Here’s a little something that you might find around outposts.  It’s just one example of a store you’ll find in Starbound.  This one is a re-purposed shipping container made into a TerramarT, a chain store where you can buy a variety of gardening supplies.

Short message as always. Until next time…

-GeorgeV

This week we’re getting into one of the funnest parts of the monster and combat overhaul: monster attacks! As Armagon mentioned in yesterday’s post, Tiy and I have been going through each of the possible monster heads and coming up with a characteristic ranged attack to match them. Some of the attacks are similar to the ones you’ve seen before, firing directly at the player with various kinds of projectiles. In addition to adding a lot more of these, we’re mixing it up a bit with some different patterns. For example, ballistic projectiles are now properly angled to hit targets at different ranges (and with different gravity):

Other monsters will have ‘ranged’ attacks that are AoE (area of effect) and hit all nearby enemies:

This is just a small sample, but we want to leave some to be discovered! Once we have a set of these basic ranged attacks, we’ll move on to more elaborate special attacks for rare monster parts, unique monsters, and bosses. Some other, less exciting things I’ve been working on include moving control of the script tick frequency from configurations into Lua (monsters will update more frequently while in combat to balance responsiveness with performance), helping kyren track down rendering bugs, and continuing to refactor monster code for consistency and maintainability.

Hey there, I spent most of today writing and configuring methods for making shields sound different when you perfect block and when they break. They also make particles on perfect block and break now.

I also wrote come code to suppress the shield while invulnerable and very slightly after (2 frames), in order to prevent tanking the first hit of a stream (that can hit you 2 or 3 times) in order to perfect block the rest of them, (essentially cheesing the system.)

I also discussed changing part of the lower level windowing system with kyren, and spent some time making sure she understood that area of the code, because she’s working on the AI stuff.