Starbase Progress Notes: Week 16 (2020)
April 14th - 17th
Hello everyone and welcome to another Starbase Progress Notes! Doesn't work quite as well in text-format, but you get the point. Hopefully you enjoy this week's development reports again. How's the treasure hunt going?
Design
Features
Assembly Job tested, some issues found in bolt profile auto aim bolting in objects with more challenging geometry
Fracture debris destruction effect tested
Asteroid Mining Job rewards tested, some configurations made to the bonus rewards and balancing needs to be done to the rewards
Economy settings tested and future features planned
Economy design: ship weapon prices adjusted and missing items added to the turret shop
Design for missing highlights for multiple choice buttons in settings menu worked on
Upcoming chat channels design is underway
UI for armor customization tool worked on
Ship recovery feature:
Design tests on initial system completed
Initial design for potential future updates worked on
Device resource networks:
Ongoing design for resource net integration with inventory system
Investigating possible ways to improve system compatibility with possible future goals
Ongoing design for UI improvements to inventory, storage, and universal tool dialog
Spaceships
Durability issue in Ithaca V1 fixed: beam frame was a bit inconsistent near one of the main thrusters, frame near rear thrusters reinforced
Hedron and Urchin were found to have legacy YOLOL chips, YOLOL code edited to fit the current chip and old legacy chip was replaced
Mining ship tests underway: testing how long it takes to fly to the asteroid belt and fill up all all the crates
Spaceship Designer
Furnace modules added to category so they can be used inside Spaceship Designer
Ship design with furnace started, the ship needs a very durable frame since the furnace modules are heavy
Weaponry and Warheads limited object types configured and locales added
Spaceship Designer economy design tested
Other
All curved end plates are now correctly arranged by size
Material types for ship windows updated to correct type
Code
Gameplay
Manipulating non-owned ships in safe zones is now allowed
Cancelling a ship spawn now returns the ship to the inventory
Issues where grabbing lock remained after the grabber unloaded entity or when the player died have been fixed
Small ship despawning issues have been fixed
A tracking system for resources (fuel, power, etc.) is in the making
Support for lot inventories has been finished
Buzzsaw's reload audio event not firing has been fixed
Lot visualizations having wrong rotations has been fixed, lot area restrictions are now finished
User Interface
Item shop not allowing to buy multi-part items such as small button has been fixed
The rest of the item shop's max buy amount issues have been fixed
The ore vacuuming system now notices if there isn't enough power and stops vacuuming ores
Item pickup checks have been fixed, won't allow picking up Mining and Assembly Job spawned items anymore
Feedback server implementation is underway, some UI tweaks have been made
Spaceship Designer
Station designer's background appearing in wrong orientation has been fixed
A log that can display text lines has been added to the bottom of the screen. This is currently only used to display a warning that an object in the current placement cannot be created
Lot terminal menus no longer display non-station lot blueprints
A bug that prevented multi-part robot arm selection has been fixed
A bug that prevented properties window device fields from updating properly in multi-selection has been fixed
A crash that occasionally happened when transforming objects too fast has been fixed
Alphabetical sorting has been added to module library in station creator
The possibility to use custom decimal count for sliders in settings menu has been added
Planets
Support added for instancing multiple planet groups
Renderer
Gas giant's orientation has been fixed in Spaceship Designer
Testing and fixing dynamic sky system refactor for the new mixed render queues and buffered updates has been finished
The explosion damage on solid planet has been implemented
Art
Other
Retopology for Pipe Tool has been finished
Additional info/decoration animations have been added for market station
Weapon turret assets' low poly and UV's have been updated
A new tiling metal fracture material which works with voxel fracture pieces and fracture debris assets has been finished
Rock instance amounts and render distances have been optimized,
New small pebble rocks have been finished and tested
Touchstone armor set's texture and paintjob quality has been polished
Ad animations have been updated
Small adjustments have been made to rocky asteroid materials
Ice asteroid materials are in the making