[2020] Starbase – Progress Notes Week 45 (2020)

Week 45 (November 2nd – 6th)

Hello everyone! Here are the progress notes of week 45:

Please note that the “Progress Notes” are different from the Starbase Alpha “Patch Notes”. Progress Notes are snippets from the development team and what has been worked on during the previous week, and many of the features might not be present in the current or upcoming builds of the Closed Alpha. Some features, especially in the design portion, can be subject to change as the development continues.

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Design

Features

• Mining backpack is now the default backpack: new players will spawn with the Mining backpack
• Ore distribution and material progression design work continues
• Restricted areas regarding player stations have been configured: building a station on some key locations is forbidden and prevented
• Player stations have been tested and improvements designed based on the results
• Bolt Tool autobolt improvement has been tasked: the tool should add bolts to all port profile suggestions, ignoring the max hard cap (i.e. ore crates and generator units)
• Mining Laser power consumption issue resolved and fixed: it now consumes 6k power per second
• Economy configurations and design have been worked on:
  • Player progression and material availability in the belt and beyond
  • Spaceship Designer assembly design and assembly cost changes
  • New player made ships were added to the economy

User Interface

• Auction House buy order, service fee variants and alternative UI have been worked on
• Design for alternative tutorial routes has been worked on

Other

• Halloween ship shop has been removed

Code

Gameplay

• Resource Bridge transfer with a single powered bridge port has been enabled
• Asteroids should be loaded again before colliding into them
• Thruster blocked-ness checking has been extended to avoid all kinds of encapsulated thrusters
• Ship “acceleration” sound system has been refactored
• Multisource sound system has been tweaked
• Cargo Lock Frame’s wall no longer disappears during fast travel

User Interface

• Ores not being stackable has been fixed
• A fix has been made for not being able to autobolt objects with no bolt profiles, if objects already have bolts

Stations

• Build restriction area configuration has been added to allow developers to specify areas where player stations cannot be built
• Owned station limit has been updated to 1 per user profile
• New permissions to station management have been added
  • The adjustment of how many lots a user can rent within the station has been made possible (can be specified for default users)
  • The possibility for a user to be exempted from rental payment has been added (can be specified for default users)
  • The station owner can rent any number of lots and pays no rent for them by default

Spaceship Designer

• Quick bar has been enabled in Spaceship Designer test mode
• A fix has been made for selection not working properly after rotating the camera in Spaceship Designer

Art

Animations and Emotes

• Work on 1st person sprint animations and general polish continues
• 3rd person resource port animations worked on

Stations and Cities

• Skyscrapers, street levels and city holograms are being worked on

Weapons and Armor

• Adamant armorset textures have been tweaked and paintjobs have been updated
• Toxine armorset colored areas have been slightly tweaked

Other

• Moon terrain texture tiling has been adjusted
• Lukium asteroid concept image has been made
• Inventory icons have been added for blueprint projectors, remote explosive assets and station assets (bases and beams)
• New ‘Warp Gate entry’ effect and a first version of ‘Warp Gate travel’ effect have been created

Gallery of the week

Don’t forget to join our official Starbase Forums and Starbase Discord for Starbase-related discussion and content!

See you next week!🪐