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    Hello Players,

    a huge update is now finally done. Here are the new features (amongst other smaller ones):


    Warp Gates

    Warp technology was something I held back to really have the necessary core to be able to make work, as that can easily break game play. With all the updates to the core, as well as all values available in the config, and also combined with our now concrete plans for a universe redesign, it's finally time to put warp into the game.

    Warp gates are the stationary version of structures that enable players to warp. Their rage is 8 systems (128 sectors), but that still can change if needed (available in config). They have a steady power cost on size, and also a one time cost per ship that passes through, which is based on the mass of the ship.

    Once passed, your ship will take 2 seconds to warp up and then warp. Note that you can only jump to stations with an operational jump gate.


    How to build and connect Warp Gates

    Warp gates have to be build in a two-dimensional loop. That means, each block that is connected to the gate computer (place that one first) must exactly touch two other gate blocks. The simplest form is to build a flat square. The computer will give feedback if the gate is currently operational. Be sure to select the computer with 'C' as it also happened to me that I patched up a gate without connecting the blocks to the gate computer, and then wondering why it didn't go online.

    Now that you have your gate, it's time to connect it. For that you will need need the new marker beam. It will be in your inventory as a fresh player, or you can ask an admin for it (/give_marker_weapon yourname). This new beam is not only going to be used with gates, it will be the main tool to use for inter-structure connection, which for example also comes in handy with the coming AI fleets, and more.

    This marker beam has two firing modes: Right Click will mark a structure. In the case of warp gates you can shoot the gate station anywhere to mark it. Right clicking the marker beam in the inventory will not tell you that it has a marking saved. You can now shoot the marker beam on another gate to enter its destination. To do that you have to use Left Click on the gate computer you want to set the destination for. As a fast way to connect the other ons to this, you can then then shoot the gate with right click to overwrite the saved marking with that gate, go then through the now working gate, and enter the mark on the other gate. You now have both gates connected.

    Kupu(tom) made the textures for all the new blocks and items.


    Jump Drives

    Jump Drives are the portable version of structures that enable players to warp. You can put them on a ship, charge them up, and instantly travel up to 8 sectors (max distance is also in the config). The destination to jump can be influenced in two ways. Either you jump in the direction you were looking at when engaging the jump drive, or you can use a more precise method: entering a waypoint in the navigation panel will enable you to jump towards the waypoint no matter in which direction you look in. It even puts you directly at your waypoint sector if it is fewer than 8 sectors away.

    Jump Drives can be placed like any other weapon or effect. They will appear in the weapon panel to put in the hotbar to use. Keep in mind that there is a sweet spot for jump Drive modules depending on ratio of total mass to jump drive modules. You can build them as small as you want, but they will take much longer to charge up. Placing more blocks than the sweet spot will make charging even faster, if you want to specifically build a jumping ship. But keep the power costs in mind. The statistics of where the sweet spot is are in the weapons panel if you click on the jump drive.

    To charge, you have to hold the left mouse button in flight mode like shooting a weapon. After it is charged, you can press right click to jump. The mechanic to actively have to charge up the Jump Drive is in place to make it more dangerous to use in battle. The drive has a small cooldown after jumps (10sec at the moment).

    But be warned. Changing the blocks on a jump drive will reset the charge immediately. The charge will also be reset if hit, so make sure you are save before starting to charge up (you can still of course do it while flying).


    Save/Load Templates to paste

    A new feature has been added to the advanced build mode. You can now save what you selected with "copy" and load it to paste any time you need it. The only restriction is, that you can't paste templates that exceed the mass build area dimension of the server you are playing on. These files can also be shared (located in StarMade/templates) to make toolboxes for any purpose.

     

    Optimization for up to 50% more fps (depending on hardware)


    Occlusion Culling was a technique I tried over and over to make work over the past 4 years. The problem is that it has a very narrow line of performance taken to gain performance. So a wrong design or a small mistake will cause it to not give any performance boost, or even lower the overall graphics performance.

    Some graphics cards have not full support of this feature (even if they say they do by specification), so if you get any flickering, you can turn it off without having to shutdown the game in the in-game options. A one time message when starting the game will also provide this info.

    Technical: Basically, occlusion culling is the technique to not draw parts of geometry that is behind other objects (occluded). What sounds easy informally, is one of the hardest problems to get working right. The first problem is, that at the time of draw, you don't know which objects are occluded without drawing them first. Draw too few, and the objects that would be normally occluded will be falsely drawn, draw too much, and there is no actual gain in performance, as you have already basically drawn it. The second problem is that graphics processing is happening in a pipeline and asynchronous, so the data is not actually there yet at the time the draw command returns. That means a lookup to check if an object is occluded forces the pipeline to a halt to have all the data flushed before being able to continue. And this of course means immense slowdown. The third problem is that occlusion culling require objects to be drawn front to back (else they objects wouldn't known to be occluded), and blended draw (for glass etc) requires back to front.

    To combat the first two problems, there are two techniques used based on the same premise: "If one object was not visible in this frame, it's highly unlikely to be visible in the next". What is done is drawing all chunks  that are known to be visible, then (very fast) bounding boxes are drawn for each chunk that may be visible or not. At the start of the next frame, the results of the query of the last frame are pulled to have no pipeline stall. The again, all possibly visible chunks are drawn based on the new result, and the rest as bounding boxes.

    The 3rd problem is lucky already solved by design. StarMade sorts chunks threaded, and vertex storage is done in a way so non-opaque parts of chunks can be drawn separately.


    Movement cancel (cancel rolling of big ships)

    Pressing 'V' (but you also can assign it to the break button) will now cancel any mouse movement. This is especially handy for bigger ships, when you start to roll the ship and want to stop.


    Storage blocks filters

     

    Another big feature are storage block filters. The storage blocks now essentially work like factories, but have a distinct use case. You can make list of which blocks and how many of them to take each cycle from other storages. Just open up your storage block and click on filter. The blocks will be taken out of any block that is connected to this one with 'v'.

    This way you can not only sort items after production or from looting, you can also split them up and direct them into a factory system to make exactly what you need.

    Each storage block or factory can be turned on and off now. Please note, that factories placed in the old version had the default active state "false", which means you will have to switch those back on again. All newly placed factories or storage blocks are switched on by default though.

    The whole system now also is fully logic capable, so you can connect storage/factories to activation modules to control your production and item sorting with the press of a button.

     

    Oculus Rift support

    StarMade now has full oculus support, including head tracking. It was an amazing experience to try out for the first time.

     

    Lib extraction

    By fiddling with the way StarMade versions are built and deployed I was able to decrease the size of the main program to 5-7MB. That means, that unless there are more files to download (like in this update, as you have to download all the libs one time, as well as textures), an update will only be 5-7MB with the new launcher.


    Launcher version 14

    Downloadable from the main download list, the new launcher version is now fully deployed. Some bugfixes have been done based on the feedback from the tests. One new feature since v12 is that downloads will now be a lot more stable, as they can actively resume. As a test, I was able to resume downloading after disabling my network card for 30 seconds.


    StarMade Server List

    StarMade now has its own dynamic server list. You can now click on the server list button next to multiplayer and get an overview of all StarMade servers that choose to annouce themselves to the list.

    For Server Admins:

    Announcing to the Server List is just a few server.cfg parameters:

    This is an example for the test server

    ANNOUNCE_SERVER_TO_SERVERLIST = true //announces the server to the starmade server list
    HOST_NAME_TO_ANNOUNCE_TO_SERVER_LIST = play.star-made.org //this must be a valid hostname (either ip or host, e.g. play.star-made.org)
    SERVER_LIST_NAME = Official Test Server //max length 64 characters
    SERVER_LIST_DESCRIPTION = Unlimited building //max length 128 characters

    please make sure, that the host name is right. The server list server will check if there is indeed a real starmade server on the other side.

    Port is set automatically by the running game server. You can also enter multiple instances from the same server that run on different ports.

    The server will usually appear within a few moments of starting it with correct parameters.

     

    Crafting

    The personal salvage beam now has a 25% chance to harvest an extra raw resource each harvested block. This setting can be of course modified in the config.

    The personal power supply beam now provides a lot more power per hit to be a lot more usable in survival situations. Also the display bug of factories showing 500/100 has been fixed.

    Calbiri is currently working on missing recipes as well as overall tweaking on the balance. It's now also possible to set the manufacture time of each block individually to allow for more balance options.

     


    Lots of Bugfixes

    There has been a lot of testing and a lot of fixes. Thanks especially to AndyP, der_scheme, gamesaucer, Lancake, Spaceking, testkil, and all the other testers! You guys are awesome!

      Resolved 30
    948 Resolved Copy/Paste and Undo/Redo gives free blocks
    939 Resolved non-procedural backgrounds inoperative
    937 Resolved Joysticks do not get recognized anylonger by the game
    928 Resolved Template list is unordered
    926 Resolved Factories/chests: Can't deactivate.
    924 Resolved Mail Spam: Your faction declared war
    891 Resolved Flickering Objects - Occlusion culling
    889 Resolved Template menu : can't click on end of text from list to load + buttons are (half) on each other
    878 Resolved Heatseeker missile targeting AI is bugged
    877 Resolved Locking on entities when using right shift
    853 Resolved Damage Pulse on Turrets/Docked Ships still damage mothership
    850 Resolved Undocking Infinite Chain Docking Freeze and Crash the game with some larger ships
    848 Resolved Crash on spawn—TutorialException
    838 Resolved Some java versions prefer IPv6 stack over IPv4 stack
    837 Resolved Changing install location throws ERROR "Please only use numbers"
    835 Resolved Rotating Display Module 6 times causes exception
    822 Resolved New Playerlist GUI-Buttons do not catch the clicks
    821 Resolved Copy and Paste debris even with proper parts in inventory
    819 Resolved Switching "Simple light" causes GL_INVALID_OPERATION
    815 Resolved Encryption Operation not possible
    782 Resolved Crash at 100% (cube shader)
    774 Resolved Unexpected Behavior of Infinite Shops and Credits
    728 Resolved Effects increasing power consumption on missiles and increase damage for cannons/pulse/beams + other issues, last message
    632 Resolved Beam weapons do not report all stats in weapons menu
    616 Resolved Plex Beacon Lighting Issues
    554 Resolved d1000 missiles report "type=HeatSeeking"
    540 Resolved UI is unusable in large lists
    495 Resolved Docked Ships do not use Gravity correctly
    488 Resolved Linking already linked computers - hides but preserves the sublink
    420 Resolved importing sector from 0.153 to 0.154
      Closed 129
    933 Closed Occlusion culling: Warp effect is broken
    900 Closed Irritating hyperspace effect with glazed cockpit
    888 Closed invisible character-Dev build
    885 Closed Using Jumpdrive while docked - crashes server
    874 Closed Weapons hotbar not showing computers but you can still fire
    871 Closed Marking a planet as faction home does not prevent the core from being destroyed by cannons/beams.
    863 Closed Warp gate + jump drive : Moving cursor when warping causes ship to move but not camera
    860 Closed Warp Gates and Jump Drives do not save ship orientation or position of arrival
    859 Closed /remove_admin only works on online players
    845 Closed Missile/Cannon computer ignoring direction
    844 Closed NullPointerException when opening the Structure menu of a station with a warpgate
    842 Closed Red Error Message when buying blueprint from shop
    841 Closed some planets teleport away when approched.
    840 Closed R no longer closes block inventory screens
    823 Closed Handheld weapons 'alternate fire' removing blocks
    816 Closed Spam in console: ACTIVATING::::
    810 Closed Duplicated Block: burnt yellow dirt (206), burnt yellow dirt (131)
    809 Closed ClassCastException caused by beam weapons
    805 Closed Starmade now require authentification when offline
    804 Closed Core /Ship Duplicates
    779 Closed Crafting buttons in inventory screen capture input incorrectly
    769 Closed Entities rendering partially invisible (Exception on occlusion computations)
    768 Closed Mac Freeze on Game Start
    760 Closed Firing Push Effect on stations causes ClassCastException
    753 Closed Nacht ore block gives you a raw hattel shard
    752 Closed Power supply handheld beam causes ClassCastException when used on a shop.
    751 Closed Non physical micro assembler
    747 Closed Can place ore blocks
    745 Closed REQUIRE_STARMADE_AUTHENTICATION does not work even with USE_STARMADE_AUTHENTICATION is set to true.
    742 Closed NullPointerException when clicking on handheld weapons if a plex storage is being used.
    741 Closed Turning down/off in game sound does not remove background noise
    740 Closed Game crash when using inventory "Craft factory" after using a macro assembler
    737 Closed Plexlifter can´t get activated by logic
    732 Closed planets not fully generating.
    724 Closed When editing Display blocks, text is reset for all directions except one
    723 Closed some keys are still functional while chatting
    721 Closed Open Plex doors block beams and projectiles
    713 Closed Area trigger blocks visible in build mode even when TAB+G'd.
    710 Closed You can still see block info with right shift in a zoomed out view in astronaut mode
    702 Closed Beams + cannon scale in the wrong way.
    700 Closed Random elevations on planets do not look aesthetically pleasing
    697 Closed You can buy blueprints when you are not near a shop
    689 Closed Hard to build while moving ship
    664 Closed Scrollbar for block type removal cannot be click-dragged
    662 Closed Setting faction to auto-war on aggression makes it possible to auto-war traders guild
    653 Closed destroying faction home planet cores with missiles
    651 Closed Build mode switch inertia follows into flight mode
    650 Closed Station bugs: Turrets and docked ships are not saved/loaded
    649 Closed Scroll Bar Glitches on Plexstorage
    639 Closed Update conversion recipes for new orange blocks
    638 Closed Add 'Orange Paint' for recipe update
    637 Closed display module re-edit sometimes places blocks
    636 Closed display module not accessible with R while in ship core
    628 Closed Ion system used defensively still causes invulnerability
    625 Closed Non-Block Models On Ships Are Rendering Through Blocks
    624 Closed Display Module: Orientation and position of screen, not correct on ships
    613 Closed Destroy Entity not logging correct target
    602 Closed Build Error with Symmetry
    593 Closed Shields not updating properly when ship takes damage
    582 Closed FAILED ACTIVATING - reenqueueing
    579 Closed Missiles: impact detection often too late
    559 Closed Radius on missiles incorrectly reported
    544 Closed The online players list and Database window (F3) jumps back up.
    526 Closed Ships that are undocked immediately turn to look in the direction they were in right before they docked.
    523 Closed Dumbfire Missles + Overdrive Effect
    519 Closed Line in the middle of planet pentagon
    515 Closed Copy/paste does not auto-connect blocks
    498 Closed Beams Do Not Consume Correct Power
    493 Closed Salvage Cannons get stuck on if power runs out
    484 Closed Damage Beam Incorrectly Calculated.
    474 Closed Switching frequently to inventory/ai config tab causes heavy ship rotation
    465 Closed Damage Pulse system does not gain damage from additional blocks
    455 Closed salvage cannons stay on if you run out of power
    452 Closed "Size of hit indications" option bug
    448 Closed Planet HP can go negative
    444 Closed /shop_restock over fills a shops stock
    439 Closed Ghosted sections of ship after missile strike
    419 Closed Shotgun beams don't work (Beam + D1000)
    417 Closed Beam targeting doesn't match the crosshairs
    413 Closed Several effects broken when used with beams
    403 Closed Connecting new computers to weaponsystems allows quick reloading
    402 Closed Weapon computer as master and slave at the same time
    389 Closed Loading large ships causes tons of lag (400k mass +)
    387 Closed SDBB type missiles and beam d1000 combo tracking docked turrets when zoomed out
    383 Closed Sector border: Missiles fired at an oobject in another sector pass through objects without damaging
    382 Closed Effect module bug: Firering with effect -> inactive
    374 Closed Defense Effects & Docked Entity's and Turrets
    371 Closed Releasing 'fire' button while weapon recharges influences power consumption
    370 Closed Missiles do not do damage to planet cores.
    369 Closed Inadvertent block placement when using ABM sliders
    367 Closed Lighting in ships changes depending on orientation
    364 Closed /ship_info_name requires server/game to restart
    355 Closed Can't hot-swap between turrets/docked ships and main core
    353 Closed /despawn_all ignores anything after underscore
    345 Closed Lock on missiles lock onto targets that are not displayed.
    344 Closed /clear_overheating Functions Erratically
    340 Closed Turrets damage the entity they are docked to and each other
    339 Closed Blocks become non-solid if you build far out on planets
    338 Closed PlexLifter glitches out on planets
    333 Closed Looking directly up/down while in gravity screws up movement controls
    331 Closed Holes to Core in Planet Segments/Tall Cube Mountains - Terrain Generation
    328 Closed Deleting a planet(-core) via /destroy_entity doesn't delete its segments
    312 Closed Beams do not do any damage to planet core
    303 Closed /shop_restock_uid appears to not work
    287 Closed Planet setting changes not updating all segments
    282 Closed Persistant 'locked target' marker
    269 Closed Firing D1000 + Beam slave without modules gives warning about no effect
    254 Closed Block orientations in Avanced Build Mode are not always saved when switching to other blocks
    250 Closed Memory error - Build mode
    230 Closed AMC "Slave" system firing with main, on turrets
    217 Closed Unable to hotkey Docking modules on a ship/station
    201 Closed Feature: Faction home should lock/protect entire planet
    195 Closed /import_sector can ONLY add stuff to sector
    194 Closed Long reload time trigger 'permanent effect' icon
    191 Closed Power Sink
    187 Closed Random Crash when using explosive effect
    186 Closed Ion weapon system reduces damage against shields by half.
    175 Closed Godmode doesn't prevent death from collision damage
    141 Closed Damage Display at range
    135 Closed New weapons - Output point / Control
    134 Closed Antimatter projectiles fire much slower or don't move at all with a slave linkup
    132 Closed Hazard stripes - Orientation mismatch on 'mirror mode'
    118 Closed Explosive Effect
    117 Closed Peirce Effect
    95 Closed Settings defaulting to deprecated textures
    93 Closed Explosions (missiles, etc) cause hit segements(chunks) to not be drawn until they are updates
    90 Closed Symmetry plane graphics not working when ship dimension to small
    78 Closed Obsolete textures still selectable - Oldstyle / cartoonish

     

    Next updates will include more small features, as well as more work on the universe redesign and creature AI.

    Thanks for playing StarMade,
    - schema

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