Howdy!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Regular readers of the blog might remember my previous posts about adding more terrain variation to planets. Well, that’s what I’m working on this week! Rather than talking much about it I’ll just show you a few samples of new terrain patterns:

Spikes!


Canyons!


Ledges!


These are still WIPs, and I’ve got more ideas to put in, but so far it’s adding a lot of interesting variety to planets and I’m excited to continue working on this for a bit.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

I’m sure you can guess what I’ve been working on. Yup! Still adding new weapons and loot! While I’m keeping some stuff a surprise, over the past few days I’ve implemented a few fun craftable throwing weapons. Here’s a peek at a couple of them!



Thorn Grenade
“A makeshift nail bomb. Scary what one can achieve with a fruit and small explosive.”

You may recall there was a nailbomb grenade in the game, however I personally found it not particularly useful due to the fact it operated on a timer and it was almost impossible to get the nails hitting where you wanted them to. This devilish combination explodes on impact, spraying twice as many thorns, making it pretty lethal if you land direct hits, particularly if the target was already in the middle of a large group.



Throwing Bones
“Nothing screams archaic like throwing bones at your enemies.”

Finding old bones may now prove beneficial in more ways than one. This item when thrown releases three bones in an arc that bounce a couple of times before breaking apart. This makes it entirely possible to sling them considerable distance across the landscape, if the terrain is in your favour.

That’s it from me. Good night everybody!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

It’s coming…



A slight preview…

See ya!

George is a man of few words.
'Til next week, friends! ːpizzasliceː

Howdy!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Regular readers of the blog might remember my previous posts about adding more terrain variation to planets. Well, that’s what I’m working on this week! Rather than talking much about it I’ll just show you a few samples of new terrain patterns:

Spikes!


Canyons!


Ledges!


These are still WIPs, and I’ve got more ideas to put in, but so far it’s adding a lot of interesting variety to planets and I’m excited to continue working on this for a bit.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

I’m sure you can guess what I’ve been working on. Yup! Still adding new weapons and loot! While I’m keeping some stuff a surprise, over the past few days I’ve implemented a few fun craftable throwing weapons. Here’s a peek at a couple of them!



Thorn Grenade
“A makeshift nail bomb. Scary what one can achieve with a fruit and small explosive.”

You may recall there was a nailbomb grenade in the game, however I personally found it not particularly useful due to the fact it operated on a timer and it was almost impossible to get the nails hitting where you wanted them to. This devilish combination explodes on impact, spraying twice as many thorns, making it pretty lethal if you land direct hits, particularly if the target was already in the middle of a large group.



Throwing Bones
“Nothing screams archaic like throwing bones at your enemies.”

Finding old bones may now prove beneficial in more ways than one. This item when thrown releases three bones in an arc that bounce a couple of times before breaking apart. This makes it entirely possible to sling them considerable distance across the landscape, if the terrain is in your favour.

That’s it from me. Good night everybody!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

It’s coming…



A slight preview…

See ya!

George is a man of few words.
'Til next week, friends! :pizzaslice:

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

On Wednesday we finally merged the massive status system changes, including the new status effect system, into our main development branch. Those who are following the nightly builds have probably noticed some major differences, lots of improvements, and a few things still missing. The past couple of days have been spent finding and fixing bugs, adding missing Lua bindings, cleaning up old status effects and adding new ones. GeorgeV, Necotho and Armagon continue their development of more biomes and biome items, and we’ve been coming up with lots of good ways to use the new status system and status effects to make biomes and their items feel unique and interesting. Next week we’ll be reworking the food and hunger system in ways that make it less of a chore and more of a bonus. More on that soon; have a great weekend!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks!

I’ve carried on as usual with implementing the multitude of new weapons and items, many of which are taking advantage of our status system rework. I thought I’d try something a little different today and see how quickly you guys can identify what one of these weapons is from the sound it makes. I think this one is gonna be quite popular with PvP-oriented players. {LINK REMOVED}Click here to hear it!

It’s been a fun implementing these new items, and the list is expanding all the time. There’s even stuff like this!



What would such an item do, I wonder?

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

One of the features that we’ve wanted for a long time is a better way for modders to make their own GUIs (graphical user interfaces). Currently, all of Starbound’s interface windows are configured in JSON, but their appearances are largely static and they can only respond to user input in a few fixed ways. On Friday we had been discussing this in the ##starbound-modding IRC channel, trying to figure out the best way to make objects with dynamic displays and lamenting the fact that there wasn’t any good method currently available. So, over the weekend, Kyren took the initiative and made one, which I finally got a chance to test out this evening!

The system she built allows an object to open a configurable interface window when the player interacts with it. This window can contain all the usual window elements, but can also include a canvas widget which gives a Lua script direct access to primitive drawing operations and user input. These ‘scripted consoles’ can monitor and respond to keyboard and mouse input, and draw their own lines, polygons, images, text, etc. Essentially this allows all kinds of custom interfaces and even simple games to be built as mods and run within Starbound!

One of the most obviously fun uses for this is to make in-game games. Here’s a truly awful implementation of Pong that I threw together as a test:



Unfortunately we don’t have the time to go wild on this just yet, but this is a good first step toward a much better GUI system in the future. Some other examples we came up with include controlling turrets in a base, hacking puzzles for missions, and numerical keypad locks for doors. I hope to have more time to develop these at some point. In the meantime, however, it’s available for modders in the nightly build, and they’re already going crazy with great ideas. For example, Neurisko is starting on a full-fledged programmable computer made from scratch:



…and that’s just the beginning! What kinds of things do YOU want to make?

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hey guys, noticed there wasn’t a post made yesterday. Sorry I didn’t get this up sooner!

Here’s the quick rundown of what folks have been working on:

- Metadept has been working on the GUI stuff, following on from his Tuesday post. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the community does with this functionality once he’s finished.

- Kyren is working on something cool that we’ll (hopefully) have something to show for later today, provided things goes smoothly.

- George has continued his work on filling the biomes with more stuff, which ties into…

- Yup, I’ve still been working on making lots of the new loot and weapons actually function. I’ve spent a chunk of time recording new sounds for these things too.

For those of you who read my post on Monday and took a stab at identifying what the audio sample I included was; if your guess was that it was a paintball gun, you were right!



There are six colour variations you can get, each painting the enemies you hit in the corresponding colour for a few seconds, making it super clear when you’ve successfully hit them. Novel in the grand adventure, but potentially really cool for PvP servers. You’ll be able to find the blueprint and the unique resources to make it in one of the mini-biomes.

Later folks!

That's all, folks! Have a nice weekend! ːSBHorseː

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

On Wednesday we finally merged the massive status system changes, including the new status effect system, into our main development branch. Those who are following the nightly builds have probably noticed some major differences, lots of improvements, and a few things still missing. The past couple of days have been spent finding and fixing bugs, adding missing Lua bindings, cleaning up old status effects and adding new ones. GeorgeV, Necotho and Armagon continue their development of more biomes and biome items, and we’ve been coming up with lots of good ways to use the new status system and status effects to make biomes and their items feel unique and interesting. Next week we’ll be reworking the food and hunger system in ways that make it less of a chore and more of a bonus. More on that soon; have a great weekend!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening folks!

I’ve carried on as usual with implementing the multitude of new weapons and items, many of which are taking advantage of our status system rework. I thought I’d try something a little different today and see how quickly you guys can identify what one of these weapons is from the sound it makes. I think this one is gonna be quite popular with PvP-oriented players. {LINK REMOVED}Click here to hear it!

It’s been a fun implementing these new items, and the list is expanding all the time. There’s even stuff like this!



What would such an item do, I wonder?

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

One of the features that we’ve wanted for a long time is a better way for modders to make their own GUIs (graphical user interfaces). Currently, all of Starbound’s interface windows are configured in JSON, but their appearances are largely static and they can only respond to user input in a few fixed ways. On Friday we had been discussing this in the ##starbound-modding IRC channel, trying to figure out the best way to make objects with dynamic displays and lamenting the fact that there wasn’t any good method currently available. So, over the weekend, Kyren took the initiative and made one, which I finally got a chance to test out this evening!

The system she built allows an object to open a configurable interface window when the player interacts with it. This window can contain all the usual window elements, but can also include a canvas widget which gives a Lua script direct access to primitive drawing operations and user input. These ‘scripted consoles’ can monitor and respond to keyboard and mouse input, and draw their own lines, polygons, images, text, etc. Essentially this allows all kinds of custom interfaces and even simple games to be built as mods and run within Starbound!

One of the most obviously fun uses for this is to make in-game games. Here’s a truly awful implementation of Pong that I threw together as a test:



Unfortunately we don’t have the time to go wild on this just yet, but this is a good first step toward a much better GUI system in the future. Some other examples we came up with include controlling turrets in a base, hacking puzzles for missions, and numerical keypad locks for doors. I hope to have more time to develop these at some point. In the meantime, however, it’s available for modders in the nightly build, and they’re already going crazy with great ideas. For example, Neurisko is starting on a full-fledged programmable computer made from scratch:



…and that’s just the beginning! What kinds of things do YOU want to make?

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hey guys, noticed there wasn’t a post made yesterday. Sorry I didn’t get this up sooner!

Here’s the quick rundown of what folks have been working on:

- Metadept has been working on the GUI stuff, following on from his Tuesday post. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the community does with this functionality once he’s finished.

- Kyren is working on something cool that we’ll (hopefully) have something to show for later today, provided things goes smoothly.

- George has continued his work on filling the biomes with more stuff, which ties into…

- Yup, I’ve still been working on making lots of the new loot and weapons actually function. I’ve spent a chunk of time recording new sounds for these things too.

For those of you who read my post on Monday and took a stab at identifying what the audio sample I included was; if your guess was that it was a paintball gun, you were right!



There are six colour variations you can get, each painting the enemies you hit in the corresponding colour for a few seconds, making it super clear when you’ve successfully hit them. Novel in the grand adventure, but potentially really cool for PvP servers. You’ll be able to find the blueprint and the unique resources to make it in one of the mini-biomes.

Later folks!

That's all, folks! Have a nice weekend! :SBHorse:

Hello! Friendly reminder that if you don't see the dev blogs cross-posted here, you can always find 'em right on our website.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Since kyren is getting close to completing her massive status system rework, I’ve spent the past couple of days helping her design and test the new Lua APIs, fix bugs, and preparing to integrate the changes back into our main development branch. One of the most apparent changes is that status effects are now driven by Lua scripts and have access to a wide variety of API functions, making them incredibly flexible and fun to work with. Today we’ve just been testing out features and exploring what kinds of crazy stuff we can do. Here’s one example, a sword with high knockback that makes monsters bounce:



Or how about a “nitroglycerine” effect that causes the player to explode when they fall too hard?



Obviously we’re also reimplementing and improving the existing status effects like fire, poison, and slows, but it’s been a lot of fun testing out the new possibilities! I think a lot of these crazy ideas may make it into the final game in some form or other, to give it a bit of a roguelike flavor.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Apologies for this going up the following morning! The Chucklefish team went out last night to celebrate the arrival of our newest member Rosie (not to be confused with the office pet of the same name) and I forgot to write this when I got home, so that’s on me!

In any case, I’ve been continuing my work with George in setting up a bunch of new weapons and fun loot for the biomes. The status system rework from Kyren and Metadept is almost done, so in the meantime I’ve been working mostly with our existing status effects, in some cases combining them for fun results. It can be a deceptively involved process, particularly if you want to make some nice particle effects to go along with it.



I’m really looking forward to when we can begin implementing some more unusual status effects, like the ones Metadept was prototyping. Then we can really go to town with making fun and, most importantly, unique weapon drops.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Nothing too exciting to post today. We’re getting very close to merging the new status changes into nightly, so kyren and I have been reimplementing lots of the old effects and responsibilities of the old system, and fixing plenty of bugs along the way. It’s going very quickly, which is a good sign because it means the new status system is very easy to work with. Today we rebuilt healing items, beds, liquid status effects, cleaned up some unused and misconfigured effects on objects, added several new functions and missing functions to the API, and added a much better system for light sources on Networked Animators (the class used to display pretty much everything on entities). I made this ridiculous effect to test it out:

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Some of the recent new additions George and I have been making to the game’s loot pool are made because they’re cool. Others are silly and fun. Then there’s stuff like this that straddles the line.



Seems like a surefire way to win a snowball fight!

Sometimes you’ll find items like this in biome-specific chests, but most of the time you’ll only find blueprints, and its up to you to get the necessary materials together. Typically it will require a component you can only get from that biome.

There’s more to come!

Also! In case you missed it, we've got Steam trading cards now! Collect 'em all to craft Steam profile backgrounds, badges and emotes. You'll get about one card drop per hour of play.

ːSBHorseː ːSBchickenː ːSBpandaː ːSBpenguinː

Have a nice weekend!

Hello! Friendly reminder that if you don't see the dev blogs cross-posted here, you can always find 'em right on our website.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Since kyren is getting close to completing her massive status system rework, I’ve spent the past couple of days helping her design and test the new Lua APIs, fix bugs, and preparing to integrate the changes back into our main development branch. One of the most apparent changes is that status effects are now driven by Lua scripts and have access to a wide variety of API functions, making them incredibly flexible and fun to work with. Today we’ve just been testing out features and exploring what kinds of crazy stuff we can do. Here’s one example, a sword with high knockback that makes monsters bounce:



Or how about a “nitroglycerine” effect that causes the player to explode when they fall too hard?



Obviously we’re also reimplementing and improving the existing status effects like fire, poison, and slows, but it’s been a lot of fun testing out the new possibilities! I think a lot of these crazy ideas may make it into the final game in some form or other, to give it a bit of a roguelike flavor.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Apologies for this going up the following morning! The Chucklefish team went out last night to celebrate the arrival of our newest member Rosie (not to be confused with the office pet of the same name) and I forgot to write this when I got home, so that’s on me!

In any case, I’ve been continuing my work with George in setting up a bunch of new weapons and fun loot for the biomes. The status system rework from Kyren and Metadept is almost done, so in the meantime I’ve been working mostly with our existing status effects, in some cases combining them for fun results. It can be a deceptively involved process, particularly if you want to make some nice particle effects to go along with it.



I’m really looking forward to when we can begin implementing some more unusual status effects, like the ones Metadept was prototyping. Then we can really go to town with making fun and, most importantly, unique weapon drops.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Nothing too exciting to post today. We’re getting very close to merging the new status changes into nightly, so kyren and I have been reimplementing lots of the old effects and responsibilities of the old system, and fixing plenty of bugs along the way. It’s going very quickly, which is a good sign because it means the new status system is very easy to work with. Today we rebuilt healing items, beds, liquid status effects, cleaned up some unused and misconfigured effects on objects, added several new functions and missing functions to the API, and added a much better system for light sources on Networked Animators (the class used to display pretty much everything on entities). I made this ridiculous effect to test it out:

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Some of the recent new additions George and I have been making to the game’s loot pool are made because they’re cool. Others are silly and fun. Then there’s stuff like this that straddles the line.



Seems like a surefire way to win a snowball fight!

Sometimes you’ll find items like this in biome-specific chests, but most of the time you’ll only find blueprints, and its up to you to get the necessary materials together. Typically it will require a component you can only get from that biome.

There’s more to come!

Also! In case you missed it, we've got Steam trading cards now! Collect 'em all to craft Steam profile backgrounds, badges and emotes. You'll get about one card drop per hour of play.

:SBHorse: :SBchicken: :SBpanda: :SBpenguin:

Have a nice weekend!

Hullo!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Here’s a few small peaks at some of the work we’ve been doing.



What’s this? Well, I’m not telling you.



You can build a lot of stuff with tar. It is very versatile. Try making some armor!

We’ve been working hard coming up with new content to help fill out the tiers. These are some simple examples. Expect to find better fleshed out biomes and sub-biomes with more biome-specific rewards.

That’s all! Bye!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Today I’ve been implementing a block protection system, so that we can have special dungeons and missions where you can’t place blocks or break through walls until deactivating a Shield Generator somewhere inside. The way this works is: each tile in the world has a ‘dungeon ID,’ which is a bit of a misnomer since it’s also used to specify tiles that have no dungeon, tiles modified by the player, and a couple of other things. Specific dungeon IDs will be protected for a given world, in a list that can be modified from server side Lua scripts or by using an admin command. I’m sure people will find interesting uses for the system beyond its original purpose, like building a planet with tests of skill and then enabling protection to make them a challenge for other players to overcome. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

So you may have noticed over the last few days our artists have been slamming out new content, all in the name of fleshing out the biomes and giving players some interesting incentives and rewards for exploring them. Presently, a heavy focus has been placed on each biome having its own unique resources and loot in the form of costumes, tools, and weapons. Its all in the name of variety!

The task of making most of these new items actually function has fallen to me. I’ve been going through all of them, ensuring they behave the way you’d expect, making sure hitboxes on the projectiles are all appropriately sized, that sort of thing. There’s also a bunch of new recipes being thrown into the mix, so a number of items that you previously could only acquire through drops are becoming craftable. If you’re lucky enough to find some of the consumable weapons (throwing daggers and axes, for instance), you’ll be rewarded with blueprints that will enable you craft them anytime you want, so long as you’ve got the resources necessary to do so.

Some of the new weapons the artists have slung my way have been challenging, but fun to make. One of the new weapons George teased in his tar biome post is a spear that lobs balls of tar when you attack. The tar itself doesn’t do much damage, but it can slow down your enemies, making it easier to keep them at bay while ducking in and out for your melee hits. Having spent so much of my time lately working with our weapon and projectile systems, I’ve learnt a great deal, and its always encouraging when you manage to get things working the way you intended.

Taking advantage of the liquid collection that the upgraded matter manipulator brings with it, you can now bottle your own water, among other things. Once a liquid is bottled you can consume it to receive the effects. For example, some liquids have curative powers when ingested. If you fashion yourself a bottle out of glass, you can collect the liquid with your matter manipulator, bottle it at a cooking table, then use it when you find yourself in a pinch.

As an aside, you actually drink your beverages now! I can’t tell you how many times I winced when listening to my character “consuming” a bottle of whiskey with a distinct crunch. That stuff makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it.

This whole process of configuring everything has been difficult at times, but it’s rewarding when it goes well. I expect to continue with this kind of work over the coming weeks, but in my position I can be made to change gear at any time. Ahhh, the joys of game development!

Good night everybody!

ːpizzasliceː

Hullo!

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Here’s a few small peaks at some of the work we’ve been doing.



What’s this? Well, I’m not telling you.



You can build a lot of stuff with tar. It is very versatile. Try making some armor!

We’ve been working hard coming up with new content to help fill out the tiers. These are some simple examples. Expect to find better fleshed out biomes and sub-biomes with more biome-specific rewards.

That’s all! Bye!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Today I’ve been implementing a block protection system, so that we can have special dungeons and missions where you can’t place blocks or break through walls until deactivating a Shield Generator somewhere inside. The way this works is: each tile in the world has a ‘dungeon ID,’ which is a bit of a misnomer since it’s also used to specify tiles that have no dungeon, tiles modified by the player, and a couple of other things. Specific dungeon IDs will be protected for a given world, in a list that can be modified from server side Lua scripts or by using an admin command. I’m sure people will find interesting uses for the system beyond its original purpose, like building a planet with tests of skill and then enabling protection to make them a challenge for other players to overcome. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

So you may have noticed over the last few days our artists have been slamming out new content, all in the name of fleshing out the biomes and giving players some interesting incentives and rewards for exploring them. Presently, a heavy focus has been placed on each biome having its own unique resources and loot in the form of costumes, tools, and weapons. Its all in the name of variety!

The task of making most of these new items actually function has fallen to me. I’ve been going through all of them, ensuring they behave the way you’d expect, making sure hitboxes on the projectiles are all appropriately sized, that sort of thing. There’s also a bunch of new recipes being thrown into the mix, so a number of items that you previously could only acquire through drops are becoming craftable. If you’re lucky enough to find some of the consumable weapons (throwing daggers and axes, for instance), you’ll be rewarded with blueprints that will enable you craft them anytime you want, so long as you’ve got the resources necessary to do so.

Some of the new weapons the artists have slung my way have been challenging, but fun to make. One of the new weapons George teased in his tar biome post is a spear that lobs balls of tar when you attack. The tar itself doesn’t do much damage, but it can slow down your enemies, making it easier to keep them at bay while ducking in and out for your melee hits. Having spent so much of my time lately working with our weapon and projectile systems, I’ve learnt a great deal, and its always encouraging when you manage to get things working the way you intended.

Taking advantage of the liquid collection that the upgraded matter manipulator brings with it, you can now bottle your own water, among other things. Once a liquid is bottled you can consume it to receive the effects. For example, some liquids have curative powers when ingested. If you fashion yourself a bottle out of glass, you can collect the liquid with your matter manipulator, bottle it at a cooking table, then use it when you find yourself in a pinch.

As an aside, you actually drink your beverages now! I can’t tell you how many times I winced when listening to my character “consuming” a bottle of whiskey with a distinct crunch. That stuff makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it.

This whole process of configuring everything has been difficult at times, but it’s rewarding when it goes well. I expect to continue with this kind of work over the coming weeks, but in my position I can be made to change gear at any time. Ahhh, the joys of game development!

Good night everybody!

:pizzaslice:

Whoops! Yesterday I drank too much coffee and did loads of things, but remembering to write the weekly update round-up was not one of those things.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Howdy folks!

I’ve spent the past couple of days getting the tiered novakid weapons into the game, both functioning and craftable. Some of the guns are still a little on the big side, so they’ll likely undergo adjustments, but it’s nice to have something for the novakids to use besides that rusty old revolver.



Beyond that, I’ve been planning the structure for the Glitch mission, which I’m pumped to start working on. It’ll likely be very script-heavy so it’s one that may have some roadblocks to overcome before I’ll be able to finish it. I can at least start building the environment in the meantime.

That’s it from me, have a good one!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Evening all!

Apologies for the lack of update yesterday! The team’s really been kicking the pace up a notch with sweeping changes across the board. I’ve been constantly sidetracked from the Glitch mission to do a bunch of configuration work, fixing a handful of UI elements, updating objects and adding a few new sounds to boot. That said, the mission is pretty thoroughly mapped out in my concepts now, so I have begun building and been chipping away at it whenever I’ve not been on some other task. The case being that this is a Glitch mission, it of course involves a castle.



I’m trying to establish a greater sense of scale than the generated glitch castle dungeons, so expect it to be quite open. It’s a bit bare since it’s still in early stages, but hopefully this peek at the castle gardens will give you some sense of what I’m going for. What exactly will be happening at this castle? I’ll leave you to speculate!

In case you missed it, Tiyuri posted over on our new Chucklefish blog earlier today. If you’ve had concerns about the longevity of Starbound lately, I suggest giving it a read. We’re not giving up this project of passion any time soon, and we’re gunning to get the next stable update to you as soon as we can. Thank you everyone for your continuous support and patience.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

On Friday I decided to make a small change to the treasure table format. I got a bit carried away and ended up spending a bunch of time over the weekend to clean up, organize, and rebuild ALL of our .treasurepools files, which I finally finished. It was a lot of work but the results make treasure much easier to work with and a much better system in general, so I’m very happy to have completed it.

For a bit of technical detail: our treasure pools are specified as weighted lists of items. The weight associated with an item determines how likely it is to be randomly selected, relative to other items in the table (not an absolute percentage chance). This means that adding new items to a table changes the likelihood of each of the other items in the table being selected. As you can imagine, this makes it very hard to edit and balance the tables! The engine change I made was to allow treasure tables to reference other treasure tables. With that functionality implemented, I rebuilt our tables by splitting loot into categories. For example, here’s the new table for a single general treasure item, such as you might find in a plain surface chest:

[see post for example]

As you can see, the probabilities are now specified for general categories of items, each of which has its own separate treasure pool. Now, when we add (for example) a new weapon, the probability of getting SOME weapon will stay the same, as will the probabilities of other categories within this file. I’ve also split several of these categories up into sub tables, divided them based on threat level, and massively reorganized things to make them easier to work with. The end result is that we can now move ahead with our work on biomes and progression (more on that later in the week!) without creating huge amounts of redundant configuration files and future work in the process.

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

As per usual, I’ve been juggling a few tasks the past couple of days.

Work has continued on the Glitch mission I told you guys about last week, though a gameplay decision that came about midway in its development has made me have to re-think the overall structure a bit. It turned out that having a larger scale structure didn’t necessarily equal more fun for the player. None the less, it’s coming along nicely and I’m looking forward to getting into scripting it. The old structure will likely end up being utilized elsewhere down the line.

As part of our restructure of the tiered progression, the mining experience is currently under the microscope. You may recall some time back, Metadept was experimenting with the matter manipulator as an upgradeable tool. Many who have tried the nightlies have likely experienced this in the form of the completely unbalanced and relatively weak starting iteration. The reason we haven’t addressed this yet is because we decided it didn’t make sense to focus on balancing the tools until we had tackled the larger task of rebalancing all of our tiles.

Every tile in the game has its own set health that governs how difficult it is to break. Since we’re having biomes split up by tier during the initial progression (note that all biomes will be available with higher difficulty levels at the end-game), it meant we needed to balance the large number of materials based on their biome and their place in the overall progression. At time of writing we have 140+ different types of tiles that each needed to be assessed and reconfigured, so most of my time the last couple of days has been tied up with this task. For now it’s looking good, but it’ll likely require adjustments as we test.

In the wake of the matter manipulator becoming the primary mining tool, it bears mentioning that the pickaxes won’t be going away altogether. Instead they will remain in the form of rare drops that, depending on your luck, could end up being one markedly more powerful than your matter manipulator at the time. The trade-off is that they will no longer be repairable, so you’d want to save them for the toughest of blocks.

The next step is going to be balancing the matter manipulator and its upgrades. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop!

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Hello humans and non-humans, and others!

Have you ever dreamed to decorate your house with reeds? Sleep on reeds, sitting on reeds, or even eating on reeds? Starbound will make your dream come true!

As you know we are working on new minibiomes now. Next step (for my part) will be more oasis things, a bedouin outfit, and a throwable coconut.

Have a good space night!

ːpizzasliceː

Whoops! Yesterday I drank too much coffee and did loads of things, but remembering to write the weekly update round-up was not one of those things.

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Howdy folks!

I’ve spent the past couple of days getting the tiered novakid weapons into the game, both functioning and craftable. Some of the guns are still a little on the big side, so they’ll likely undergo adjustments, but it’s nice to have something for the novakids to use besides that rusty old revolver.



Beyond that, I’ve been planning the structure for the Glitch mission, which I’m pumped to start working on. It’ll likely be very script-heavy so it’s one that may have some roadblocks to overcome before I’ll be able to finish it. I can at least start building the environment in the meantime.

That’s it from me, have a good one!

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Evening all!

Apologies for the lack of update yesterday! The team’s really been kicking the pace up a notch with sweeping changes across the board. I’ve been constantly sidetracked from the Glitch mission to do a bunch of configuration work, fixing a handful of UI elements, updating objects and adding a few new sounds to boot. That said, the mission is pretty thoroughly mapped out in my concepts now, so I have begun building and been chipping away at it whenever I’ve not been on some other task. The case being that this is a Glitch mission, it of course involves a castle.



I’m trying to establish a greater sense of scale than the generated glitch castle dungeons, so expect it to be quite open. It’s a bit bare since it’s still in early stages, but hopefully this peek at the castle gardens will give you some sense of what I’m going for. What exactly will be happening at this castle? I’ll leave you to speculate!

In case you missed it, Tiyuri posted over on our new Chucklefish blog earlier today. If you’ve had concerns about the longevity of Starbound lately, I suggest giving it a read. We’re not giving up this project of passion any time soon, and we’re gunning to get the next stable update to you as soon as we can. Thank you everyone for your continuous support and patience.

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On Friday I decided to make a small change to the treasure table format. I got a bit carried away and ended up spending a bunch of time over the weekend to clean up, organize, and rebuild ALL of our .treasurepools files, which I finally finished. It was a lot of work but the results make treasure much easier to work with and a much better system in general, so I’m very happy to have completed it.

For a bit of technical detail: our treasure pools are specified as weighted lists of items. The weight associated with an item determines how likely it is to be randomly selected, relative to other items in the table (not an absolute percentage chance). This means that adding new items to a table changes the likelihood of each of the other items in the table being selected. As you can imagine, this makes it very hard to edit and balance the tables! The engine change I made was to allow treasure tables to reference other treasure tables. With that functionality implemented, I rebuilt our tables by splitting loot into categories. For example, here’s the new table for a single general treasure item, such as you might find in a plain surface chest:

[see post for example]

As you can see, the probabilities are now specified for general categories of items, each of which has its own separate treasure pool. Now, when we add (for example) a new weapon, the probability of getting SOME weapon will stay the same, as will the probabilities of other categories within this file. I’ve also split several of these categories up into sub tables, divided them based on threat level, and massively reorganized things to make them easier to work with. The end result is that we can now move ahead with our work on biomes and progression (more on that later in the week!) without creating huge amounts of redundant configuration files and future work in the process.

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As per usual, I’ve been juggling a few tasks the past couple of days.

Work has continued on the Glitch mission I told you guys about last week, though a gameplay decision that came about midway in its development has made me have to re-think the overall structure a bit. It turned out that having a larger scale structure didn’t necessarily equal more fun for the player. None the less, it’s coming along nicely and I’m looking forward to getting into scripting it. The old structure will likely end up being utilized elsewhere down the line.

As part of our restructure of the tiered progression, the mining experience is currently under the microscope. You may recall some time back, Metadept was experimenting with the matter manipulator as an upgradeable tool. Many who have tried the nightlies have likely experienced this in the form of the completely unbalanced and relatively weak starting iteration. The reason we haven’t addressed this yet is because we decided it didn’t make sense to focus on balancing the tools until we had tackled the larger task of rebalancing all of our tiles.

Every tile in the game has its own set health that governs how difficult it is to break. Since we’re having biomes split up by tier during the initial progression (note that all biomes will be available with higher difficulty levels at the end-game), it meant we needed to balance the large number of materials based on their biome and their place in the overall progression. At time of writing we have 140+ different types of tiles that each needed to be assessed and reconfigured, so most of my time the last couple of days has been tied up with this task. For now it’s looking good, but it’ll likely require adjustments as we test.

In the wake of the matter manipulator becoming the primary mining tool, it bears mentioning that the pickaxes won’t be going away altogether. Instead they will remain in the form of rare drops that, depending on your luck, could end up being one markedly more powerful than your matter manipulator at the time. The trade-off is that they will no longer be repairable, so you’d want to save them for the toughest of blocks.

The next step is going to be balancing the matter manipulator and its upgrades. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop!

---

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Hello humans and non-humans, and others!

Have you ever dreamed to decorate your house with reeds? Sleep on reeds, sitting on reeds, or even eating on reeds? Starbound will make your dream come true!

As you know we are working on new minibiomes now. Next step (for my part) will be more oasis things, a bedouin outfit, and a throwable coconut.

Have a good space night!

:pizzaslice: