It’s been strange for me to not hear the monsters vocalizing anymore. While it currently feels a little odd, there is far less repetition of sound going on and it’s less obnoxious when there’s multiple monsters together in an area. Removing these vocalizations has drawn attention to the more pressing need for their attacks to have their own samples. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but now it’s of far greater importance.

In the near future I’ll be gaining functionality that enables me to make sounds play upon the projectile’s creation. This is good because this means I can assign samples based entirely on the type of attack, whether they’re ranged or melee types. For instance, depending on what type of melee attack is being used (bludgeoning, slashing, biting), the monsters will use different projectile and play the appropriate sounds. If a monster is attempting to headbutt you, you’ll hear a fairly general whoosh and a flat bludgeoning sound when they successfully hit. Comparitively monsters that attack with claws, they’ll make more of a “slicing the air” kind of sound and do slashing damage (think the sounds swords make when they hit organic enemies).

The more gargantuan task is going to be finding suitable sounds for all the new ranged attacks that have been added recently. There was a handful to begin with, but now it’s climbed to over 60 different projectile types, and there’ll likely be more to come as Metadept and Tiy continue to add unique attacks for our flying enemies and bipeds. Sometimes finding that perfect sample can be a fairly straightforward affair, and at others it can be mindnumbingly difficult to find one that doesn’t sound horribly out of place. All that said, I’m confident that by the time I’m done, Starbound will sound better than ever.

I’m looking forward to seeing what people think of the new sound arrangement once it’s finished!

Hey guys,

Not a great deal to report today. We’ve largely been working on the same things we’ve been involved in for the last few days. We’ve finished up the remaining quadruped head pieces and their unique attacks (some of which are hilarious, good job metadept). We’re still chugging away at the ship AI UI and how that feeds into the progression system. We’re starting to work on various other monster parts giving unique movement attacks, as well as monsters visually responding a little better to things like being surprised by a hostile enemy.

We now have a new member of the team though, introducing our office puppy:

We’re still figuring out what to call her!

I’ve been doing a bunch of things lately, mostly fixing a couple of very nasty bugs and assisting on engine side work with monsters as well as implementing the AI interface.  I recently fixed a really really nasty bug where our networked animation system positions were being de-synced in position with the logical position, and this required a slight rework of the client side networked animator which pulled all of the client side code outside of the server code, making the system better overall anyway.

I’ve been doing a lot of one off bugfixes for metadept, fixing projectiles and changing the update method for our scripted entities, adding to the lua api.  I fixed a nasty nasty network bug which made the server send huge amounts more data than it should, which I need to check on current steam stable.  Thanks to Underbalanced for reporting this bug to omni.  I actually ran into the bug independently working on the networked animator bug, but that confirms that it is occurring on the steam stable build and needs to be fixed.

I fixed a whole series of universe deadlocking bugs caused by a worker pool class we use not being COMPLETELY TOTALLY impervious to re-entry deadlocks.  That was fun.

I spent maybe 3 hours tracking down some particle animation problems, which turned out be a one line fix.

Then comes the AI ui stuff… our UI code is kind of.. special.. at the moment.  This has been somewhat in my way as of late getting the AI code working, so in the process of building the AI gui I’ve fixed maybe a zillion UI bugs and hopefully introduced significantly less than that in the process.  None of it is particularly interesting, it’s just kinda sucky.

Finally, we’re preparing to restore the build server (it’s nearly done actually) and start doing AUTOMATED SCRIPTED NIGHTLY UPLOADS to steam.  These will be AUTOMATED builds that are SCRIPTED and occur NIGHTLY, so huge huge warning signs will be placed around them, they are only for dedicated interested people to track development and experiment, not really for normal play.  They could eat your dog, set your house on fire, eat your house, or set your dog on fire, who knows.  They also might be broken, so don’t complain.