Starbound [Winter Update!]

http://playstarbound.com/16th-may-progress/

 16th May Progress

Just a dull one tonight, we’ve been working on recipes all day. There are thousands of them and they’re not really anything we can show a screenshot of sadly.

But it’s important stuff and it’s getting done!

Bartwe has made the finishing touches to the tech screen and Omni is working on some special blueprint / unlock stuff.

Legris has been working more on the biome I don’t want to talk about.

Rho has been making crafting items like copper wiring and circuit boards.

In other awesome news, Stardew valley was greenlit!

So in honor of that, here’s a screenshot of Stardew!

http://playstarbound.com/17th-may-progress/

 17th May Progress

So the great recipe undertaking is still underway, I managed to do over 800 today but there’s still a lot more to be done.

I’m hoping to have the recipes finished before next week. Fingers crossed.

We’ve also finally added nametags to multiplayer. A small thing but a little bit more work than you’d expect.



When a player appears on your screen, their name tag is shown for around 5 seconds before fading out. Name tags won’t be displayed for players who appear on screen in the dark. So you can still be sneaky.

We’ve also added a status button (alt), holding down the status button displays everyone’s nametag regardless of how long they’ve been on screen. It also causes all interactive objects in the world to flash.

Here’s an ugly gif of that. In game it’s a nice smooth pulse.



We’re also working on the 3D printing interface, which is very similar to the crafting interface but you’re also able to “scan in” items to reverse engineer them. Almost any object you find in the world can be scanned/reverse engineered to allow you to print it using ‘pixels’. However, anything you make with a 3D printer will be marked as “printed” and will have a much lower value. If you want authentic gear you’ll have to find it.



We’re also revamping the way mobs spawn, giving them herds/groups and making sure they don’t spawn in undesirable spots.

http://playstarbound.com/18th-may-progress/

 18th May Progress

Oh dear, apparently I’m doing the progress update today. This should be interesting

So, most of the mob spawning bugs are worked out, finally. NPCs spawn in clusters that are far apart, and don’t tend to spawn in undesirable spots anymore or on top of each other. Mobs are de-spawned properly if no players are nearby, and mobs are spawned only if there is enough room in a given region to place them all. There were some bugs left that caused NPCs to be de-spawned in certain cases while still on screen, and those have been fixed. So that’s good!

The next stage for NPCs at this point, which I’m working on at the moment, is fixing some of the behavioral problems they have. They tend to be a little too determined to try and reach their goal (to attack a player), and they need to have way better detection for when this is just not possible and they need to get bored and wander off a little faster. There are also plenty of general navigation bugs and limitations that remain, and hopefully a good chunk of these can be fixed by tomorrow. I’m hopeful!

Omni and Rho are working on a fun little UI animation for ship travel that will give UI feedback for when the ship is currently flying and can’t be controlled, but more importantly looks really cool! Hopefully we can post a video of it tomorrow, but for now here’s a pretty terrible screenshot of it:



Bart has finished some lighting changes for nametags and object highlighting that makes them a bit smarter about the surrounding light level, and it looks really nice now!

Another change we’re working on right now is putting the actual mod loading mechanics in! This is the part of the code that will scan additional asset directories and handle the load order for them, and load assets from them instead of the base assets directory. This also includes the addition of “packed” asset files, which should make startup times on real distributed versions of the game much much faster than the in-dev versions, because packing the assets folder means a whole lot less filesystem access, and we can add indexes that make everything much easier to load. Also it’s a lot simpler for people to manage.

In non-starbound related news, I have just recently recovered from what I can only assume to be the flu, and I do not recommend it. However, good news is that I finally have new glasses to replace my broken ones! I can see the text on my monitor again! BEHOLD:



Now that I can see again, coding should be slightly less challenging!

Kyren Out.

Those are some really nice looking glasses. :f6:

http://playstarbound.com/19th-may-progress/

 19th May Progress

Hey again guys,



Been working on a whole bunch of different things today.

Everyone is working hard. Kyren is working on NPC pathing, making them a whole lot smarter.

There’s not too much I can show in a screenshot there, but it’s going to round off combat nicely.

After we’re done with the path finding and a few more tweaks we can really begin to show off the combat. It’s shaping up to be very interesting.



Bartwe has been working on speech bubbles, they’re currently very very ugly (as you can see), but the important thing is they work. Tomorrow we’ll be working on making them look much nicer.



Omni has been working on the finishing touches to the travel animation.

Here’s a little video of that:

[video=youtube;HAxNtR_TBRo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HAxNtR_TBRo[/video]

Also apparently my ship supports skype.

The artists continue to work on their wonderful super secret stuff, but I don’t want to spoil too much! So I’ll let you find those yourselves.

That warp is amazing and somehow extremely immersive with the sounds and feel.

http://playstarbound.com/20th-may-progress/

 20th May Progress

Time flies so fast.



So yesterday I said we’d make speech bubbles prettier. We worked on it and now they look more or less like this:



still needs a little bit of tweaking positioning/pixel ratio wise. But I think they’re far more bearable now.

We’ve also been working on NPCs, giving them new behaviors and making them all around much smarter and more interesting.

NPCs spawn really nicely now too. They spawn in packs that looks very natural. More importantly they know where they shouldn’t spawn.

We’ve also been working on getting the ship upgrades to work nice and seamlessly so you don’t need to reorder any of your decoration when upgrading.



Until tomorrow!

Dem Ship upgrades.

http://playstarbound.com/21st-may-progress/

 21st May Progress

A small one tonight guys,

We’re working on a bunch of things I can’t really post too many screenshots of because they’d be outright spoilers.

But just to keep you in the loop.

The tricky final polishing on the Speech bubbles is being finished up.

Work on flying NPC behavior is ongoing, as well as additional work on various behavior scripts.

A ton of unique ore based weapons have been created and more are coming. A full set of weaponry for each race at each tier is being produced. That’s 60 ore based weapons per race. Not including other uniques.

Biome work is constantly on going.

The avian tomb generator is being fleshed out a bit more.

The transition between ship upgrades is being worked on.

A whole bunch of cooking recipes are being designed.

We’re beginning work on the in game option menu.

and a bunch more stuff

Here’s a random screenshot:

http://playstarbound.com/22nd-may-progress/

 22nd May Progress

Hello guys,

Today we finally got the speech bubbles nicely finished up. They’ve taken a little while because they’re much more complex than they look.

Now they’re automatically arranged nicely so you can easily follow a conversation, even between a lot of different people.



We’ve also been working a bunch on the games intro sequences. These are comic sequences with narration that set the scene for each race.

An example of some of the art:



Legris is amazing!

We continue to work on NPC stuff that I can’t really show off yet.

A lot of work is going on with cooking and various recipes and meals you can make.

Biome and terrain work is ongoing, I think I’m going to show off a bit more about how the terrain works tomorrow.



Also a thank you to everyone sending us narration auditions. It’s going to take a little while for us to go through them all.

Woo! Finishing touches. Beta shouldn't be too far away.

http://playstarbound.com/23rd-may-progress/

 23rd May Progress

Hi guys,

So today we put the finishing touches on in game chat with character expressions.

When you type now your characters lips will move. Typing in various different ways or using emotes like :o or will cause your character to mirror those emotes.

Here’s a terribad video of it in action:

[video=youtube;YLFO2Zq1X2A]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YLFO2Zq1X2A[/video]

You probably want to watch it in 720p full screen, to actually see the animations.

Work has been going on with the art for mechs / other vehicles.

They’re starting to look really nice:



We’ve also been working on adding more ‘Terrain features’. These are small portions of terrain that make use of our dungeon system code to place very interesting set pieces on the terrain. They blend in nicely with existing terrain and there are hundreds of them.

Here’s an example of a terrain feature, a natural bridge:



Terrain features look different depending on the planet they appear on. We wanted a way to create natural structures the terrain gen would struggle to create naturally.

THE FACES! TOO ADORABLE.

what a nice update!

http://playstarbound.com/24th-may-progress/

 24th May Progress

A really short one today folks,

Today we’ve been swamped with dealing with webserver stuff, so we didn’t get as much done as we usually do.

That said, we’ve now got a whole bunch of nifty functions to use in the intro comics, zooming, fading, that sort of thing.

As part of the flying NPCs update, Kyren has begun adding some nifty functionality to player physics that will allow us to do some really neat powerups.

We’ve got tons of mechs being produced by our artists. There will be at least 1 mech and 1 hoverbike per race.

We’re working on the in game options menu, which we haven’t bothered with for a long time (the defaults are good!) but we figured we should finally get it done.

A lot of costumes and clothes are going in, some of which terrify me..

We changed up the travel sounds, now theres more of a thunder boom as you enter hyperspace

Sorry for the lack of screenshots! Anything I screenshot for today would be spoilery.

http://playstarbound.com/25th-may-progress/

 25th May Progress

Might be another sort of boring update today, sorry!

Today has been mostly about technical improvements and getting ready for things.

Omni is working on several things right now, he should be finishing up the Options menu and getting all the back end stuff tidied up with that. He’s also still doing some work to get ship transitions working properly, which turned out to be a pretty big technical challenge. The details are a little hairy, but essentially we have special Worlds just for things like ships, and transitioning a live world between one ship and another ship without causing all sorts of chaos is a bit tricky! Getting all that straightened out turned out to involve both Omni and myself, but it seems like it’s all straightened out now and ready to finish up.

Bartwe has been hard at work fixing bugs and making improvements to the code that runs our intro comics and splash screen. He’s also made emotes configurable and moddable in data and he and the artists have been hard at work making more emotes and fixing timing and things like that.

Both Omni and Bartwe are doing lots of GUI improvements and fixes that are required for later GUI work. GUI work is generally way harder than you would think it should be and kind of boring and thankless, so everyone really appreciates all the work they’ve put in to making the GUI well.. work!

I’ve been working on a couple of things also, like doing the big technical improvement that allows Omni to dynamically change ship structures, scripting flying NPCs, and of course The Big Physics Change. The Big Physics Change was necessary to get flying NPCs working properly, and like Tiy said, will allow us to be a lot smarter and more capable about giving the Player upgrades, handling vehicles, and things like that. Now, finally everything in the game has been moved from the old “approach” based physics to new physics with actual mass, force, friction and all that good stuff. Planets with different gravity levels are also back in now, and this time they work without bugs! Also, by by turning the player’s mass way up, the air friction way down, and the bounce amount to 0.9 you can make bouncy castle mode

The artists have been doing their thing, writing more recipes, drawing more costumes, adding emotes, and generally doing artsy things that I’m utterly incapable of doing.

So no exciting updates today, but it’s all important stuff! More to come tomorrow!

Citing Abed from community "Cool, Cool, Cool"

http://playstarbound.com/may-26th-update/

 May 26th Update

Greeting citizens,

It is very late, and the server maintenance has been delayed. Also it seems that the daily update falls to me today.

I generally keep to my coding cave, so I’m going to infer what everyone was doing from the git updates (24 commits today), because I’m kinda just winging this right now.

For what I did today, I added another widget type to our gui toolkit. It’s a slider bar (whee). That’s pretty boring. It’s also something that probably should have already been in the toolkit. But because I wrote most of it, I have no one but myself to complain to. :X

I also standardized the expected name of the json map in the assets. It used to be that each layout configuration was expected to have a random different name from nearly every other configuration, so I took some time to standardize each of the names. It’s not a big change, but it’s one that will have modders thanking us later about. (Or at very least, not being confused, annoyed, and cursing us and our firstborn.)

Armagon, Bartwe, and Tiy made several commits today concerning cinematics. Work is continuing on that, mostly getting the first one in is the biggest challenge, because it comes with developing the system. After we get the first one in the 2nd, 3rd, etc. go much faster. There’s still more work to make cinematics a “thing” for in game, though.

A Helper Elf pushed a change that includes several minor changes to many items that I was completely unaware existed within the game. Like, one off costume sort of things, pretty cool! Horsemask? Horsemask.

It looks like Kyren is continuing her work on enemies, she made a small commit to tweak some behavior of the smaller bipedal enemies. I assume there is more that she simply hasn’t committed yet. As I’m actually currently at her home, I could probably snoooooop her computer and find out, but I’ll be good. Because that’s not cool, yo.

3 days without a screenshot? There’s no way I’d let that happen, so here’s something random.

http://playstarbound.com/27th-may-progress/

 27th May Progress

Hi guys

A whole lot of our day was taken up with getting the website steady on a new host today.

Let us know if it’s faster/slower or if you have any other problems with it.

Kyren finished her big physics change and will have some fun things to show on that front soon.

I spent an absurd amount of time (12 hours?) tweaking intro cinematics.

We didn’t want to simply load a video, that’s always very obvious and ugly.

So we have an in game system that allows us to create comic style cinematics, getting all the cinematic timings right (by tenths of a second) however requires quite some patience.

Omni is putting the finishing touches on the options menu.

Legris is working hard on providing utterly beautiful art for the intros.





On an entirely different note, by popular demand (and because it’s funny). We’ve decided to have a cosplay competition.

It’ll be up on the forums soon, you can post your best (or worst) attempts at Starbound cosplay.

And we’ll pick 10 for a free copy of the game + getting your name in the game as an NPC.

If you want to win, either make sure your costume is really awesome or really embarrassing.

http://playstarbound.com/28th-may-update/

 28th May Update

Hey amigos!

Looks like I’m in charge of tonight’s update.

Kyren’s made changes/tweaks to flying NPCs, to make them a little smarter and more intuitive. Not like, Siri intuitive. I wouldn’t ask one for weather reports, or strike up conversation with one. But still! Moving right along…

Legris is still working on super pretty intro cinematics! Omnipotent Entity is finishing up work on the options menu!

As for me, I’ve been working on…oh god, I’m really setting myself up for jokes here…food! Working on implementing food recipes. Each race will start with its own set of recipes, but you’ll be able to learn every other race’s recipes as well. You’ll craft food at a kitchen counter out of crops, meat and other materials. Some of it will require cooking to reap the full benefits, though. I mean, you CAN eat a raw alien burger, but I can’t promise you won’t regret it later.

And yes, you can totally bake a cake.

Foods and other consumables, on top of having health, hunger and possibly status effects, will be able to be placed on tables and other platforms for decoration. Nifty!

Oh, and here’s a brand new mech from thefluvirus.



See you tomorrow. <3

PS- It’s almost newsletter time! Last chance to send in any art and/or letters for a chance of having them featured!