StarMade 0.0883 new planet, new docking & more stability news

New Planet

Welcome to the all new alien like purple planet. Enjoy the view at it's procedurally generated rock formations, and it's toxic green atmosphere. Go explore in the new and improved caves.

New Docking System

As the docking system didn't really work, a complete makeover was necessary. I build a system that dynamically fuses any number of physical objects together into a larger structure, which allows for full hit detection. This means: no more glitching physics when ramming a wall with a docked structure. I also rewrote the complete docking orientation, and constraint system.

To use docking, you have to place a docking module. You can now change the orienation of that module in advanced build mode by pressing WASDQE. The orientation will change relative to the cameras position. The arrow INSIDE the yellow block preview indicated the current orientation.

As you place a docking module, you will see a green/red box in the direction, the docking module is orientated. This is the docking area. The docking area determines the maximum size of the ships that can be docked on this docking module. You can make that area bigger by connecting the new Docking Enhancement block to the docking module.

If you build inside a docking area, the area will become undockable. A dockable area is indicated in green, an undockable area is red. This means in short that the docking area has to be green to be able to dock to it.

You can edit a docked ship, but if you make the ship bigger then the docking area, it will automatically undock.

The freedom of rotation as a docked ship is now restricted to what you's expect from a turret. There is still some overlapping possible, but I'm working on that. The orientation also deceides the axis of the docked ship. If you need for example a turret on top of your ship, you need to orientate the docking module to point to the top. The docking texture does not yet represent the current orientation, but that will also soon be fixed.

More Stability

I spent most of the last week rewrite some core functions of StarMade, specifically the block logic structure, which handles block grouping and the functionalily of usable blocks. It also handles the connection structure of blocks. I have redone the system to be extremely abstract, which in the end eliminated houndreds of sources of errors. The game is also now a lot more scalable, since the new system is more streamlined.

Notable Bug Fixes

There have been over 50 smaller bugfixes since the last update. Since stuff like random crash fixes, etc, are not very interesting, I'll pick out the most notable, and bugs that have been reported on the forums for the following list:

• Fixed bug that would cause the health of players outside a ship to not update, making players litterary invincible in this form.
• Changed economy: Shops now update their prices on random intervals to prevent fraud
• An active AI of a ship will now be automatically turned off when that ship is being entered by a player.
• Fixed bug that would cause missiles to never change the sector and remain in the same sector without ever exploding. Missiles will now change the sector if necessary.

This awesome ship was made by Asharad.

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema