A bunch of work was done today on the new combat system. I can honestly say the combat in Starbound is now a lot of fun. We’re not done yet though.

Shields now have a perfect guard timing, if you block an attack within the first 0.15 seconds your shield is active the shield takes no damage.

On top of that, shield health is now balanced for all shields across every level, monster melee attacks are tied to the leveling curves.

Monster AI is massively improved and continues to see new improvements. Myself and Metadept are working hard on giving each monster part a unique attack.

Tooltips for shields are now complete, and work on parrying with longswords has started.

The combat consists of 100s of small tweaks that would take forever to list, but once it’s done I’ll put out a new combat video.

We’ve been hard at work on Starbound with stuff like ship A.I., shields, and the above which is a sample of an animation you might see when you upgrade your ship. The one you get is based on your species.

We’ve also done some more work on several basic ship A.I. animations like these:

Until next time…

-GeorgeV

Late update for the coder tonight. George left so quickly because he wanted to play Mario Kart 8.

Today, I primarily worked towards solving a few perf issues as a palette cleanser before diving back into shields.

I fixed a deadlock scenario with where we weren’t holding a mutex before signaling on a condition variable to shutdown worker threads in our assets system.

While I was in the neighborhood of Assets, I revisited the locking behavior of our assets system. Namely, because Asset reading is nearly entirely reads, and never ever writes except for loading, we didn’t strictly need a single user Mutex to lock it. So I wrote a readers/writer lock. Then I spent the rest of the day debugging, testing for correctness, and exposing bugs elsewhere. Unfortunately, most of these issues were exposed on Windows, so I didn’t stream most of the day. Sorry stream peeps. :(

With the new readers/writer lock we start up noticably faster, which is awesome. There’s still large, low hanging perf issues in the new tile rendering code, which I’m planning on turning my baleful gaze to some point next week, either before or after the shield stuff.

Have a wonderful weekend.