mollygos posted on April 7th, 2015 in Dev Blog, News
Happy Tuesday!
We’ve returned from the long Easter weekend all refreshed and ready to take on the next week’s worth of work. Hope everyone here had a lovely holiday, too! :)
Today we’ve been working on:
various animations for unique NPCs
implementation of unique NPCs
character portraits
new missions!
improvements to the way we design dungeon parts — keeping file size down, making it easier to add objects to existing maps
Hello! It’s a long weekend (HappyEaster, if you celebrate it!), so I’ve got something a bit different for you today.
We were recently reached out to by Thomas Bull– a 16 year old Youtuber and one of ~10,000 sufferers of Cystic Fibrosis (CF) in the UK. Cystic Fibrosis is a rare-but-serious genetic lung condition, and average the life expectancy for CF patients is just 36 years. Despite the severity of the disease, CF sufferers in the UK have to fund their own treatment after the age of 18, despite the fact that they need these medications to survive.
One of Thomas’ methods for coping with his illness is raising funds and awareness. In the past he’s done this by raffling off hundreds of pounds (£) worth of video games and streamed games for over 24 hours in order to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. He’s involved in an ongoing campaign petitioning the UK government to provide free medication for sufferers of CF. He’s been featured on national television and radio, and his petition has (at time of writing) 18.7k signatures!
Last year, though, Thomas started #CF5DayLive, a five day livestream with friends on Twitch.tv. By the end they’d raised $1600 for charity, but this year they’re hoping to do even better. Streamers involved include TheJellyTom, VideoGameNerdMan, HiTrix, SwordfishPlays, Mrsomedude, Teaisformugs_, NihonTiger, TheSpydersilk, Twoshotsgaming, and Soboy.
We want to help! They’ve got lots of games to stream, as well as keys to giveaway that are unlocked based on donation milestones — Starbound keys among them!
They’ll be streaming from April 4th @ 12PM BST to April 10th @ 12PM BST— that’s 120 hours! Relevant links below:
It’s been a busy month and a half since our last stable update, and now it’s time for the unstable branch to be updated in preparation for the next! Before I get to the actual patch notes, please read this big red warning text:
As of this patch, the ‘Home’ planet feature has been replaced by planet bookmarks and direct teleporters. EXISTING CHARACTERS WILL LOSE THEIR HOME PLANETS!!! Make sure to write down your home planet’s coordinates or leave your ship in orbit so that you don’t lose track of its location.
Now, on to the good stuff!
Players can now save planet locations in the cockpit navigation interface
Select a planet, then select ‘Add Bookmark’ to bookmark it
Select a bookmarked planet from the list to set it as your navigation target
Players can now place and register teleporters on planets
Interact with a teleporter to add it to your list of registered destinations, which you can return to from any other teleporter
Can also be used to teleport directly to party members
Find Teleporter Cores in the world
New Outpost store, the 2-Stop Teleshop, lets you use a Teleporter Core to create various types of teleporters to suit your style
Breaking a teleporter destroys it, but refunds the Teleporter Core
Outpost store includes a teleporter you can register for easy access to the outpost
After logging out, players will be returned to the place in the world where they left (rather than back on the ship)
Mission dungeons will persist for 10 minutes after all players have left, allowing continuation of a mission after dying
Mission dungeons now have teleporters at the entrance and exit, should help clarify how and when to leave
Players can no longer be attacked while teleporting
Players can no longer initiate another teleport while teleporting
Teleport cinematic while destination world is loading
All player ships should now be inhabited by a non-combat pet corresponding to the character’s race, in one of a wide variety of color options
Pets will investigate held items and various ship objects
Pets can be fed and will develop preferences for certain foods
Terramart now sells several pet-related items
Food Bowl to keep your pet fed while you’re busy adventuring
Pet Ball for your pets to play with
Pet House for your pets to sleep in adorably
Ancient Gates now have another destination, a huge and ancient ruin
Gives a few clues about Starbound’s overarching plot… so mysterious!
NPCs and ground monsters now jump accurately and reliably find paths across complex terrain
NPCs and ground monsters are much better at avoiding and escaping liquids
NPCs and ground monsters should become stuck MUCH less often
Can be found underground on Radioactive worlds
Includes various unique items and a new furniture set
Reworked Apex, Avian, Floran, Glitch and Hylotl name generators to be much less (but still a little bit) silly.
Changes to melee weapon responsiveness, damage sounds and visual feedback. Lots more of this coming in a future update!
Ranged weapons now have varying accuracy depending on the weapon type, quality and rate of fire
Player energy now refills much more rapidly and has a shorter delay before regenerating
Various improvements to server architecture which should greatly improve server performance and stability
Various improvements to internal handling of Lua API calls which should greatly reduce CPU usage, particularly in areas with many monsters or NPCs
Many small improvements and fixes to objects throughout the game, including updating 3d printing costs in preparation for future additions to the game’s economy
Scroll bars can now be clicked and dragged properly
Fixed several bugs with codexes. Codexes are now retained across universes. Existing players will, unfortunately, have their codexes reset.
Moons are now generated with solid cores to help avoid falling out the bottom
Several improvements to grass placement, also add underground ceiling grasses to several biomes
Fix bug where music volume changed in combat
Several small improvements to AI interface
Removed the annoying levitation status from random status pods
Added optimizations and cyrillic character fixes for Hobo font. Thanks to user dsp2003 for this fix!
Existing characters and universes are safe (aside from the codexes and home planet, as listed above). However, a few of these changes may require a new universe or new planets to take effect. Hope you all enjoy the changes, and for those of you playing on the Unstable branch, let us know if you find any bugs or have other feedback!
