#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks!

I returned to my efforts on the lunar base today, as I’ve begun my detailing pass to make it all look nice and fill it with loot. There’s still a couple of elements I’m going to need before I can totally wrap up on the mission, like scripted NPC events (among other things). The good news is that we will have Metadept officially joining us in the office next week so we should see some really big progress on this front soon! I’m quite looking forward to having him in the office for the long haul, since he does a lot of stellar work and is a great guy to collaborate with.

George has continued working on his own mission and has been making excellent progress, with very little support required from yours truly. He’s already got a solid foundation down to build upon, and even though it’s rough around the edges it’s already looking great, I fear I may soon be eclipsed by his talent! That said, the fun bit will be when I get to teach him how to configure NPCs.

I’m afraid I don’t personally have much more to report, again for the wish to keep missions relatively spoiler-free. The programmers have continued to toil away on their respective tasks, which continue to sail over my non-programmer head, but what I was able to grasp is that they’re intensely focused on crushing a number of insidious bugs that crept their way in some time ago. Kyren in particular seems to be gearing up to assist Metadept when he arrives by tackling the systems he’ll need to work with.

Lastly, just in case you missed the announcement; the Chucklefish Blog has just gone live and Tiy kicked it off with a fairly comprehensive post on our plans for what will feature in Starbound’s 1.0 release. I wouldn’t advise reading it if you want a spoiler-free experience, but for those of you who absolutely must know what’s coming next you can read it . On this new blog we’ll be posting Chucklefish-related news, along with updates from the developers of games that we’re publishing, so you guys should definitely check it out from time to time!

Good night everybody!

---

I'm just going to link you to this post, because it's super long and technical and there's a character limit here. :D

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hello again, since I spoke last, I’ve been working on a couple of different things.

First, there was the new status system for players, npcs, and monsters which has been written and integrated into Player, but for right now it sits in its own branch awaiting a couple more things. The new system is basically ready, but there is a lot to the old status system which is needs conceptual reworking because it just wasn’t working out or wasn’t fun. The biggest example of this is the heat / warmth system, which will probably be replaced by something much simpler. The system is ready, but merging it to master is going to happen once metadept arrives in the UK and we can sit down together and make some design decisions and implement the scripts to drive them. In any case, the system is cool, it works very much like tech that you don’t actively control (player effects that involve movement == tech, player effects that don’t involve movement == status).

Oh and by the way! Metadept is moving to the UK to work with us in our physical actual corporeal office, and be a real life employee. He arrives on thursday and I am super thrilled, because you just can’t beat working together in person. Right now starbound programmers in the UK are pretty thin on the ground (me alone) so having me + metadept will be amazin’.

Other than status, I think you heard a little about the whole Star::Root threading debacle.. the important bit is that it’s fixed, and the atomic_store / atomic_load thing with shared_ptrs turned out not to even be needed. Now *every* database in Star::Root is updated through Read Copy Update, not just the few with the problems, and Root locking is avoided entirely. This fixes the problem without causing rendering slowdown, and actually speeds things up in a lot of places.

Other than THAT, I’m working on a few items in the starbound 1.0 todo, mission things and some boring technical ones involving Drawables and Particles. When I’m done, rain will NOT slow down your game to a crawl, which is nice. Next week, once metadept and I are both in the office, we’re going to start focusing very very hard on getting a new stable patch out, with all the save file compatibility fun that will go along with that.

Aaaaand in case you haven’t heard, Chucklefish is making a new game! It’s called Wayward Tide and, you should check out the Chucklefish blog post about it here. Development on Wayward Tide is *entirely* parallel with Starbound, a whole separate team in fact with Palf as the programmer.

In a technical sense, Wayward Tide is kind of cool for Chucklefish, because it represents a radical departure from the way starbound was developed, and if it works out it may very well be the way that Chucklefish makes games from now on. It’s entirely written in Haskell, primarily based on Functional Reactive Programming, and it’s really really cool. I would tell you more about it but I’m sure Palf will want to tell everyone more about it at some point in the near future.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Howdy guys!

Since I”m waiting on Metadept’s arrival at the office later this week before proceeding further on the missions, I spent my time today continuing one of my side tasks, which is to convert all existing lights over to the new flickering light code I discussed a few weeks ago. There’s a lot of lights that used the old flickering code, but I’m almost done with the conversion, and many lights (particularly fire-based ones) are being adjusted to look a bit more natural.

Working on this stuff isn’t terribly exciting in and of itself, but it makes for a welcome change of pace from all the mission work, and really it’s so gosh-darn nice to be able to make the lights pulse in time with their object’s animations!

That's all for now! Goodnight!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks!

I returned to my efforts on the lunar base today, as I’ve begun my detailing pass to make it all look nice and fill it with loot. There’s still a couple of elements I’m going to need before I can totally wrap up on the mission, like scripted NPC events (among other things). The good news is that we will have Metadept officially joining us in the office next week so we should see some really big progress on this front soon! I’m quite looking forward to having him in the office for the long haul, since he does a lot of stellar work and is a great guy to collaborate with.

George has continued working on his own mission and has been making excellent progress, with very little support required from yours truly. He’s already got a solid foundation down to build upon, and even though it’s rough around the edges it’s already looking great, I fear I may soon be eclipsed by his talent! That said, the fun bit will be when I get to teach him how to configure NPCs.

I’m afraid I don’t personally have much more to report, again for the wish to keep missions relatively spoiler-free. The programmers have continued to toil away on their respective tasks, which continue to sail over my non-programmer head, but what I was able to grasp is that they’re intensely focused on crushing a number of insidious bugs that crept their way in some time ago. Kyren in particular seems to be gearing up to assist Metadept when he arrives by tackling the systems he’ll need to work with.

Lastly, just in case you missed the announcement; the Chucklefish Blog has just gone live and Tiy kicked it off with a fairly comprehensive post on our plans for what will feature in Starbound’s 1.0 release. I wouldn’t advise reading it if you want a spoiler-free experience, but for those of you who absolutely must know what’s coming next you can read it . On this new blog we’ll be posting Chucklefish-related news, along with updates from the developers of games that we’re publishing, so you guys should definitely check it out from time to time!

Good night everybody!

---

I'm just going to link you to this post, because it's super long and technical and there's a character limit here. :D

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hello again, since I spoke last, I’ve been working on a couple of different things.

First, there was the new status system for players, npcs, and monsters which has been written and integrated into Player, but for right now it sits in its own branch awaiting a couple more things. The new system is basically ready, but there is a lot to the old status system which is needs conceptual reworking because it just wasn’t working out or wasn’t fun. The biggest example of this is the heat / warmth system, which will probably be replaced by something much simpler. The system is ready, but merging it to master is going to happen once metadept arrives in the UK and we can sit down together and make some design decisions and implement the scripts to drive them. In any case, the system is cool, it works very much like tech that you don’t actively control (player effects that involve movement == tech, player effects that don’t involve movement == status).

Oh and by the way! Metadept is moving to the UK to work with us in our physical actual corporeal office, and be a real life employee. He arrives on thursday and I am super thrilled, because you just can’t beat working together in person. Right now starbound programmers in the UK are pretty thin on the ground (me alone) so having me + metadept will be amazin’.

Other than status, I think you heard a little about the whole Star::Root threading debacle.. the important bit is that it’s fixed, and the atomic_store / atomic_load thing with shared_ptrs turned out not to even be needed. Now *every* database in Star::Root is updated through Read Copy Update, not just the few with the problems, and Root locking is avoided entirely. This fixes the problem without causing rendering slowdown, and actually speeds things up in a lot of places.

Other than THAT, I’m working on a few items in the starbound 1.0 todo, mission things and some boring technical ones involving Drawables and Particles. When I’m done, rain will NOT slow down your game to a crawl, which is nice. Next week, once metadept and I are both in the office, we’re going to start focusing very very hard on getting a new stable patch out, with all the save file compatibility fun that will go along with that.

Aaaaand in case you haven’t heard, Chucklefish is making a new game! It’s called Wayward Tide and, you should check out the Chucklefish blog post about it here. Development on Wayward Tide is *entirely* parallel with Starbound, a whole separate team in fact with Palf as the programmer.

In a technical sense, Wayward Tide is kind of cool for Chucklefish, because it represents a radical departure from the way starbound was developed, and if it works out it may very well be the way that Chucklefish makes games from now on. It’s entirely written in Haskell, primarily based on Functional Reactive Programming, and it’s really really cool. I would tell you more about it but I’m sure Palf will want to tell everyone more about it at some point in the near future.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Howdy guys!

Since I”m waiting on Metadept’s arrival at the office later this week before proceeding further on the missions, I spent my time today continuing one of my side tasks, which is to convert all existing lights over to the new flickering light code I discussed a few weeks ago. There’s a lot of lights that used the old flickering code, but I’m almost done with the conversion, and many lights (particularly fire-based ones) are being adjusted to look a bit more natural.

Working on this stuff isn’t terribly exciting in and of itself, but it makes for a welcome change of pace from all the mission work, and really it’s so gosh-darn nice to be able to make the lights pulse in time with their object’s animations!

That's all for now! Goodnight!

Happy Wednesday! ːtdealwithitː

In addition to the weekly round-up, Tiy's just posted on our new company blog outlining what we need to do to finish Starbound 1.0. You can find that post here.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks!

For the past couple of days I’ve been chiefly focusing on the armor balancing that I mentioned last week, as it’s proven surprisingly difficult. I’m beginning to understand the pains that other developers must go through when painstakingly balancing their games, especially the competitive multiplayer ones! Our armor balance is getting to a better place, but it’s looking like there are a number of earlier armors that are going to need to be rebalanced as well to suit our progression changes.

I’ve also been doing little bits of work on the lunar base here and there. I’ve turned it into a floating dungeon type while await the completion of Omni’s work on the skies so I can configure the parallax layers to my liking. I still wish to keep most elements of the mission a surprise, so I’m reluctant to share any further media relating to it and its unique enemies.

The efforts of the rest of the team seems to be stuff that’s mostly under the hood, like the biome threat level changes that Metadept talked about yesterday. He’s continued his efforts on that front but has also been working on the enemies I’ve been trying to stay so elusive about. He’s also fixed a few long-withstanding bugs with the humanoid NPCs that have been present in the nightly build for some time (such as their inability to properly switch between their melee and ranged weapons appropriately).

George on the other hand has been busily devising our other missions, with some seriously cool ideas being laid out. Once I’m done with the lunar base, I’ll be moving right along to start building one of those.

In any case, it’s about time for me to hit the hay. Good night everybody!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Since it seems nobody else has anything particularly new to report as we’ve all continued working on the same things for the most part, I’ll cave a little and give you one more glimpse of what you can expect on your mission to the moon. This is the only lunar base media you’re getting out of me for a while, so enjoy it while you can!



Keep your eyes peeled, and you might just see something. ;)

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Continuing work on biomes, I’ve been configuring a new primary biome type for starter worlds that we’re calling Garden. It’s a sparsely forested biome with gentle, rolling hills that should be easy to navigate for players just starting the game. It’s got quite a pleasant atmosphere:



I’m also working on surface terrain generation for all biomes. Higher tier planets will be a bit craggier (in general) since players will be likely to have some movement abilities and grappling hooks, but mainly I’m just aiming for interesting variety. I’ll post some screenshots of other terrain types in a future update. Have a good weekend!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Not much exciting to post about today. Kyren’s been working on nitty gritty technical stuff, addressing some threading issues we’re running into with C++11 pointers. Armagon and the artists are continuing work on missions that I’m not allowed to post about yet.

I’m still playing with the terrain generation, seeing what its capabilities and limitations are. Here’s a screenshot of some WIP desert canyons (click for big):



The terrain generator works by combining multiple layers of Perlin noise. In this shot, I’m using one source to define the primary surface terrain (low dunes), another source to define the rough bottom of the canyons, and a third to mix between them, with bias toward the primary source to make canyons less frequent. There are several problems with the current configuration, however. The most obvious problems are the sharp corners at the canyon edge where the mix shifts from 100% primary surface and rapidly begins switching to the lower canyon terrain. These can be addressed with some smoothing in the mixer (which needs engine changes to implement). Another issue without an obvious solution is what to do with the background. Because of the dimensionality and limited number of layers, it’s difficult to visually distinguish an open valley from a long, narrow canyon from a deep hole. I’ll have to experiment further to find a satisfactory solution.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hey y’all!

I spent my day helping George by setting up a dungeon file and key for the mission he’s about to start working on. He had already knocked up a detailed plan of the mission’s structure and layout, so he spent most of today roughing it out visually in-game while I worked on getting a functional setup together. George seems keen to tell a story with the environment, so he’s been creating a bunch of cool new objects as he’s progressed.

It looks for the most part like he has everything necessary to get started turning it into a functional location, so most likely he’ll be spending the next week focusing on this mission. I’ll probably get called in from time to time to help him with the finer points of the dungeon system, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how he does with it, since his mockups are generally very good and having someone else to work on this stuff with me will be most welcome.

Sorry I don’t have anything fancy to show off, it’s just been that kind of work lately and we’d like to keep at least a few surprises, if possible.

Good night!

Happy Wednesday! :tdealwithit:

In addition to the weekly round-up, Tiy's just posted on our new company blog outlining what we need to do to finish Starbound 1.0. You can find that post here.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks!

For the past couple of days I’ve been chiefly focusing on the armor balancing that I mentioned last week, as it’s proven surprisingly difficult. I’m beginning to understand the pains that other developers must go through when painstakingly balancing their games, especially the competitive multiplayer ones! Our armor balance is getting to a better place, but it’s looking like there are a number of earlier armors that are going to need to be rebalanced as well to suit our progression changes.

I’ve also been doing little bits of work on the lunar base here and there. I’ve turned it into a floating dungeon type while await the completion of Omni’s work on the skies so I can configure the parallax layers to my liking. I still wish to keep most elements of the mission a surprise, so I’m reluctant to share any further media relating to it and its unique enemies.

The efforts of the rest of the team seems to be stuff that’s mostly under the hood, like the biome threat level changes that Metadept talked about yesterday. He’s continued his efforts on that front but has also been working on the enemies I’ve been trying to stay so elusive about. He’s also fixed a few long-withstanding bugs with the humanoid NPCs that have been present in the nightly build for some time (such as their inability to properly switch between their melee and ranged weapons appropriately).

George on the other hand has been busily devising our other missions, with some seriously cool ideas being laid out. Once I’m done with the lunar base, I’ll be moving right along to start building one of those.

In any case, it’s about time for me to hit the hay. Good night everybody!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Since it seems nobody else has anything particularly new to report as we’ve all continued working on the same things for the most part, I’ll cave a little and give you one more glimpse of what you can expect on your mission to the moon. This is the only lunar base media you’re getting out of me for a while, so enjoy it while you can!



Keep your eyes peeled, and you might just see something. ;)

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Continuing work on biomes, I’ve been configuring a new primary biome type for starter worlds that we’re calling Garden. It’s a sparsely forested biome with gentle, rolling hills that should be easy to navigate for players just starting the game. It’s got quite a pleasant atmosphere:



I’m also working on surface terrain generation for all biomes. Higher tier planets will be a bit craggier (in general) since players will be likely to have some movement abilities and grappling hooks, but mainly I’m just aiming for interesting variety. I’ll post some screenshots of other terrain types in a future update. Have a good weekend!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Not much exciting to post about today. Kyren’s been working on nitty gritty technical stuff, addressing some threading issues we’re running into with C++11 pointers. Armagon and the artists are continuing work on missions that I’m not allowed to post about yet.

I’m still playing with the terrain generation, seeing what its capabilities and limitations are. Here’s a screenshot of some WIP desert canyons (click for big):



The terrain generator works by combining multiple layers of Perlin noise. In this shot, I’m using one source to define the primary surface terrain (low dunes), another source to define the rough bottom of the canyons, and a third to mix between them, with bias toward the primary source to make canyons less frequent. There are several problems with the current configuration, however. The most obvious problems are the sharp corners at the canyon edge where the mix shifts from 100% primary surface and rapidly begins switching to the lower canyon terrain. These can be addressed with some smoothing in the mixer (which needs engine changes to implement). Another issue without an obvious solution is what to do with the background. Because of the dimensionality and limited number of layers, it’s difficult to visually distinguish an open valley from a long, narrow canyon from a deep hole. I’ll have to experiment further to find a satisfactory solution.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hey y’all!

I spent my day helping George by setting up a dungeon file and key for the mission he’s about to start working on. He had already knocked up a detailed plan of the mission’s structure and layout, so he spent most of today roughing it out visually in-game while I worked on getting a functional setup together. George seems keen to tell a story with the environment, so he’s been creating a bunch of cool new objects as he’s progressed.

It looks for the most part like he has everything necessary to get started turning it into a functional location, so most likely he’ll be spending the next week focusing on this mission. I’ll probably get called in from time to time to help him with the finer points of the dungeon system, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how he does with it, since his mockups are generally very good and having someone else to work on this stuff with me will be most welcome.

Sorry I don’t have anything fancy to show off, it’s just been that kind of work lately and we’d like to keep at least a few surprises, if possible.

Good night!

Yo, it's Wednesday! Here's a round-up of updates from the past week. 23rd to the 25th = three day weekend.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Recently, we’ve been discussing adding some more capabilities to the Status and Status Effect system in Starbound. There are a lot of interesting things we want to do, but as of right now the Status system is a bit of a pain point in the Starbound codebase.

Every Status equipped entity has around 20 stats, all defined directly in c++, and they can be affected by about *45* status effect primitives, also specified in c++. Status primitives are everything from ForceField to FlawedProtection to ClumsyProtection to ExplosiveDefense to ExplosiveDefensePower to.. you get the idea. Extending the status system right now involves doing things like extending this enum and adding to this set of fields.

Now, don’t get me wrong, simple and hard-coded sometimes works great. Usually, it’s what you want to try *first*, and you stick with that until it’s clear that it needs to be replaced by something more powerful. Well, for the Status system, that time is NOW.

Omni and I have been working on a replacement for the Status system that should hit (fingers crossed) master in a few days. Stats are generic String -> Float mappings, there’s a system for adding temporary modifiers to the String -> Float set, there is a resource system that is closely tied to the stats system for things like health / energy / warmth, and, the most exciting part is, it will be driven by lua scripts!

Not only will this allow us to have, well.. sort of more “interesting” status effects like brain reboot and things like that driven by an isolated script and with way more interesting graphical effects, it will allow modders to add additional status effects and, as a side effect, will give modders a place to add persistent client-side data and scripts that affect the player without having to tie into the tech system.

Also, as either part of this update or soon thereafter, I’m trying to work it so that status graphical effects like cold and hunger that affect the screen can actually modify the shader used by the world renderer for some more interesting graphical effects than what we have now.

It’s exciting!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

I ended up deviating a bit from my work on the lunar base mission today, as I’m waiting on further developments on the new enemy before I go too in-depth with careful placement and setting up the loot distribution. We have some other cool stuff for it in the works, but I’d really like to keep those elements a surprise if I can help it.

Instead I primarily spent my time getting the Novakid armors that George showed off last week actually craftable in-game. We’ve got all their tiered weapons designed and ready to go too, they just need to be implemented and balanced.

The Novakids feel so at home in our universe, they could well usurp the Glitch as my favorite race!



I’ve also begun work on rebalancing all the armors that fall into the separator, accelerator and manipulator classes. I expect to spend most of tomorrow continuing on this task, so I’d like to get it to a good place. That said, I have no doubt we’ll need to do some fine-tuning down the line as we continue our playtesting.

Until next time!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

So a while back I mentioned that I made some changes to sky to decouple them from the coordinate information. Today I hooked it up to the WorldParameter system so that it could actually begin to be used on Floating Dungeons and stuff. There’s more work to be done, because currently there’s no randomization in this area. But we can put any sky on the outpost worlds now. Here’s an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-TZ_NP1utA

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

One big part of the game’s progression will be the ability to access new planet types as your ship and equipment improve. To facilitate this, we’re making biomes correspond with threat levels as you advance through tiers.

What does this mean, exactly? Previously, some biomes would only appear on planets with higher threat levels, but there wasn’t much relating a world’s appearance and environment to how challenging it is other than the explicit threat level. We’re now grouping the primary biomes by tier in a way that makes the progression of difficulty more logical and encourages players to visit a wide variety of planet types as they play through the game. When a player acquires gear with the appropriate environmental protection (such as heating systems to insulate them from cold environments), they will gain access to several new primary biome types (such as Tundra, Arctic and Asteroid worlds). We’re making sure to have enough variety within each tier to keep exploration entertaining while still retaining a somewhat consistent theme at each stage.

Once a player has completed the game’s progression and can access all of the various primary planet types, they will be able to visit planets with special high-level versions of the biomes. These will include some of the stranger variations like metallic trees/plants, as well as previously unavailable mini-biomes and dungeons. There’s no need to rush or grind to the endgame, but there will still be lots to discover after reaching it!

I’ve also been working on some smaller biome and planet configuration improvements. I’ve made the biome/sub-biome combinations more reasonable, so you won’t find ice trees growing next to pools of lava, and improved the matching of planet types to the distance from their star so you can reliably look for hot worlds in near orbits, temperate worlds in the habitable zone and frozen worlds in the outer fringes.

'Til next week! ːpizzasliceː

Yo, it's Wednesday! Here's a round-up of updates from the past week. 23rd to the 25th = three day weekend.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Recently, we’ve been discussing adding some more capabilities to the Status and Status Effect system in Starbound. There are a lot of interesting things we want to do, but as of right now the Status system is a bit of a pain point in the Starbound codebase.

Every Status equipped entity has around 20 stats, all defined directly in c++, and they can be affected by about *45* status effect primitives, also specified in c++. Status primitives are everything from ForceField to FlawedProtection to ClumsyProtection to ExplosiveDefense to ExplosiveDefensePower to.. you get the idea. Extending the status system right now involves doing things like extending this enum and adding to this set of fields.

Now, don’t get me wrong, simple and hard-coded sometimes works great. Usually, it’s what you want to try *first*, and you stick with that until it’s clear that it needs to be replaced by something more powerful. Well, for the Status system, that time is NOW.

Omni and I have been working on a replacement for the Status system that should hit (fingers crossed) master in a few days. Stats are generic String -> Float mappings, there’s a system for adding temporary modifiers to the String -> Float set, there is a resource system that is closely tied to the stats system for things like health / energy / warmth, and, the most exciting part is, it will be driven by lua scripts!

Not only will this allow us to have, well.. sort of more “interesting” status effects like brain reboot and things like that driven by an isolated script and with way more interesting graphical effects, it will allow modders to add additional status effects and, as a side effect, will give modders a place to add persistent client-side data and scripts that affect the player without having to tie into the tech system.

Also, as either part of this update or soon thereafter, I’m trying to work it so that status graphical effects like cold and hunger that affect the screen can actually modify the shader used by the world renderer for some more interesting graphical effects than what we have now.

It’s exciting!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

I ended up deviating a bit from my work on the lunar base mission today, as I’m waiting on further developments on the new enemy before I go too in-depth with careful placement and setting up the loot distribution. We have some other cool stuff for it in the works, but I’d really like to keep those elements a surprise if I can help it.

Instead I primarily spent my time getting the Novakid armors that George showed off last week actually craftable in-game. We’ve got all their tiered weapons designed and ready to go too, they just need to be implemented and balanced.

The Novakids feel so at home in our universe, they could well usurp the Glitch as my favorite race!



I’ve also begun work on rebalancing all the armors that fall into the separator, accelerator and manipulator classes. I expect to spend most of tomorrow continuing on this task, so I’d like to get it to a good place. That said, I have no doubt we’ll need to do some fine-tuning down the line as we continue our playtesting.

Until next time!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

So a while back I mentioned that I made some changes to sky to decouple them from the coordinate information. Today I hooked it up to the WorldParameter system so that it could actually begin to be used on Floating Dungeons and stuff. There’s more work to be done, because currently there’s no randomization in this area. But we can put any sky on the outpost worlds now. Here’s an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-TZ_NP1utA

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

One big part of the game’s progression will be the ability to access new planet types as your ship and equipment improve. To facilitate this, we’re making biomes correspond with threat levels as you advance through tiers.

What does this mean, exactly? Previously, some biomes would only appear on planets with higher threat levels, but there wasn’t much relating a world’s appearance and environment to how challenging it is other than the explicit threat level. We’re now grouping the primary biomes by tier in a way that makes the progression of difficulty more logical and encourages players to visit a wide variety of planet types as they play through the game. When a player acquires gear with the appropriate environmental protection (such as heating systems to insulate them from cold environments), they will gain access to several new primary biome types (such as Tundra, Arctic and Asteroid worlds). We’re making sure to have enough variety within each tier to keep exploration entertaining while still retaining a somewhat consistent theme at each stage.

Once a player has completed the game’s progression and can access all of the various primary planet types, they will be able to visit planets with special high-level versions of the biomes. These will include some of the stranger variations like metallic trees/plants, as well as previously unavailable mini-biomes and dungeons. There’s no need to rush or grind to the endgame, but there will still be lots to discover after reaching it!

I’ve also been working on some smaller biome and planet configuration improvements. I’ve made the biome/sub-biome combinations more reasonable, so you won’t find ice trees growing next to pools of lava, and improved the matching of planet types to the distance from their star so you can reliably look for hot worlds in near orbits, temperate worlds in the habitable zone and frozen worlds in the outer fringes.

'Til next week! :pizzaslice:

Continuing from part one! In the future these will be shorter and fit into one post, but we're taking on 20 days worth of posts here (and Armagon talks a lot :D).

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Remember the late time I mentioned documentation I said I’d eventually make it automated?

I did that today. It’s now tied to the steam upload so it should update every time Steam does (ie, nightly).

You can find the documentation here: http://doc.playstarbound.com/

You can navigate around by classes or by namespace, but the front page is mostly blank (because it’s the default doxygen setup).

The bits that you lua modders are most interested in are located here:
http://doc.playstarbound.com/namespaceStar_1_1LuaBindings.html under the namespaces section ( for instance:
http://doc.playstarbound.com/namespaceStar_1_1LuaBindings_1_1WorldEnvironmentCallbacks.html )

Hope this helps!

Also did a few things with the Sky today. I’m currently separating the Sky from the Celestial Coordinate system so that we can give fully featured Skies to Outputs and Instances and the like. Nothing too exciting though.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Sorry, I was supposed to do the daily update yesterday and I missed it :(

I’ve been working on a ton of things lately, instancing and unique world support, world <-> world warping, new world generation types and general world generation fixes, material light sources.

But right now I’m fixing a loooong standing series of bugs in starbound regarding projectile disconnects between the client and server. I’m basically done, and with any luck you will see it in tonight’s update.

If I finish and merge today, I’ll do another post later today that goes into how the fix actually works.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Projectile disconnect fix is complete and pushed to master. It’s less of a fix and more of a.. near total rework.

I promised I would go into more detail but.. it’s late so here’s the very VERY quick version:

Projectiles are now proper synced entities with entity update deltas and everything, and damage is sometimes applied where an entity is not necessarily the master entity. Our old concept of a disconnected entity is gone, and there has been a lot of simplification with other damage and status related parts of the code. Self damage no longer routes through the damage manager, and instead entities can produce arbitrary damage notifications themselves. Damage requests and now also a new thing called *hit requests* can travel over the network before being applied, and there is no longer a need for direct status effect requests over the network. Total change in lines of code: -120

PvP needs lots more work still, but PvE locally and over network should be MILES better.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hey guys!

Over the past few days I’ve continued my work on the lunar base mission with a nice steady rate of progress with some feedback from Tiy and George along the way. As I’ve stated previously, I don’t wish to spoil any plot details, but I’m okay with teasing a small piece of the environment. You may also notice a subtle new feature that crept its way into the game. Blocks are now capable of casting light.



It can be challenging at times; sculpting out a cave environment in such a way that it looks natural while also keeping the player’s ability to traverse it firmly in mind. That said, I think it’s coming along nicely.

On a side note, yesterday’s upload of the nightly build failed, so if you’re interested in trying out Kyren’s new projectile code, the update only went live a couple of hours ago. Personally, I’ve already noticed a huge improvement!

Area-of-effect projectiles like grenades are hitting and damaging multiple enemies far more reliably. The issue of projectiles outright disappearing when shot point blank into an enemy’s face is gone. If you have a bunch of monsters clustered together and you land a melee attack it now damages all of them as it should, rather than just a fraction. The PvE combat is feeling really good right now. Nice work, Kyren!

Anyway, that’s it from me. Stay classy and good night!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Here’s a little something I’ve been working on… The Novakid will be needing their own armor sets.



Time to go back to my Devcave. K Bye!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

As we’ve been working on the progression of the early game, one awkward point that kept coming up is the Matter Manipulator. You’re given this all-purpose future tool, but then immediately replace it with stone age pickaxes because of their superior digging ability. So, for the past few days, I’ve been prototyping a system of upgrades for the Matter Manipulator that should keep it useful throughout the course of the game and give players something more futuristic than hand tools. This is all WIP, obviously, but so far it seems to make more sense both aesthetically and mechanically. Here’s a quick look at the current range of upgrades we’re testing:



Players will be able to upgrade the area, digging power, and other numerical aspects of the Matter Manipulator as well as enabling new harvesting options such as liquid collection. Hopefully, this should make it a satisfying tool in your character’s arsenal and even offer a bit of customization to suit your play style.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

It’s pretty much been business as usual for me the last few days. The lunar base mission is getting to a really nice place, and I’ll be able to start populating it with enemies and loot very soon.

Kyren kindly implemented a quick update to our lighting engine that provides far greater control of how a light flickers. Previously the controls were a little vague and it was often difficult to get the precise results desired. It was difficult to get lights doing anything other than dimming and brightening in an largely unpredictable fashion.

Now we have the capacity to make lights pulse, strobe, or flicker erratically as we wish. As a side effect of this update, you may notice in the nightly that any lights that previously flickered currently are not doing so, but I’ll be quickly zipping through them to make them work as intended again in my downtime.

I put a quick video test together with a variation of the spotlights that flickers erratically. I do not advise watching this video if you are sensitive to strobing light effects as I have purposefully used a lot of them in one space simply to demonstrate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXvOLZEdeQY

---

No space left for Omni's post from yesterday on the JSON patching system, so I'll just leave a link here.

http://playstarbound.com/august-19-the-day-when-all-your-mods-died/

'Til next time!

Continuing from part one! In the future these will be shorter and fit into one post, but we're taking on 20 days worth of posts here (and Armagon talks a lot :D).

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Remember the late time I mentioned documentation I said I’d eventually make it automated?

I did that today. It’s now tied to the steam upload so it should update every time Steam does (ie, nightly).

You can find the documentation here: http://doc.playstarbound.com/

You can navigate around by classes or by namespace, but the front page is mostly blank (because it’s the default doxygen setup).

The bits that you lua modders are most interested in are located here:
http://doc.playstarbound.com/namespaceStar_1_1LuaBindings.html under the namespaces section ( for instance:
http://doc.playstarbound.com/namespaceStar_1_1LuaBindings_1_1WorldEnvironmentCallbacks.html )

Hope this helps!

Also did a few things with the Sky today. I’m currently separating the Sky from the Celestial Coordinate system so that we can give fully featured Skies to Outputs and Instances and the like. Nothing too exciting though.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Sorry, I was supposed to do the daily update yesterday and I missed it :(

I’ve been working on a ton of things lately, instancing and unique world support, world <-> world warping, new world generation types and general world generation fixes, material light sources.

But right now I’m fixing a loooong standing series of bugs in starbound regarding projectile disconnects between the client and server. I’m basically done, and with any luck you will see it in tonight’s update.

If I finish and merge today, I’ll do another post later today that goes into how the fix actually works.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Projectile disconnect fix is complete and pushed to master. It’s less of a fix and more of a.. near total rework.

I promised I would go into more detail but.. it’s late so here’s the very VERY quick version:

Projectiles are now proper synced entities with entity update deltas and everything, and damage is sometimes applied where an entity is not necessarily the master entity. Our old concept of a disconnected entity is gone, and there has been a lot of simplification with other damage and status related parts of the code. Self damage no longer routes through the damage manager, and instead entities can produce arbitrary damage notifications themselves. Damage requests and now also a new thing called *hit requests* can travel over the network before being applied, and there is no longer a need for direct status effect requests over the network. Total change in lines of code: -120

PvP needs lots more work still, but PvE locally and over network should be MILES better.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hey guys!

Over the past few days I’ve continued my work on the lunar base mission with a nice steady rate of progress with some feedback from Tiy and George along the way. As I’ve stated previously, I don’t wish to spoil any plot details, but I’m okay with teasing a small piece of the environment. You may also notice a subtle new feature that crept its way into the game. Blocks are now capable of casting light.



It can be challenging at times; sculpting out a cave environment in such a way that it looks natural while also keeping the player’s ability to traverse it firmly in mind. That said, I think it’s coming along nicely.

On a side note, yesterday’s upload of the nightly build failed, so if you’re interested in trying out Kyren’s new projectile code, the update only went live a couple of hours ago. Personally, I’ve already noticed a huge improvement!

Area-of-effect projectiles like grenades are hitting and damaging multiple enemies far more reliably. The issue of projectiles outright disappearing when shot point blank into an enemy’s face is gone. If you have a bunch of monsters clustered together and you land a melee attack it now damages all of them as it should, rather than just a fraction. The PvE combat is feeling really good right now. Nice work, Kyren!

Anyway, that’s it from me. Stay classy and good night!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Here’s a little something I’ve been working on… The Novakid will be needing their own armor sets.



Time to go back to my Devcave. K Bye!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

As we’ve been working on the progression of the early game, one awkward point that kept coming up is the Matter Manipulator. You’re given this all-purpose future tool, but then immediately replace it with stone age pickaxes because of their superior digging ability. So, for the past few days, I’ve been prototyping a system of upgrades for the Matter Manipulator that should keep it useful throughout the course of the game and give players something more futuristic than hand tools. This is all WIP, obviously, but so far it seems to make more sense both aesthetically and mechanically. Here’s a quick look at the current range of upgrades we’re testing:



Players will be able to upgrade the area, digging power, and other numerical aspects of the Matter Manipulator as well as enabling new harvesting options such as liquid collection. Hopefully, this should make it a satisfying tool in your character’s arsenal and even offer a bit of customization to suit your play style.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

It’s pretty much been business as usual for me the last few days. The lunar base mission is getting to a really nice place, and I’ll be able to start populating it with enemies and loot very soon.

Kyren kindly implemented a quick update to our lighting engine that provides far greater control of how a light flickers. Previously the controls were a little vague and it was often difficult to get the precise results desired. It was difficult to get lights doing anything other than dimming and brightening in an largely unpredictable fashion.

Now we have the capacity to make lights pulse, strobe, or flicker erratically as we wish. As a side effect of this update, you may notice in the nightly that any lights that previously flickered currently are not doing so, but I’ll be quickly zipping through them to make them work as intended again in my downtime.

I put a quick video test together with a variation of the spotlights that flickers erratically. I do not advise watching this video if you are sensitive to strobing light effects as I have purposefully used a lot of them in one space simply to demonstrate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXvOLZEdeQY

---

No space left for Omni's post from yesterday on the JSON patching system, so I'll just leave a link here.

http://playstarbound.com/august-19-the-day-when-all-your-mods-died/

'Til next time!

For awhile now, we've been posting daily progress updates (weekdays only) over on our blog! At least one person posts every day, so you can check there every night (GMT) for info about what we've been up to.

We've also been posting them in a sub-section of the Steam forums called "Dev Blogs", but several people noted that they'd prefer if we posted a round-up in Announcements as well.

So here's a round-up of front page updates we've posted since the beginning of August! You can find many of these changes in the nightly builds.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks! Looks like I’m doing another daily update, but since it’s my second in a row, I’ll be keeping it fairly brief. :P

For my part, I did what I set out to do and finished setting up the moon mine dungeon file and key, so I’m good to start building at any time. That said, I opted to spend some time fixing an issue that’s been bugging me for quite a while with all the chests. Up until this point they opened up in a painfully slow fashion and as a side effect were not appropriately playing their closing sounds if players closed them relatively quickly.

As for the others, here’s what I know:
- Supernorn has continued working dilligently on the Novakid ships.
- Metadept has been working on implementing a new item type. Not quite ready to talk about this one yet. ;)
- George has been producing new assets for the gateway to appear in the nav UI, along with some other elements relating to Metadept’s work.
- Kyren has been doing some cool stuff with instancing, specifically concerning how they can be located and reached in the world. I’m afraid I don’t fully understand the specifics, not being a programmer, but she should hopefully be able to make an post about it sometime next week.

Afraid I’m not really clued in on everyone else’s activities, but exciting things are happening. I’m looking forward to starting work on the dungeon next week.

Until next time guys!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Howdy! My main project for the past couple of days has been prototyping a tool for sucking up liquids into the player’s inventory. Aside from the obvious utility of being able to move them around, we plan to make them used as fuels and in crafting recipes, so finding biomes with certain kinds of liquids (such as oil) will become important. Here’s how it looks so far:



Since this is the first real scripted item we’ve built, it’s involved a lot of testing and adding functionality to the Lua item API, so that’s been a nice side benefit. I’m definitely looking forward to making some more interesting scripted items and tools in the future, as well as seeing what modders make with it!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening guys! I’ve been up to something a bit different today.

With the recent addition of the floating dungeons and player spawns, I spent my day building a rough prototype for what our missions could be like. The objective was for me to create a level for players to move through from start to finish, with environmental hazards and enemies to fight. The main objective of this test was to assess how long I would need to produce a mission, so we can gauge precisely how many polished missions we could create in time for 1.0, and to highlight any issues we may run into.

When I say the prototype is rough, I mean super rough. I didn’t spend any time dressing it up visually, since it’s just for testing and it only involved me using randomized monsters for now, which means no configuration of behaviours or dialogue as there would be when using humanoid NPCs. I ended up using the glitch dungeon files as the base for the mission.

For my test playthroughs, I would attempt to get through it repeatedly with a tier 1 broadsword, shortsword and shield, 10 bandages, and my starting clothes. It would typically take me anywhere between 10-15 minutes to get through in one go (without dying).

The difficulty of the mission varied greatly since the monsters are randomized on each instance, but when approaching the actual missions we’ll have a good idea of what the players will have by that point and be able to scale the difficulty accordingly, not to mention we’ll be using specific enemy types with known behaviours, making it easier to craft challenges with a bit more thought. I imagine it’ll be a tricky balancing act when we factor in whether you have other players with you too, but that’s just one the many challenges of game design!

This test mission also highlighted what the current benefits and limitations of using wiring within the missions are. Because I am able to plan around a linear approach, I have the ability to set up traps and obstacles that may change as you progress. In the case of the glitch, they have a number of switch objects and even hidden door objects that can also double as platforms when used in an open space, so I was able to create timed alternating platform jump puzzles, passages that only open when all switches in a room are activated and the like.

All in all it’s been a valuable experience that will prove most useful once I start working on the missions proper.

Apologies for the lack of screenshots by the way, I’m writing this from home.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Everyone’s been working on the various elements for the gate and outpost stuff, and today we’ve started putting them all together!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Today one of the many things we worked on was improving the visual distinction between the various ores and bars. This will continue to change over the Beta and this is not final.



Click to enlarge!

BYE!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

The last couple of days have been really exciting. As our work on progression continues, we’ve been putting some serious focus into our missions; what they will be, and how they’ll tie into the grand scheme. Those of you who follow the daily updates will likely recall the moon mine George showed a mockup of a little while ago. Well, now you know what it was for!

We sat down and mapped out the overarching goal, structure, events, and enemies for the player’s first mission. Unlike the dungeons where I would generally build a single carefully detailed room at a time, we intend the development of this mission to be a highly iterative process, with feedback and ideas from other members of the team.

For now I’ve got the entire layout boxed out with a loose scale reference, but next week I’m going to really go to town shaping it into an actual environment. Detailed decoration will come later after we’ve got something solid we can actually play through.

I’m honestly really excited. Being able to work on a carefully constructed experience from start to finish will be a refreshing change of pace from having to build dungeons that are inherently dynamic in nature, as I am not bound to the limitations that randomly generated layouts bring with them. In the interest of keeping specific elements a mystery, I won’t be sharing any media of it today, but I’m sure you guys can understand.

In any case, that’s it from me. Take care and good night!

Down with character limits! Onwards to part 2.

For awhile now, we've been posting daily progress updates (weekdays only) over on our blog! At least one person posts every day, so you can check there every night (GMT) for info about what we've been up to.

We've also been posting them in a sub-section of the Steam forums called "Dev Blogs", but several people noted that they'd prefer if we posted a round-up in Announcements as well.

So here's a round-up of front page updates we've posted since the beginning of August! You can find many of these changes in the nightly builds.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks! Looks like I’m doing another daily update, but since it’s my second in a row, I’ll be keeping it fairly brief. :P

For my part, I did what I set out to do and finished setting up the moon mine dungeon file and key, so I’m good to start building at any time. That said, I opted to spend some time fixing an issue that’s been bugging me for quite a while with all the chests. Up until this point they opened up in a painfully slow fashion and as a side effect were not appropriately playing their closing sounds if players closed them relatively quickly.

As for the others, here’s what I know:
- Supernorn has continued working dilligently on the Novakid ships.
- Metadept has been working on implementing a new item type. Not quite ready to talk about this one yet. ;)
- George has been producing new assets for the gateway to appear in the nav UI, along with some other elements relating to Metadept’s work.
- Kyren has been doing some cool stuff with instancing, specifically concerning how they can be located and reached in the world. I’m afraid I don’t fully understand the specifics, not being a programmer, but she should hopefully be able to make an post about it sometime next week.

Afraid I’m not really clued in on everyone else’s activities, but exciting things are happening. I’m looking forward to starting work on the dungeon next week.

Until next time guys!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Howdy! My main project for the past couple of days has been prototyping a tool for sucking up liquids into the player’s inventory. Aside from the obvious utility of being able to move them around, we plan to make them used as fuels and in crafting recipes, so finding biomes with certain kinds of liquids (such as oil) will become important. Here’s how it looks so far:



Since this is the first real scripted item we’ve built, it’s involved a lot of testing and adding functionality to the Lua item API, so that’s been a nice side benefit. I’m definitely looking forward to making some more interesting scripted items and tools in the future, as well as seeing what modders make with it!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening guys! I’ve been up to something a bit different today.

With the recent addition of the floating dungeons and player spawns, I spent my day building a rough prototype for what our missions could be like. The objective was for me to create a level for players to move through from start to finish, with environmental hazards and enemies to fight. The main objective of this test was to assess how long I would need to produce a mission, so we can gauge precisely how many polished missions we could create in time for 1.0, and to highlight any issues we may run into.

When I say the prototype is rough, I mean super rough. I didn’t spend any time dressing it up visually, since it’s just for testing and it only involved me using randomized monsters for now, which means no configuration of behaviours or dialogue as there would be when using humanoid NPCs. I ended up using the glitch dungeon files as the base for the mission.

For my test playthroughs, I would attempt to get through it repeatedly with a tier 1 broadsword, shortsword and shield, 10 bandages, and my starting clothes. It would typically take me anywhere between 10-15 minutes to get through in one go (without dying).

The difficulty of the mission varied greatly since the monsters are randomized on each instance, but when approaching the actual missions we’ll have a good idea of what the players will have by that point and be able to scale the difficulty accordingly, not to mention we’ll be using specific enemy types with known behaviours, making it easier to craft challenges with a bit more thought. I imagine it’ll be a tricky balancing act when we factor in whether you have other players with you too, but that’s just one the many challenges of game design!

This test mission also highlighted what the current benefits and limitations of using wiring within the missions are. Because I am able to plan around a linear approach, I have the ability to set up traps and obstacles that may change as you progress. In the case of the glitch, they have a number of switch objects and even hidden door objects that can also double as platforms when used in an open space, so I was able to create timed alternating platform jump puzzles, passages that only open when all switches in a room are activated and the like.

All in all it’s been a valuable experience that will prove most useful once I start working on the missions proper.

Apologies for the lack of screenshots by the way, I’m writing this from home.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Everyone’s been working on the various elements for the gate and outpost stuff, and today we’ve started putting them all together!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Today one of the many things we worked on was improving the visual distinction between the various ores and bars. This will continue to change over the Beta and this is not final.



Click to enlarge!

BYE!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

The last couple of days have been really exciting. As our work on progression continues, we’ve been putting some serious focus into our missions; what they will be, and how they’ll tie into the grand scheme. Those of you who follow the daily updates will likely recall the moon mine George showed a mockup of a little while ago. Well, now you know what it was for!

We sat down and mapped out the overarching goal, structure, events, and enemies for the player’s first mission. Unlike the dungeons where I would generally build a single carefully detailed room at a time, we intend the development of this mission to be a highly iterative process, with feedback and ideas from other members of the team.

For now I’ve got the entire layout boxed out with a loose scale reference, but next week I’m going to really go to town shaping it into an actual environment. Detailed decoration will come later after we’ve got something solid we can actually play through.

I’m honestly really excited. Being able to work on a carefully constructed experience from start to finish will be a refreshing change of pace from having to build dungeons that are inherently dynamic in nature, as I am not bound to the limitations that randomly generated layouts bring with them. In the interest of keeping specific elements a mystery, I won’t be sharing any media of it today, but I’m sure you guys can understand.

In any case, that’s it from me. Take care and good night!

Down with character limits! Onwards to part 2.