Hello again! So soon?!

Today I did stuff.  Among this stuff was the mockup for the “Ship Computer A.I.” user interface. The blank space to the left is where a portrait of the A.I. would be and like all mocks everything in it is temporary.

Hello! GeorgeV here posting from the new office.  All the movers are moved and we’re pretty settled.

One of the things we discussed today was adding an AI “character” in each ship which would act as a new way to receive certain items, upgrade your ship, give you quests and help you out in general.  There was also talk about giving it a bit of personality, potentially making it based on race and having it upgrade along with the ship.

Obviously this idea is in the early stages.  I’ve only just started planning out the UI.  In fact, here’s a really quick sketch we made on our wall in order to make sure everyone was on the same page:

Yes it is very rough but that’s how everything starts out ;) .

All of this is tentative and is being shared to give you an idea of what we’ve done today. We’ll try to keep you up to speed!

-GeorgeV

So there will be a new update coming down the pipe soon, and there’s a couple of bits here that need explaining.

We’re changing the way we do releases slightly.  There will be a new “unstable” branch which you can select on steam, which will receive updates sooner than the regular branch that you get when you install starbound.  Anybody who is interested in helping us test the releases is encouraged to try it out, but please please note that unstable may destroy your saves and be generally, well, unstable.  Yes, we know this is a testing branch for our beta, which is also for testing, but we’re trying to keep the big ugly data destroying bugs to a minimum so we figure this will help.  We put some tests in your tests so you can test while you… anyway,

The next thing that needs mentioning… update sizes!  It seems every time there is a starbound update it’s 500 – 700 MB, regardless of how tiny it is.  This is due to two things:, One, our windows binaries had full debugging information because (for silly technical reasons) that was the only way we could get stacktraces from crashes.  Well, not anymore!  Windows binaries are now built at debug level 1 (as opposed to 2) which means that instead of starbound.exe being 450MB it’s more like 30MB.  So there’s that.

The OTHER thing that was causing large updates was our pak file system.  Whenever we updated pak files, we tended to completely rebuild the pak file with just a file or two changed, which was enough to make the steam binary diff system go bonkers and just basically re-download the whole file again.  This is also fixed!  We now add to the pak file in place, so minimal changes occur (and at the end of the file) that make steam deltas very small.  This is important as we want to start doing more frequent content updates (as we’ve mentioned).

That’s the good news, the BAD news is that in order to make this happen, you’re going to have to download the entire pak file again, so the first update will kinda suck (pak file format change).  But, it should get better after that.  To all those that have bandwidth caps, I’m very sorry :(

The update should include several bugfixes and updates to heck, the treasure horde, and the skyrails system at least, probably post a full changelog later.  The update will hit ‘unstable’ tonight, and probably ‘stable’ tomorrow depending on how things go.

-kyren