• UFO's should no longer be brought back if you destroy them. This will not work retroactively, so you will have to destroy them one last time.
  
• UFO Bipedal Aliens should now behave properly. They were getting stuck in the previous build, and would not react to the player. Their guns would appear, but would remain stuck in the middle of the alien's body. Now they should hold their guns, and either attack the player (if hostile) or behave neutrally if not.
  
• UFO Bipedal Aliens should now spawn inside of the UFO rooms. They were in a bad habit of spawning between the walls. They still might shoot through walls, but I have reason to believe I will be able to fix that in the next update.
  
• UFOs will now produce space debris if you destroy them. Capturing this will put alien tech item's into your ship's storage.

• I have included a file in the game's save folder called "Vsync.txt" which you can edit. It will be set to 0 by default, enabling Vsync. If you want to disable Vsync, open that file in "C:/users/-your username-/AppData/Local/Star Explorers" and change the 0 at the end of the line to a 1. If you don't know what vsync is, just ignore this.
  
• Previously vsync was set to be disabled by default, and there was no way for users to change it.
  
• I will look into adding an in-game button to enable/disable vsync.

• All the seated NPCs in the mothership seem to have moved a foot or so (in game space) forward, and are now intersecting the tables at which they sit. This is true for games that are reloading the mothership, I am not sure if it effects games in which the mothership has not yet been entered.
  
• If this is only for reloaded motherships, I will probably not fix it. I would test it now, but I cannot work on it any more today, and I did not want to delay the update.

Mothership NPCs have been improved, with better lighting/shadows. Also, their inventory for sale has been adjusted so they will not have as many alien items. Vendors will now have a better budget with which to buy back items.

Pits should no longer appear in caves. These are still a feature I want to add, but currently there is no way to escape them.

Storm planets will no longer push the player around constantly, however, tornadoes themselves will still push the player and damage them.

I found a strange issue where planets do not reload properly. I was not quite able to resolve why it was happening, but have applied a work-around for the time being. Hopefully this will not cause any new problems!

Robots have been reintroduced to hostile UFOs. They were replaced by bipedal aliens, which should still appear on UFOs, so now you should be seeing both.

During playtesting, I noticed the player's landing craft did not appear in the UFO hangar. However, when reloading a UFO, it appeared where it should be. Let me know if this is still an issue. I would resolve it, but it is not game breaking, and I wanted to upload the new branch tonight.

This update fixes a bug that was introduced when I added crashed UFOs to the game. What happened is that when a planet had either a crashed UFO or an ancient ruin, it would not allow that planet to reload on later visits.

It was easy to fix once I was able to identify the cause. I want to thank the players for reaching out and for their patience. This sort of thing is inevitable when new features are added, especially when it's me programming them :)

There is another bug that will prevent a galaxy file from reloading. It is actually easy to fix the file but I have not been able to identify the cause yet. If you encounter this, where the game will hang when trying to reload from the main menu - or I suppose it might happen when returning from a planet or the mothership - please let me know. I can fix your file if it happens, and it might give me a clue as to how it occurred.

I plant to test some ideas on why, where and when this might be happening.

The most feedback about the mothership so far seems to be how it is causing some unbalance as far as loot and money are concerned. I like a lot of the suggested solutions to this, so I will be working on re-balancing these aspects of the game in the latest version. If you have any feedback regarding this, let me know here, or over on the discord server: https://discord.gg/vTxpb8Z

This is a pretty big update. What I thought would take a week or so, ended up taking over a month. The Mothership Altair is now becoming a location to visit in-game!

First, I apologize, but this latest version will again require a new game. I hate to do this, and I try not to have this happen, but some times it is unavoidable due circumstances outside of my control. This usually means some error that I wrote into a previous version, but it is what it is.

It is still rough, very rough. I have to add some actual characters, new models, and work on improving the graphics, which somehow do not want to work the way I expect them to right now :)



Still, there are new shops for ship, suits and weapons that you could not access from the ship's computer before. That shop is still available, in case you just want to refuel or sell some stuff quickly.

The idea here was to create a different, more familiar kind of environment the player can visit. A kind of home base with friendly npcs to interact with. I do want to elaborate a lot on the look, feel and functionality of the place, but it is currently working and accomplishing a good portion of what it needs to right now. Having player feedback and ideas will be welcome at this point.

A few issues have popped up in the previous build, and i have begun to address those as well.

• Leaf alpha - some leaves were being rendered incorrectly. This only occurred on liquid ammonia planets, and only after leaving and returning to the surface ... so that was fun to test!
  
• Missing storage containers - this only effected the visible storage model, not your actual storage capacity. It should work properly now.

Lots of new stuff is happening in 0.0.6, including, but not limited to, the following:

• New fungus and plant variables. Different liquid and atmosphere types will influence what kinds of fungus and/or plant-life will exist on a planet.
  
• There are no new plant or fungus models, but the way they form and combine has been altered, so you may discover fungus trees, or branching fungus in your travels, among other things.
  
• Fixed a number of small issues.
  
• New spaceship rooms. Here is where I have spent the most time. I will let the screenshots say the rest.

The last few updates have brought along their share of bugs and other issues, I spent a lot of time repairing those.

1. Star Names - Star names now appear at the man console at the ship's helm, in addition to the star chart. There was a problem where they would not appear correctly if you had not visited the star's sector (either with your ship or in the star chart) and it would show up as "NOT IN DATABASE." This should be corrected, and the star name should appear correctly.

2. Planets crash when loading - After adding sand planets, I introduced a bug that would prevent certain other planets from loading. I was able to identify the cause of this and resolve the issue.

3. Sideways rain - After updating the way rain works, I forgot to update the actual rain model in the Steam version, so rain would have appeared incorrectly. This should be resolved.



1. New landscaping - There are six new types of "landscape" objects. These are the large scale rocky outcroppings that appear on some planets. The image above shows one of the new types.

Here are a couple more images of the various new types of landscape...


Natural arches...


Craters...

More New Features are being tested...

I was able to identify a problem with some textures on alien UFOs. Occasionally, the levels would appear with dark areas. It turns out some of the textures I was using were formatted incorrectly, so it was actually pretty easy to fix once I found the problem.


Probably the most dramatic change is the existence of crashed UFOs on some planets. You can enter these destroyed craft and explore then, just like the ones in outer space. You won't find the crew on board, but you may come across some other surprises.

The star chart now remembers your last position when you switch back to the ship's helm. This should improve the ease of navigation a lot. There is a bug in the star chart too, if you switch back and forth between stars and sectors, or between planets and stars, occasionally the star chart will have an error, and will not know what to focus on.

If this happens, just switch back to the last working focus (i.e. if you were looking at sectors, and then switched to stars, then switch back to sectors). You may have to re-click the star or planet you are trying to zoom in to. I will continue to troubleshoot this issue, but it does not seem to cause any game breaking problems.


Sand planets already existed in Star Explorers. However, they will now have some different aspects that set them apart from other planets. The new sand planets will be flatter than others, and they will be lacking grass, trees and plants, though they may still have surface liquids and aliens if conditions are right. They also will be lacking caves, but they can still have ancient ruins or crashed UFOs to discover. This is just to add a little more variety to the game's possibilities. I plan on adding more planet and terrain types in the next update.

New Features are being tested...

Aliens on UFOs should now be persistent between visits. So if you meet an alien, and it has an item or a quest, you should be able to come back later and purchase that item, or fulfill that quest.

Star and planet names now appear at the ship's helm. Previously you had to go to the star chart to see the names of stars and planets. This should make navigation much easier than before. You do still need to visit the star chart to enter custom names for stars and planets.


Here you can see the selected star is named "Big Red."


Mercuria, a desolate world, orbiting a dead star in a far off corner of the galaxy.

I already announced this, but I wanted to show you some of the new cave textures that you may encounter in your travels. The caves now reflect the surface type of each planet...

The 0.0.1 release had a few missing files, models, textures etc...

No new content has been added since the 0.0.1 release, but now that content should work.

Okay, I have come up with an absurd naming convention. I can't call it 4.x, because the newest version is not compatible with the earlier 4.x games. I don't want to call it 5.0 yet, because that is what it will be called when it is ready. So I'm calling it the 5.0 Pre-Release 0.0.1 and that's what's gonna happen.

Anyway, what's going on here?

There are some major improvements happening. First, I plan to focus on fixing and streamlining content that already exists. Then I have plans to add lots of new content. So far, I have accomplished the following:

• Improved Load Times - Loading times for planets, caves and space has been cut by about a third (so it should take 2/3rds of the time it used to).
  
• Improved Frame Rate - Planets, especially those with grass and more dense surface features should see an improvement in performance. I plan to do more with this in future updates.
  
• Geysers should now become invisible on foggy planets when you move away from them. Also, geysers should no longer switch on and off when your character jumps from one side of a planet to another, it should be more smooth now.
  
• Lava Smoke should also stop jumping as well.
  
• Radiation clouds should form more randomly, they used to form in horizontal lines.
  
• Nebulae in outer space would freeze your spaceship's lasers, this should no longer happen.
  
• Sonic Cannon Fixed - the weapon should now work ... sorry it did not do anything for some time.

Some planets you land on will be Stormy, with severe high winds and other dangers like tornadoes and crystal rain. This was added after learning about some real life exo-planets that have similar conditions.



The old volcanoes have been replaced with bigger and better volcanoes. These will do damage to the player if they get too close, and they also spit out exploding globs of lava ... watch out!



Now caves will have different wall textures based on the surface type of the planets they appear on.

I have focused more of my attention on UFOs, which have undergone some major changes.
First, UFOs will now form a permanent part of the Star Explorers galaxy, leaving a star system, and returning to it, should reload the same UFO(s) in the same condition.
Friendly UFOs now exist. You may approach and board these UFOs with no trouble, and interact with the aliens aboard.
Aliens are now on UFOs, previously, only robots "lived" on UFOs.
Derelict (damaged) UFOs now have a different look, with all sorts of holes and stuff (see image below)
UFO interiors now have better collision detection, so going up stairs is much smoother than before.



UFOs are not done, I still have to make sure the aliens aboard will reload with the same items and quests, like they do on planets.
Alien AI on UFOS still needs some tweaking too.
I also want to offer at least three different types of UFOs, one for each alien type, and have some more interesting differences between an undamaged UFO, and one that has been damaged.

I also have a number of ideas about terrain, animals, plants and other stuff. I look forward to diving in to this game again, and I hope you will join me for the ride!