Starbound

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:

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.

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.

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:

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!

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

Just a short update tonight because I can’t really show you screenshots of the things we’re working on.

We added a new biome, but it’s a secret :P one that I don’t want to spoil.

We’re working hard on adding recipes for every item in the game, this is going to take a little while because there are just so many.

Bartwe has begun working on the tech GUI, this morning it looked like this:

Beautiful no?

Now it looks like this:

Ignore the regular crafting recipes in the tech window.

Here’s an example of an access panel on your ship you might access the tech window with:

Here’s a chocolate fountain:

Hi guys,

So Omni is back from his family visit and had a chance to upload the codex system.

It still needs a little bit of a tweak, but here are some shots

Work has begun on translating codex entries into a format the game can read.

We’ve also been creating all the blueprint unlock item schematics, all 1300~ of them. Which took a rather large amount of time as you can imagine.

We spent some time experimenting with how to display these schematics in the toolbar:

I’m not sure if we’re quite happy with any of them yet though. Maybe we’ll add a shader to the items icon so it’s just a white silhouette on a blueprint background. A bit more mystery until you actually use the blueprint to unlock the crafting schematic.

I also managed to catch some live comedy tonight, that was nice!

Also one of our secret helper elves made a lovely tea-set. The game is really starting to make me feel as if I have a huge lego set in front of me.