Ladies and gentlemen!
So, as you may know, I’m Suit. I used to do support tickets as QA, but I also do some texturing and player contact, like the blogs and Facebook.
So, to have a bit more of a connection with you guys, I’d like to make a blog about me. You can ask me anything in the comments, and I’ll create a new blog on the 20th of October answering EVERY question you ask. So, ask me anything you’d like to know!
Regards,
The classiest Dev alive
Summer’s gone and Winter is coming, the leaves are turning brown, there are conkers to be found, the nights are drawing in and the kids have recently gone back to school. All of this can only mean one thing…
Halloween is soon! As such, it’s about time we got a competition going. This year’s competition is gunna be a bit different to any we’ve had before so listen (or read) carefully for the instructions; because you’ll be carving pumpkins!
You will (probably) need the following:
Prizes:
Five winners will be picked from the entrants the weekend of the 31st and will be given the following:
Dates:
Rules & Judging:
When you submit your entry, make sure you have good picture(s) of it. You can take multiple pictures of your submission; if your pumpkin is to be lit inside, pictures of it lit in the dark and a picture of it unlit in the light would probably be a good idea.
This week’s update isn’t going to be a traditional update. I’m working on a pretty cool project, but at the moment I’m not quite ready to release all the details. Instead, I’ll just leave you with this teaser screenshot!
I’ll be back again next week with a reveal of exactly what I’ve been up to. Until then, feel free to post feedback in the forums!
With Bageese no longer with the development team, Suit felt like something was missing. He went on a search on how he could stop this, but had no idea. He finally decided he could no longer bear this, and contacted the Lyceum scientists to try and go back in time.
Long story short, something went wrong with the black hole generator and the universe as we know is going to end. They are unsure how long they can hold the black hole generator from spinning out of control, but they predict that it will swallow the entire universe saturday the 11th of October at 1PM Eastern Time. Hopefully the almighty adum will be generous and will be able to re-create everything, so the server should be back up shortly.
If this is your first universe reset, click here for a guide!
This week’s update is going to cover a few small feature additions as well as a whole load of bug fixing! Keep reading to find out more!
With the Alien Invasions changes and additions completed, I had a week were I was able to focus on a lot of smaller issues and make fixes and additions to resolve them. The first up was the issue with the lockout for the High Prophet in Temple Grounds. Since this is a unique encounter (in that you don’t actually kill the boss) we were having issues getting a lockout that would apply to the whole squad. To remedy this, I’ve added in a new bit of boss script that allows a boss AI to give a lockout to everyone in the galaxy automatically. This is being applied to the High Prophet to properly fix his lockout issues and going forward will make life easier if we want to do another boss that doesn’t actually die.
Another rather big change that I made concerns “special” galaxies. Special galaxies are point-of-interest locations in the universe that contain skill training, missions, etc. You may recall a while back I added in custom map coloring for the name of special galaxies. In order to help newer players even more, I’ve added to the functionality of being a “special” galaxy by ensuring they’ll always be revealed on the map for players. This is good for two reasons, firstly, new players will have less trouble finding galaxies for Paxian missions (so less WHERE IS XXXX in help chat) and secondly, it’s very convenient for existing players to find key locations after a universe reset.
Finally, what I spent most of my time on this week, fixing a lot of little bugs. All of our content (items, galaxies, enemy spawners, etc) is stored in XML files. Recently Jeff added in some error checking code to our XML loading functions to check for out-of-order XML tags for our content files. An out of order tag for spawner and galaxy files will lead to a skipped tag and a skipped tag means information about an object that is missing. The new error checking code revealed hundreds of small issues that needed tracked down. For the most part, these issues were little things that won’t noticeably affect a galaxy or spawner — but there are two noticeable fixes that took place.
Firstly, there were quite a few lower level spawners that were getting their treasure lists skipped by the parser. These mainly include Monochome Tints and Hues. With the tags in the proper order, they’ll once again drop all the loot they are meant to, not just Augmenters and Kromaticos. This also affected NCC-Bulk spawners in Beta Antares, BP Processing and East Vindia, who were getting their treasure lists replaced by their missile launcher drops. Secondly, the roaming Olympus AI that players need to kill for missions were getting their team definitions skipped. Ares Warriors, Stingrays, Cyclops, Rams and Zeus Pretenders were all meant to have individual teams and will properly have them next universe.
So that’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!
Hi everyone, here’s an update on the base rebalance. As hoped, it is on track to go in for next universe (which should be announced soon). The purpose of this post is to elaborate on some of the details of the rebalance, especially those that I left vague in my first post.
I mentioned disposable base gear in my previous post. Here’s how it’s going to work. When you deploy a base kit, it will come with three new blueprints pre-installed. If it’s a tech 20 kit, the blueprints will be Annihilator Upgrade X, Y, and Z. Lower tech kits will come with the corresponding lower tech blueprints. Each upgrade project builds a whole set of gear that can’t be removed, tossed, or sold from the base. That includes a shield, energy, shield charger, laser, and omni-dampener (all seven damage types). These projects cost little or no credits, but require a substantial supply of raw materials (Metals, Silicon, Nuclear Waste) over an extended period of time. For example, the Upgrade Z version will take 6 weeks to complete.
The objective here is to give players the chance to build a strong galaxy defense even if they don’t have any base gear stored up. Of course, having some Adamantiumized or Armada gear in storage will still be quite handy to make sure your bases are strong from Day 1. Not only that, that kind of gear will be necessary for competitive BvB since the XYZ Upgrades take far too long for that.
Since we are repurposing XYZ gear as disposable, we need to do something about currently-existing XYZ gear. When universe reset is taking place, we will go through and replace existing XYZ gear by the plain versions. But before you cry “nerf!” let me share with you some new stats.
As you can see, the new plain versions of base gear will be miles better than the current Z versions. The only XYZ gear that won’t be replaced by the plain versions are Andaman and Achilles Laser Z. We are aware that these are popular endgame base weapons and so those two items will be left as they are (except of course they will receive the same stat buffs as the rest of the gear, as well).
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your impressions on this.
I am egrosphere, a new developer for Star Sonata. In this post, I will show some of the skins that I have been making that will use features from the new version of the skin system (which most likely will be on the live server soon), and will tell you what sort of ships need skins, so that you, the players, can help make them.
Here are 6 of the skins that I have been making that are either finished or almost finished:
Rainbow-imizer, the four irregular shaped parts on the top cycle through all RGB colours over 24 seconds.
Earthforce Police Zebra, with four animated roating red and blue lights.
Zebucart Mark 2, a skin for the various types of Zebucart (such as the normal Zebucart and Oversized Zebucart) that makes them look like the client 1 Zebucart.
Hephaestus Machine Frame
Prawn Frame
Earthforce Police Dreadnought, a skin in which the red and blue cylinders flash, alternating their colours. Similar skins have been made for all of the Earthforce capital ships except the Earthforce Frigate (which has no cylinders).
All of these skins are not final, and may change due to some problems that I found with them (for example, the Rainbow-imizer glow seems to have problems near bright suns, and the Prawn Frame skin might have to have its polygon amount reduced so that it runs easier on many computers). I also have been making some “phasing” subspace ship skins, that add a phasing bubble similar to many of the planets in subspace to the player-obtainable subspace ships, however a problem with how visages are displayed in the client caused the ships to be scaled down to very small sizes inside their phasing bubble, so I will have to wait until this problem is fixed before I can continue making them.
We still need more skins from you however, as many of the ships have no skins currently. I believe that skins are mostly needed for many lower-tech ships (ones that people whose level is under 900 would use as their main ship), and many of the Industrial Freighters, such as the Dark Transport. More specific ships that I believe should have skins aswell are the tech 21 Paxian ships, the Red Photon ships and the ships that players commonly use as slaves. Any kind of skin is welcome to be submitted to the forum post accompanying this blog post, from 3D models (it would be good to keep the model under 3500 triangles, or at least have a model that can be recduced to something around that number), texture replacements, glowmap replacements or a combination of them.
The new version of the skin system due be released soon, allows skins to use the entire visage system, allowing the whole ship to be replaced (for example, a Zebucart could in theory, have a skin that makes it look like a Juxtaposition wormhole, or a sun). This means that in your skin submissions any special effects on your skin that you would like, such as particles or flashing glows can be included, and if your skin is chosen to be in the game, I will try to incoroprate it into the skin. Also, a question that you players may be able to answer regarding skins, is that do you think that there is a need for skins for ships that a player of less than level 50 would use? Or are people upgrading ships too fast at that point for skins to matter to the player?
Also, I have confirmed that people who have their skins chosen to be in the game will also get a free copy of the skin.
In this video, I demonstrate a new item type called a Maneuvering Thruster that was created for the Target Dummies in the Nexus to make them more interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu1OEhdU8bU&list=UUI8NgyQmuJfPyadcld8JSsA
Maneuvering Thrusters come in 3 types, absolute, relative, and home. Absolute thrusters will always thrust in a certain direction regardless of the ships facing. There are currently 4 of these that I made (AI only for now) which are “North”, “South”, “East”, and “West”.
Relative thrusters are relative to the ships facing. The two of these that I made are “Port” and “Starboard”.
Home-type thrusters only will ever work for AI, and they remember where the AI spawned, and will always thrust towards that point. This helps to keep the AI in one place.
These Target Dummies each have a different super item which uses a combination of maneuvering thrusters to move them around in an interesting, arcade-y, way. The first one does a series “east, west, home”, causing the dummies to move side to side relative to the main Nexus base. The second one goes “north, south, home”, causing it to go vertically up and down. The last guy goes “starboard, home”, causing him to go in a circle around you if he has aggro and you are sitting relatively near his spawn point.
So far, these maneuvering thrusters are AI-only, and only in these target dummies, but expect them to appear in some other AI in the future, and possibly be available to players. I’m thinking something like a tech 9 base kit with built in thrusters so you can move your base around without a tractor beam, or some kind of thatch with no engine, but built in thrusters… Who knows?
This week’s update is going to further cover the changes and additions coming to the alien invasion announced last week. Keep reading to find out more!
Firstly, I’ve made some changes to the way overall alien ownership is calculated. Currently, it’s extremely easy to keep the overall ownership down (and negate any of the effects that alien ownership has) by clearing out the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms of the layer. So I’ve added an ownership weight to each arm and instead of taking a true average of the ownerships of each arm, I’m taking a weighted average. This means that ownership in the lower level arms is valued less while ownership in the higher level arms is valued more. With the current weights, 25% of the overall ownership is contributed by the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms and the remaining 75% is contributed by the Katur, Pajca and Sas arms. This was especially important to do considering ownership is going to control a lot more than it currently does. Not only will it affect colony income, but it will control a lot of spawners in both Subspace and P-Space.
This past week I did a lot more work on the back end of things as the major features discussed last week were mostly implemented. This mainly meant updates to the alien invasion page of our admin control interface. There were some things we couldn’t set without changing the configuration files for the invasions (which means a server restart!) and all of them are now accessible via the control panel, including the new ownership weights. These additions are good for two reasons. First, it makes testing out anything invasion related a lot faster and easier — being able to manually set the alien ownership levels made testing out the ‘growth’ factor of the world boss a lot simpler! Secondly, it will allow us to make tweaks on the live server to some aspects of the invasion we couldn’t before as well as some extra manual control for events if we want.
Finally, I’ve done a small pass at the alien loot. I’ve added a few new items, but more importantly, I’ve added some rolls from the instance loot tables onto some of the harder aliens spawned by the subspace invasion! Paired with an experience increase, this will hopefully address some of the risk vs. reward issues we have with killing the harder outposts in subspace.
That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!
As some of you probably noticed. There was an issue with the webserver (and the game server due to dependency) being down.
There has been an hardware failure and it took a bit over 12hours before we could get it replaced. It is now fully functional again.
As compensation for the 14hours downtime that entailed from it, there will be a 100% experience bonus, 100% teamxp bonus and 60% faster worker until 11h59pm 2014-09-15 server time (EDT).