get an economy. An easier way to navigate the universe will be available.

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema