Starbound [Winter Update!]

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!

very interested in how mech are going to work

http://playstarbound.com/29th-may-progress/

 29th May Progress

Hi guys,

Today we worked on a few more UI bits and bobs.

First we made a culinary UI, which can be accessed from a food prep table and various kitchen counters style items.

It will be full of a massive amounts of food recipes. Food is divided into various categories like Entree, sides, snacks, drinks, desserts.



Each category of food will have it’s own use. You’ll also be able to place food in the world, should you want to lay a table.

It’s basic functionality, but we finally got around to making the number of slots in a chest configurable.



We’re putting the final touches on the options menu. Finishing up the final respawn animations and finishing up the avian intro.

Molly is throwing in a ton of food items to go with the cooking system.

And kyren has the ongoing task of increasing NPC intelligence.



beeeep

These late night updates will be the death of me.
http://playstarbound.com/30th-may-progress/

 30th May Progress

Let’s see what’s going on today in Chucklefish Land…

On the creative / artist side, there was some more work done on cooking and cooking recipes, and a lot of cooking recipes were added, along with some more crafting objects to do different sorts of cooking. There was also some code work done to crafting to enable more types of crafting / cooking windows to be opened. Also I believe more hats were drawn.

On the coding side, like I said before there was work done to support more kinds of crafting, bartwe is working on fleshing out more functionality in the container UI code, and omni did some more work on the sound system and also tying some of that functionality to the options screen.

Also, I finally have the monster spawner naturally spawn flying creatures and fish

So, bit of a short update today, sorry about that. We’re still hard at work, though! There will be more tomorrow, and hopefully nice juicy screenshots.

On a somewhat related news:

-Starbound just recently hit 100k lines of code! (For comparison, Last version of terraria had something like 107k lines afaik)

random monster:

floran cloning:

http://playstarbound.com/31st-may-update/

 31st May Update

Heya folks.

Sorry, but today’s update is going to be a bit of a short one. Most of the group had some responsibilities to take care of. There’s always a few people taking care of business, and they generally don’t get mentioned in the updates. Today just happened to have most of everyone busy with life. For instance, I spent most of the day mopping and vacuuming my girlfriend’s floor. But I came online to rescue you, dear reader, from a completely missing update.

Tiy and Kyren worked mostly on the server. Trying to get WordPress plugins installed and make things work. Since the move there have been a few issues, which we’ve been working slowly but surely to resolve. Hopefully, things should be getting better, but this pomegranate is time consuming. :/

Legris finally finished the Avian Introduction Story Cutscene. It’s very pretty, but we cannot reveal it because spoilers, etc.

Kyren is working on enemy monster mechanics still. She’s doing, among other things, “fish flopping on land” AI. Fun stuff. Next on the plate according to Da List is humanoid enemies, that can have equipment and weapons just like you.

I’m still pecking away at the options menu. Sorry about the delay. I had a bit of life get involved, and it turns out that my window for actually spending quality time with the girlfriend ends tomorrow at 9AM. This is sad for me, but wonderful for you, because it means I’ll be focusing a lot more on work.

Armagon is working on an Avian Airship dungeon. Think SMB3 style. It’s pretty neat.

Bartwe did a very minor change to humanoid drawing order to fix a subtle issue with faces.

And that’s it for today! Some of the things that you’ll see in upcoming days is putting the respawn animation into the game, working on making ships upgradable in game, and more!

http://playstarbound.com/1st-of-june-progress/

 1st of June Progress

First of the Month! Woo

Development that’s interesting to the end user seems to come in waves. We spend a bunch of time showing off screenshots of cool things, making pixels appear on the screen and then suddenly the wave dips and we’re back doing under the hood work that’s difficult to present besides showing you all a bunch of code or a bunch of spoilers. The under the hood work then leads to a bunch of new cool features we can easily show off. It’s a cycle!

So not a huge amount to show today, a bunch of stuff we’ve talked about recently is still ongoing. Omni is still finishing up the options screen and how it interacts with the rest of the game. (It’s actually a pretty big task). Kyren is still adding a ton of NPC functionality (they’re going to be smart little things). Bartwe is working on various special kinds of damage. Part of which included us finally getting in impact graphics and sound. Armagon made us a a ton of sounds for every weapon type striking flesh and armor. Hammers give nice heavy crunch, swords a satisfying slash. There are also hitsparks and particles.



The screenshot really doesn’t do it justice, it looks great in motion.

We’ve also been working on the way data is structured. We’ve got a nice system where you’re going to be able to just drop ‘pak’ files into a mods folder and immediately have them active. The great thing about this system is that server hosts could transfer missing pak files to the client on connect. Potentially even host a file server with a redirect to make the process extra fast. We’re really hoping once modding takes off each server will be a unique experience.

George is completing the tiered weaponry, there’s at least 60 unique weapons per race (not including any of the randomly generated or non craftable stuff).

Here’s a very small sample of what he’s done, keeping the vast majority back for spoiler reasons.



Rho has been working on respawn animations, you can find one of the new ones in this months newsletter.

Legris is still plugging away at all the intro cinematics.



In other news Chucklefishy news, the Risk of Rain beta has been released and you can pick it up over at http://www.riskofraingame.com

[video=youtube;i84sipkxIV4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i84sipkxIV4[/video]

The game is absolutely incredible and Chucklefish published so purchasing it goes towards supporting us.

Congrats to the risk of rain dev team for getting it out there.



Finally I’d like to talk a bit about durability in Starbound. It’s been a massively hot topic on our forums and in the comments. Some have speculated that your favourite gun or sword will eventually break, or it will be a constant grind. I wanted to put those fears to rest and explain what we’re proposing for the durability system, and why we think it should have a place in the game.

First of all, durability only affects tools. Things like pickaxes, axes, hoes, etc. Weapons are unaffected, objects are unaffected, armor is unaffected.

Second, durability does not break and delete the tool. Each tool has a healthbar below its slot in the inventory. When this bar hits 0 the tool is marked as ‘blunt’. It’s still usable but its effectiveness is massively reduced.

Returning to your ship automatically repairs and restores to full health every tool in your inventory.

If you’re not on your ship, you can sharpen your tools with ore. Either the ore made to use your tool or something stronger. The sharpening process is super quick and super simple. You just pick up the ore, drag and drop it with right click on top of your tool and the tool’s health goes up.

We decided this system is a good way to encourage thoughtful mining, where making use of ore deposits and finding caves is key to mining quickly. We wanted to discourage digging massive vertical tunnels to the center of the planet (though you can still do that if you’re determined, it won’t be the quickest method of reaching the center anymore) and keep the basic ores useful throughout the entire game.





Also

<@kyren> I have seen omni naked

That’s all

http://playstarbound.com/2nd-june-progress/

 2nd June Progress

Hi all,

So we’re in the process of making the websites comment system part of the forums and this post could get lost entirely. So I’m going to keep it very short in case I need to repost it again in the morning.

The options menu was finally completed today. We left some room for additional options but everything is functional.

I know options are dull but it’s a fair bit of work and it’s complete, so yay!



We’ve also got procedurally generated, funky aquatic creatures appearing in oceans and other bodies of water.



We’ll be adding a ton of different behaviours to these over the coming days.

We’re also working on the 3D printer interface and the scanning items procedure at the moment, but no shots of that just yet.

So as I said, keeping this one really short until website maintenance is complete.



Cheers guys!

QUADRA POST
http://playstarbound.com/3rd-june-progress/

 3rd June Progress

Hey guys, gonna keep things fairly short today!

There’s lots of work taking place right now across the board. Some of it is technical stuff, there’s AI stuff, and our artists are still hard at work on weapons and mechs. I personally have been crunching on dungeon stuff. Today I pretty much wrapped up on the Avian Tomb dungeon, which has been a refreshing change of pace from the lavishly decorated halls of the Glitch castle dungeon. There’s a number of massive chambers, dedicated to ancient graves, interconnected by smaller passageways filled with tombs and deadly pitfalls for the unwary. Here’s a taste of what you have to look forward to!



Kyren has been busy adding a bunch of new behaviours to our flying NPCs, which are shaping up nicely!



With the tomb wrapped up, I’m going to be taking a week-long vacation in Bali starting tomorrow. While the rest of the team will continue working hard to deliver the best game they can, I’ll be lazing about the side of a pool, probably with a cocktail. Rest assured it’ll be business as usual once I get back, I’m looking forward to seeing how far the game progresses in my absence!

I refuse to let you have a Penta Post.

I'm still quite stunned by the background details. the sky, the stars, the clouds and the planet in the background, it looks really good, and the idea that it's all randomly generated is amazing.

please tell me there isnt a mysterious old man near that dungeon

http://www.playstarbound.com/roadmap/
Road map got an update.
Should I do some copy and pasting for this?

Nah, but here is a link with a twitter feed that automatically gets roadmap changes

https://twitter.com/StarRoadTracker

Damn, all those updates.

http://playstarbound.com/4th-june-update/

 4th June Update

SHORT ONE FOR YOU TONIGHT LOL NO. Lots of things have happened today, as you may or may not be aware.

First, there were moderately large changes to the website, as chronicled in previous updates. We’re now bridging together our website and our forums. Clicking the comments link for all subsequent posts will take you to the forums thread that was automagically created when we make a post. This will help our mod staff actually moderate the comments that were being posted, rather than leaving troll comments around for several days waiting around for Tiy, who is the only person with Disqus mod powers, to remove them. So that’s good.

Also in the tin is a roadmap update. You can thank Tiy for putting it together. I just uploaded it. Some percentages were updated. Maybe some text was changed? I don’t really know. I didn’t pay much attention when I uploaded it. So go exploring.

As far as game work is concerned, I’ve been having some difficulty working on it personally lately with all of the website changes. I’ll be staying up way late this evening working on the 3D Printing UI. Hopefully, I can have it done before tomorrow morning rolls around. Hopefully.

Bartwe made some major improvements to initial load performance. Start up time is dropping fast. That’s really nice. That combined with some of the stuff a helper elf is working on, means that we’ve really begun performance tuning on this part of the code. It’s important, because it lets us do our edit, compile, run, test cycles much faster. If I understand the plan of attack, next up for bartwe is programming in status effects.

Kyren made a commit that removed the need for redundant asset information to the tune of 3k lines of redundant information removed. This also helps start up time.

So today was more of a performance tuning day. Kyren and Tiy also talked strategy in dev chat, mostly about how we’re going to need to tackle Humanoid Enemies and NPCs and made some cool plans surrounding that. Boring but necessary. Planning is important.

It’s really late over here. *yawn* I’ll let my cat type out the rest of this post.

meowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowpuke

http://playstarbound.com/5th-june-progress/

 5th June Progress

Hey all,



Today was one of those dreadful days in which I had to take care of a ton of business shenanigans. Accounts and lawyers that sort of thing.

Luckily though, whilst my soul was being destroyed the rest of the team continue to make progress.



Rho completed the last of the respawn animations. I don’t think I’m going to show any more. We should at least leave a couple as a surprise no?

Kyren continues to work on Humanoid npcs, they need to be quite smart and encompass a lot of different behaviours, so she’s probably going to be on that for a few days yet.

Omni has nearly entirely finished the 3D printer system, which is a really nifty thing to have access to (especially with an admin client, print anything in the game for free! Yay!).

Bartwe has finished up all the base work for status effects. Enemies now use the same damage system as the player, so anything we come up with can be applied to both. Next on the agenda is poison, burning and bleeding.

George and our wonderful contributors are still tackling the huge number of ore based melee weapons and isn’t too far off completing them now. Some of these are ridiculously cool.



Can you guess which races these two weapons are from?

Legris is still working away at the intro sequences between work on biomes.

We also got the wonderful Logan Cunningham of Bastion fame on board for the voice acting. The samples he sent today were incredible.

Until next time!

Man dat Logan Cunningham voice acting, can't wait to hear what hes gonna do in starbound.

http://playstarbound.com/7th-june-progress/

 6th June Progress

Hi all,

Work continues on NPCs, weapons and so on.

We’re a little entrenched in multi-day tasks at the moment, but there’ll be a lot to show off once those tasks are complete.

One of the things I did today was implement a bunch of new NPC projectiles. We had some fun doing it on stream and taking suggestions from stream chat.

You can watch the stream over at http://www.twitch.tv/tiyuri/b/413545532 It’s around 3:30 hours long, recorded after midnight, so forgive my indiscretions.

Be warned though, this wasn’t a planned affair, the stream is full of moments where I’m working in another window for a good few minutes, bugs caused by reloading assets on the fly, my going to answer the door,



stream hiccups, that sort of thing. I’d suggest skipping the first 10 minutes or so.

I think of all the new NPC projectiles the stream chat helped me add, icebreath was my fav



Check the stream link to see it in motion

Oh and fish now scatter when startled. We’re officially next gen!

http://playstarbound.com/7th-june-update/

 7th June Update

Hey guys,

Today a lot of work was done around ranged monster attacks. Tiy has a stream about it here: http://www.twitch.tv/tiyuri/b/414028486

I’m still working on the 3d printer interface.

Kyren is pulling an all nighter and working furiously on something apparently. I’m not sure exactly what.

Bartwe is neck deep in something. He was complaining about memory corruption and something, I’m not sure I really want to know what’s going on with that. Sounds messy. He did some minor bugfixes earlier in the day too.

Rho, George and legris and still hard at work making more art stuff! And Armagon is working on dungeons. All in all a pretty normal day.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve made a trailer, you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MBDzzW4b0

http://playstarbound.com/not-the-8th-of-...ss-update/

 Not the 8th of June progress update

Hi, I thought this was cool.

Apex village tower block:



It’ll have more floors when it’s finished.

yay soul destroying. Bless big ape.

http://playstarbound.com/not-not-the-8th...ss-update/

 Not.. Not the 8th of June progress update

Hallo,

Today saw a couple of cool developments, particularly with some of our lovely contributors.

ArchVince has fixed the last few (known) bugsin his new terrain code, and has merged that in! This means that a couple of our terrain generators (mountain and canyon) look a lot better than they have been and are a lot more interesting and navigable. They look awesome, good job Arch!

Bartwe has been working on a very important change regarding status effects that will allow us to have lots of status effects defined by data rather than hard-coded, which will make working with status effects much easier. He’s now done with his change, but unfortunately not before losing about 12 hours and his sanity on a massive debugging session. It’s over though! I feel for ya man, good job.

Omni continues working on the 3d printer interface and associated non-interface code and is nearly done, as far as I know. Go omni! you can do it!

I continue to be embroiled in a multiple-day change for humanoid NPCs phase 1. I’ll have more to say about that once it’s in place, which hopefully will be late tomorrow. I’ve also made an update to our physics code that should allow other parts of the code to easily mod physics behavior temporarily, so that things like status effects can slow you or increase your mass or friction. It’s a pretty minor change, but hopefully it will go along well with the status effects stuff that bartwe is doing.

The artists continue their artisty work on things like ship improvements, legris continues his work on intro sequences, and Tiy has been experimenting with a cool new “ship design” that we’re not sure will make it in or not, but damn is it cool!

Aaaaand…. I’ve saved the most important for last. We have a new code contributor named “jordo” that has been helping us lately, and he’s super smart and capable, and has already being a huge help. He has been doing some monster AI work and, just recently, implemented the most advanced, most important feature in all of Starbound…

Are you ready???

The fishes swim away from you!!!



Kyren out.