Starbound

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.

Stop with the crafting window already!

I know I know, another update on crafting. But these things take time to complete.

But complete it we have!

We now have a fully polished crafting window. The icons below the schematics list filter recipes based on category and the little blocks of colour on the top left can filter recipes on rarity.

It’s really nice to have this complete, now all I need to do is write a few thousand recipe files and crafting will be done!

Our artists have begun work on monster evolutions. You’ll only be able to catch baby creatures, so youll need to look after your creature if you’d like an adult. Though adults will appear in the wild.

Kyren has finished her big important technical change. There’s not much to show there from an end users perspective, but it’s very important. She’s now working on finishing up NPC behaviour. You can now only knock an NPC back with an attack if the attack depletes more than 40% of the NPC’s healthbar. We’re going to be focusing closely on exactly how NPCs spawn and their path finding behaviour.

Omni will soon be moving onto other UI / Hud style elements. We have an interesting nametag/visual chat system coming, as well as a way to highlight all interactive items on the screen. 

Roll on tuesday (this doesn’t mean a beta will be released on tuesday!!!)

Sunday!

So today we got in 240 armor descriptions. They appear on the tooltip/crafting window like this:

Right now it’s using the helmet’s icon as it’s preview image, which is obviously rather low res. It’s going to actually display the helm on a mannequin instead. Also the area beneath the armor/warmth ratings will contain icons that indicate the special abilities attached to the armor.

Bartwe continued work on the crafting window, it now has a very nicely functioning search/filter tool:

The next thing to add is category buttons beneath the search bar.

Kyren continues her work on deep engine features.

Omni has completed our book reading interface, though no screenshots of that at the moment because he’s spending weekend with family.

Our artists have been working on armor generators.

Armagon has completely finished up the glitch castle generator and is moving back to avian tombs to give them a little more flair.

A lot of people were asking where the materials required to craft something are displayed.

They appear on mouse over:

It’s the weekend! Yay!

Today we’ve been finishing up some crafting changes. Each type of item now has its own swanky layout within the crafting window.

There are lots of different kinds of items, so this was quite a bit of work and it’s nice to have it finally out of the way.

I’ve also thrown a bunch more recipes into the game, given our 1300~ items so far there are a lot of recipes!

Bartwe is working on a sorting and searching system to make the number of items manageable. That will sit in the gap below the schematics list.

Kyren is continuing her super technical work, which will be out of the way soon.

Omni has more or less finished up the log book UI, but I need to configure where all the text/images sit, so no images of that just yet.

One of contributors also made me this with the paint tool <3

Roll on Sunday