StarMade 0.087: Prettier Planets & Improved Build-Mode news

Hello and welcome to StarMade,

Improved Planet Generation

The old algorithm seemed to only produce flat plateaus with canyons. Therefore I revisited the algorithm and added more layers to it. Now, planets have a much wider variety. There can still be flat plateaus, but now there also are mountains, hills, and overall more structure. I also managed to improve the generation performance by about 15%.

New Build Mode

I scrapped the old in-ship build mode and replaced it with one much easier to use. This new build mode now basically works just like editing your ship from the outside, but with some major advantages:

• you are always aligned to the ship
• the arrow that indicated forward
• you can pass though solid blocks
• huge range to place blocks
• faster movement speed with shift
• pressing X will reset the camera

You can of course still use this mode like the old one though (by zooming out with the mouse wheel)

Economy Balance

We spend the last week balancing out the economy of the game. While it's still far from perfect, it already works quite well. Shops now have a maximum stock (per item), so you are forced to find another shop if the one you are at is already full. There were also several bugs in the pricing and transaction system, which have been successfully fixed

I want to say thanks to all the testers, who helped! You're awesome :)

Here is a story from the tester MarcelloPelli I just have to share:

MarcelloPelli wrote: "[...]Secondly, it gives the ships built by a player a higher value, since he worked hard to build it. An evidence of this effect happened when I had just finished building my ship and I heard a missile being shot.Then I noticed another player really close to me (with a better ship as he had missiles), and we faced each other's ship for about 15 seconds without doing anything. Then, for defensive purposes, I started steering around his ship aiming at his core, even though I had no intentions to shoot (that ship was his creation!).

He must have taken this as an aggressive act, as he turned around and started shooting me. Fortunately for me, he missed.The battle had started and it was probably the longest and hardest battle ever (sorry, Bettlebear). To cut the rest of the story short, I won, he called me murderer and it was sad (though a little bit funny) seeing him there, flying forever without a ship near the shop."

Bug Fixes & Small Features

GUI improvements

You can now drag items from your build-bar into the shop to sell them. The catalog is now also displaying right again. Furthermore, the shop now displays the price live if you want to buy/sell higher quantities of an item.

Performance

I managed to improve the performance significantly for large amounts of single block changes over the network, which was mostly the case with high powered harvesting ships. I also improved the general drawing performance by using a neat trick to get rid of a hot-spot draw call.

Catalog & Save Bug

A performance update introduced a new bug that would cause saving issues in both the general game and in the catalog.

What Comes Next

Exciting stuff is up ahead: There will be more planet types, block types, and a new system for improving existing blocks soon...

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema