This week’s update is going to be a little shorter and will cover some more upgrades and changes coming with the improved Nexus.

One of the main goals in reworking the Nexus was to improve flow and really give a new player a much better handle on the game. Recently, I just finished up two more mission goals to further augment the starting experience. The first of these is the use item goal. This mission goal is rather self-explanatory; it lets us specify an item the player has to use. The primary reason I added it was to showcase the starting super item on a new player’s Zebucart. Super items are extremely powerful for the low level player and can make their life easier so we felt it was definitely important to introduce them early. With the new use item mission goal we can easily do that now.

Secondly, I’ve added a docking goal so we can explicitly state to a player where they need to go. We can tell the player to dock places in mission text, but having a goal means we can plant a giant mission indicator over the base for the player to make a it a bit more obvious. We’ve been trying to remove as much docking as possible from the Nexus, but when we do want them to dock, we want to make sure a new player knows it and more importantly, where!

Other improvements have been made again with the UI functionality. Currently when you complete a mission that rewards an item, the game automatically opens up your main ship inventory. During our testing we noticed that it was a little annoying to always have to close your inventory when undocking, so the game also takes care of that for you now. This will only happen if the dialog was opened up by a mission though (so it won’t automatically close the inventory dialogs you open up yourself!).

That’s it for this week’s update! I’ll be back again with another update next week. Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

The micropatch is in and Double Team EXP is live! It will end on June 7th at 11:59pm EST. This micropatch also fixed the issue with the recent crashes.

Arctia and Vulcan, two new zones that will be coming with the next universe reset for lower level players, are up on test and need some playtesting!

At this point I’d like if some players can run through both areas and give me their overall impressions on the design, AI, bosses and loot. It’d also be great if some players could try the zones on characters that are level appropriate for the zones. For Arctia, this range is 20-50 and for Vulcan it is 20-100. This kind of testing is important because it lets us know if this area is properly tuned for players of the target levels! Feedback can be posted in the auto-generated forum post!

If you’d like to find out more about these two zones you can read both my previous posts about Arctia and Vulcan. If you’d like to help test log on to test.starsonata.com, port 3032.

For the past few months Jey’s special side project has been working on a skin system. This awesome system will allow you to purchase skins for your ship with space points! I know what some of you are thinking, “But I wanted CUSTOM skins, that I designed!” Fortunately for you, you still have the chance to nab a custom skin. Our current predicament is that we have the system, but we don’t have the skins!

Thus, we are launching a Skin Creation Contest. We’d ideally like to get two custom skins for each ship. That’s right, TWO FOR EACH SHIP. There are a lot of ships in game so that’s a LOT of skins to be designed, and there are a lot of you with amazing talent so why not make a skin creation contest with awesome prizes!

Rules of the contest

1. You may submit as many entries as you desire except only one skin per ship. This is mostly to allow other people to submit skins for their favorite ships.
2. You may only submit your own artwork or modifications to the default textures. You may not submit someone else’s art or modifications and claim it as your own. Plagiarism is an immediate disqualification.
3. When submitting your entry to the thread created by this post you must have certain things in your post in order for us to count it.

A screenshot of your skin in game
The texture.png file you modified
Optional: The specular map, normal map, and glowmap files. (If you worked with someone else on this part include their account name as well, only ONE person needs to post).

4. Being a jerk in this thread is grounds for immediate disqualification, be nice and respect others and their work.
5. You may work with someone else on your skin ONLY if your skin includes normal maps and/or specular maps. If you work with someone else make sure you include their account name in the submission, otherwise they won’t get the prize! You may also PM me with questions on this one.

Creating and Testing your custom skin

1. Navigate to the Textures folder in the Star Sonata 2 client and find the texture you want to modify. The default location is:

%APPDATA%\Roaming\Star Sonata 2\Content\Default\Textures\Ships

2. Copy the ship texture you want to modify to the skins folder in that directory.

%APPDATA%\Roaming\Star Sonata 2\Content\Default\Textures\Ships\Skins

3. Open that copied texture in an image editing program of your choice. Paint comes installed by default on windows systems. I personally recommend Gimp since it is a free Photoshop alternative that lets you make very powerful changes to an image.

4. Edit the texture to your heart’s desire and SAVE OFTEN. You might even save multiple copies of your texture just in case you make a change you’re not happy with.

5. Once you’re ready to see what your skin looks like in game make sure you save it, and then load up your Star Sonata 2 Client. We recommend setting up your Star Sonata 2 client for faster testing. Make sure that DDS Textures is unchecked, and preload textures is unchecked. Your client must be restarted in between each change to the skin.

6. Make sure you’re in the ship you want to test the skin on and type
/debug testskin skinname.png into the chat. You will be the only one to see your skin as these tests are local to your client. These file names are also case sensitive!

7. Once you’ve hashed out your design submit a cool screenshot of it and the .png texture file to the thread on the forums!

8. (Optional) If you know what normal maps and specular maps are you can create custom ones for your ship texture! Name your normal map skinname.png_NM.png and your specular map skinname.png_SP.png. To test those maps just add those file names to the command mentioned above. So

/debug testskin skinname.png skinname.png_NM.png skinname.png_SP.png

9. (Optional) If you would like to add glowmaps you need to grab the latest beta client. You can put your glowmap into the same skins folder as a .png. After you have the glowmap in the skins folder you’ll want to launch your client and type:

/debug glowmap glowmapname.png
/debug skintest texturename

(Note, the glowmap is a newer feature, and the instructions for glowmaps may be incorrect and the feature might be buggy since it is untested. A post will be made if the instructions change.)

Prizes and Final Notes 

If we decide your skin is one of the two for a specific ship, you’ll get that skin for FREE in addition to a cool holoprojector specifically for skin creators. So if you want to get that skin you’ve always wanted in game (I’m talking to you Daedalus and your green Poseidon Wave), design it, post it, and win cool stuff! We will announce winners a week after the contest concludes, and then keep the thread opened for more skin submissions. After the contest concludes and you decide you want to submit a skin, if we accept your skin you will still get it for FREE! The contest just gives you a cool holo projector or two.

The contest starts today and will last one month. So ending on June 5th at 11:59pm EST. Contest winners will be announced the second or third week of June.

PS: We are literally 30 minutes of work away from having the winners from the Class Rebalance  contest announced. That post should come probably Wednesday depending on scheduling.  

This week’s update is going to focus on another new mission features that I’ve worked on the past week. Keep reading to find out more!

This past week I finally got to the Deep Space section of the Nexus. As I was going through the missions there, I came to the first mission in the Augmenter Tweaking chain. It requires that players find a Minor Docking Augmenter. This isn’t that big a deal outside the Nexus, but inside that’s a very, very specific request for a new player. Ultimately, I decided to move Augmenter Tweaking (and Focus Selection) outside of the Nexus, but it left me wondering a few things; mainly, why don’t we have missions that can take items from categories?

That thinking led to a new mission goal I have been working on, the Egg Carton, or a mission goal that lets you turn in any combination of items (or easter eggs)  from a set of items. With this mission goal content developers will be able to flag items with a set, for instance, Minor Augmenters, and then specify a ‘collect item’ mission goal that will accept any items from that set. This will let us reduce mission bloat a lot for turn-in type missions and make some earlier missions, like the Augmenter Tweaking one, a whole lot easier for new players to finish. A very good example of where this could be extremely useful is in Lyceum. Between the Honorary Mention and Diplomas, there are over 50 turn-in missions. With this new mission goal, I can reduce that number to 2, and offer the added benefit of mixing and matching blueprints!

This mission goal has a few turn-in options as well. If you try to complete with exactly the number of items from the set the mission requires, it will take all of them. If you try to turn in with more items you get two options provided via a pop-up menu. The first lets you pick which items you want the mission to take. The second lets the server automatically pick the items until enough have been taken to fulfill the mission requirement.

Finally I needed a way to let players know what items belong in a set. For that I have my first solution, which is to put a colored field in the item tooltip as in the example image above. However, that is not finalized and I would like to get player feedback on that. I could change the tooltip text to be reliant on having the appropriate mission to be visible, or put it as part of the general tooltip text so it doesn’t stand out as much. Player feedback on this is definitely appreciated so I can come to a final decision on this.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update, but until then, please post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

So things have been a little quiet on my end for a little while, so I thought I’d give an update as to what’s going on behind the scenes.

Class Rebalance Contest

We have our finalized list of winners but we’re doing final checks to make sure there are no duplicates. I said in a thread that people with multiple accounts would only have one account for the contest, and our final step is confirming the individuals getting prizes are actually different people. Right now it looks like there are 15 testing badasses among you that received 10 or more points! These people will be announced next week once I chase Jey down to help me with the final checks. Winners will be contacted by me to discuss your custom skins.

Compensation for Team Experience: 

Since team EXP was rather broken for a month, we’re giving one month of double team exp. Unfortunately we require a micropatch (a scheduled server restart) for this and we were unable to start the event on the first of the month like I wanted. I am scheduling a Micropatch with Jey and the 31 days of double team EXP will start immediately following. I am expecting the Micropatch to be no later than Friday, May 9th.

Monthly Events

The monthly event for April kinda didn’t happen. Things have honestly been a little chaotic back here for the month of April between various team emergencies and people moving around doing jobs they’re not quite familiar with. April’s Monthly event will actually start today and last through Wednesday at 12:00 EST! May’s event will start on time.

Skinning Contest

In between the chaos, Jey has been working on the new skinning system for ships! We are going to be doing a contest for this skinning system. The details of that contest will be announced in a post following shortly after this one.

Steam Greenlight

We were one of the first 30 games on Steam Greenlight, but unfortunately never got much in the way of traction on that website. However, the folks at Steam have been Greenlighting 75 games to go onto Steam regularly every two to three weeks. We are now in the top 75, but there is no guarantee we’ll stay there! We need your help to get on Steam! Vote for us today!

Much like the past month or so, this update is going to focus on more changes to the Nexus and low level game play. It will also address a few more features that are being added to smooth out the UI for newer players! Keep reading to find out more!

The Nexus is coming along very well. All the content on both sides, Cadet and Volcom, up to Deep Space have been streamlined to remove all the backtracking and pointless docking. They’ve also been rebalanced to make them easier with the new player in mind and all the galaxies have been reworked slightly to make the flow of progression through the Nexus a lot smoother. Most recently, in the past week I looked at the Contracosta and Honey Moon dungeon arms.

The content in both of these dungeons arms was significantly overtuned for the players we wanted to complete them. Contracosta received the bulk of the changes. I’ve moved the ‘stations’ that you have to destroy to ambush spawners so they don’t stick around after the player kills them. I’ve also turned the fight against the Ganglinite Research Gamma station into a mini-event similar to Whiskey Outpost. Instead of going it alone against an army of Micro-Zebus and defense drones, the player is now given backup in the form an allied Volcom army. Not only does it make the mission a lot easier to complete, it makes it a lot more fun and engaging. Honey Moon received a few changes for difficulty as well. Firstly, the AI in both Dagger and Cutlass Caprice were unteamed. Most of the difficulty in those areas were the fact a new player would get swarmed. I’ve also toned down Urzod significantly. Having him call for reinforcements just overwhelmed new players who don’t know how to handle AI swarms yet.

I’ve also made a few other changes to help out new players server side, the biggest of which is that docking in an AI base will now refill 50 energy and 50 shields per second. This isn’t enough to be extremely useful for higher level players, but for the new player this kind of regen will ensure that if they dock because of low shields, they’ll be back in action a lot faster than they would have before.

On the client side I’ve made a few more improvements to the pop-up mission agent dialog as well as another change to station UI. For the pop-ups I shifted the typing animation from a frame based animation to a time based animation. This will make sure that jumping into a galaxy with a lot going on (which can lag your client and slow the framerate) won’t slow down the speed the text types out. I also removed the big close button from the agent dialog and made a few modifications to the accept button so it can handle all the usage conditions. It didn’t make much sense to have two close buttons on that dialog and it allows for the mission vendors name to be visible for all missions (which is a definite win for immersion!).

For the station UI, I am sure some of you have already noticed a button underneath the mission list that reads ‘Contact Agent’. This button when clicked will automatically open the first available mission at that station. It can also be used to avoid double clicking to open missions. Clicking on the mission you want in the list and then hitting that button is a bit easier to understand for a new player. The second change I’ve made that you probably don’t know about is that I’ve added a new button to the bottom of the ships tab in AI stations. This button is the ‘Buy or Upgrade Ship’ button and when clicked will automatically take the player to the hull tab of the trade bay. Again, this was done to help new players. Upgrading your ship is one of the most important power increases in the early game but it isn’t the most intuitive process. Hopefully this button will help alleviate some confusion — they can go to the ships tab to see their ship and click this button to easily see if the base they’re docked at has any alternatives.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again with another post (perhaps the final one!) on the Nexus! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

In this video, I demonstrate two new convenience features that we’ve been working on: auto-targeting and auto-credit scooping.

Auto-targeting eliminates the need to select a target before attacking it. If you have no target already selected and shoot at an object that is either a mission goal to kill, something that you have hostility towards, or just an aggressive AI, then as soon as you shoot, that object will be automatically selected and your shot will track towards it.

Auto-credit scooping works in two ways. The first is that if you have a scoop equipped and fly near any credits that you would normally be allowed to scoop, then those credits get automatically scooped. The second is that for 5 seconds after you kill something, those credits will fly towards your ship. In effect, you can clear out a whole DG level or kill most guys at normal range/speed and get all the credits automatically without having to go and scoop them.

This will be on the test server in the next day or so and require a test client to use, so please check it out and give your feedback. In particular, we need to test the credit scooping in various squad type environments to make sure that nothing too crazy happens.

This is a micropatch, mostly bugfixes / minor tweaks and also update the client to include some supports needed for test server.

* Tweakings to the bosskill score system.
* Autopilot no longer requires Astral Travel.
* New Contact Agent button for station mission list.
* Missions now autocomplete when you dock at the ending station.
* Text in the trade bay is now colored based on price and tech levels (dark green for can’t afford, red for insufficient tech level).
* Crash fixes.
* Fixed the bug where we had an extra tab in several different tab control UI elements.

Much like the last few weeks, this week’s update will continue detailing changes to the Nexus as well as a few new mission features that will be coming with the early game changes.

I did a lot of work with the the mission system this week after some initial testing. The end result was two new mission goals that should make life a lot easier for newer players. The first of these is the new Proximity Goal. With this, content developers can specify any object in any galaxy as a location that players need to fly to in order to progress their mission. It will then require the player to be within a specified distance of that object and will put a mission marker above it. This pretty much lets us do ‘hey, fly over there and check out this nebula’ type missions that we couldn’t do properly before. An example of this is in the Fly Dungeon. Instead of vague mission text that says ‘go find the Maggot’, I instead gave a proximity goal to explore the sun he spawns near. When a player gets near, it completes that mission, auto-opens the mission to kill the maggot and spawns him. This hopefully illustrates how useful this goal will be for low level content. It lets us guide new players around galaxies to better help avoid confusion

The second new mission feature is a new mission goal called a Motion Goal. This essentially lets us check for thrust, break or turn actions that the player does and was added so we can further slim down the tutorial bot. Instead of getting the W, A, S, D key information from the tutorial bot when you start a new player, you’ll now get it from a mission. This makes it a lot easier for us to time the actual starting missions (killing a Volcom attacker if you’re a cadet, or proving yourself to the Volcom if you’re a pirate). It also is a little less confusing since you’re getting your information from one source (the mission dialog) instead of three (mission dialog, mission tracker and tutorial bot). Along with this I’ve added a new feature to auto-completing and auto-starting missions that lets us set a delay between the completion of the previous and start of the next mission. This gives the player a little time to breathe between the missions in the movement tutorial missions (and lets us give them mission completion text). Overall, I think the new mission based tutorial will play a lot better and be a lot less confusing for new players.

Finally, a few of the bosses in the Nexus are going to be seeing some changes, specifically, Rattie Moe and Vorian the Rogue. Both of them were extremely difficult for new players. Vorian was extremely confusing, so he will no longer jump around the galaxy and force you to find him. It was a good boss design, but not for a level 15 player. Instead he will do a new super item translocate. This keeps him moving around, but not in a way that can get players lost! Rattie Moe just did way too much damage for a new player to handle. That’s being significantly toned down.  Between these two though, perhaps most importantly, Rattie Moe is finally getting the robotic-space-rat squeak he deserves. Even doing less damage he’s more terrifying than ever!

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again with more progress on the Nexus (and a lot closer to completed). As always, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!