Hi guys

A whole lot of our day was taken up with getting the website steady on a new host today.

Let us know if it’s faster/slower or if you have any other problems with it.

Kyren finished her big physics change and will have some fun things to show on that front soon.

I spent an absurd amount of time (12 hours?) tweaking intro cinematics.

We didn’t want to simply load a video, that’s always very obvious and ugly.

So we have an in game system that allows us to create comic style cinematics, getting all the cinematic timings right (by tenths of a second) however requires quite some patience.

Omni is putting the finishing touches on the options menu.

Legris is working hard on providing utterly beautiful art for the intros.

On an entirely different note, by popular demand (and because it’s funny). We’ve decided to have a cosplay competition.

It’ll be up on the forums soon, you can post your best (or worst) attempts at Starbound cosplay.

And we’ll pick 10 for a free copy of the game + getting your name in the game as an NPC.

If you want to win, either make sure your costume is really awesome or really embarrassing.

Greeting citizens,

It is very late, and the server maintenance has been delayed. Also it seems that the daily update falls to me today.

I generally keep to my coding cave, so I’m going to infer what everyone was doing from the git updates (24 commits today), because I’m kinda just winging this right now.

For what I did today, I added another widget type to our gui toolkit.  It’s a slider bar (whee).  That’s pretty boring.  It’s also something that probably should have already been in the toolkit.  But because I wrote most of it, I have no one but myself to complain to. :X

I also standardized the expected name of the json map in the assets.  It used to be that each layout configuration was expected to have a random different name from nearly every other configuration, so I took some time to standardize each of the names.  It’s not a big change, but it’s one that will have modders thanking us later about. (Or at very least, not being confused, annoyed, and cursing us and our firstborn.)

Armagon, Bartwe, and Tiy made several commits today concerning cinematics.  Work is continuing on that, mostly getting the first one in is the biggest challenge, because it comes with developing the system.  After we get the first one in the 2nd, 3rd, etc. go much faster.  There’s still more work to make cinematics a “thing” for in game, though.

A Helper Elf pushed a change that includes several minor changes to many items that I was completely unaware existed within the game.  Like, one off costume sort of things, pretty cool!  Horsemask?  Horsemask.

It looks like Kyren is continuing her work on enemies, she made a small commit to tweak some behavior of the smaller bipedal enemies.  I assume there is more that she simply hasn’t committed yet.  As I’m actually currently at her home, I could probably snoooooop her computer and find out, but I’ll be good.  Because that’s not cool, yo.

3 days without a screenshot?  There’s no way I’d let that happen, so here’s something random.

Might be another sort of boring update today, sorry!

Today has been mostly about technical improvements and getting ready for things.

Omni is working on several things right now, he should be finishing up the Options menu and getting all the back end stuff tidied up with that.  He’s also still doing some work to get ship transitions working properly, which turned out to be a pretty big technical challenge.  The details are a little hairy, but essentially we have special Worlds just for things like ships, and transitioning a live world between one ship and another ship without causing all sorts of chaos is a bit tricky!  Getting all that straightened out turned out to involve both Omni and myself, but it seems like it’s all straightened out now and ready to finish up.

Bartwe has been hard at work fixing bugs and making improvements to the code that runs our intro comics and splash screen.  He’s also made emotes configurable and moddable in data and he and the artists have been hard at work making more emotes and fixing timing and things like that.

Both Omni and Bartwe are doing lots of GUI improvements and fixes that are required for later GUI work.  GUI work is generally way harder than you would think it should be and kind of boring and thankless, so everyone really appreciates all the work they’ve put in to making the GUI well.. work!

I’ve been working on a couple of things also, like doing the big technical improvement that allows Omni to dynamically change ship structures, scripting flying NPCs, and of course The Big Physics Change.  The Big Physics Change was necessary to get flying NPCs working properly, and like Tiy said, will allow us to be a lot smarter and more capable about giving the Player upgrades, handling vehicles, and things like that.  Now, finally everything in the game has been moved from the old “approach” based physics to new physics with actual mass, force, friction and all that good stuff.  Planets with different gravity levels are also back in now, and this time they work without bugs!  Also, by by turning the player’s mass way up, the air friction way down, and the bounce amount to 0.9 you can make bouncy castle mode :D

The artists have been doing their thing, writing more recipes, drawing more costumes, adding emotes, and generally doing artsy things that I’m utterly incapable of doing.

So no exciting updates today, but it’s all important stuff!  More to come tomorrow!