The big news for this week is that Starcom: Unknown Space just hit a lifetime milestone of 100,000 copies sold on Steam!
This was a bit of a surprise for me: two weeks ago, it was at around 75,000. But last weekend it was featured as one of the "Weekend Deals" on Steam. This part wasn't a surprise, I knew it was going to be featured, I just didn't realize how big of a bump that would be. The game had been previously part of a Daily Deal during launch week which produced some additional visibility, but it was a relatively modest boost in comparison. Thanks to everyone for supporting the game!
As a result I've spent more time than usual in the discussion forums this week trying to answer new player's questions, collate new bug reports and feedback, etc. So another big shout-out to players in the forums and discord who've helped answer new players' questions.
Despite the additional community communications, I've made some good progress on a few tasks. As I mentioned last week, there's a new opt-in beta build. Yesterday, I posted an update to that build which fixed a few things and added some QoL enhancements. I haven't heard any major issues introduced by this build; it is compatible with existing saves. Players are welcome to check it out now, with the caveat that there may be bugs.
One of the more time consuming issues was addressing a long-standing bug that prevented some modules from showing thermal effects in the shipyard.
The way ships are rendered in-game is with a custom shader that blends several masking layers together, each multiplied by some color value allowing for faction and player customization. As I talked about in a video entry during EA, there's also an emissive component that handles the glowing for windows and power supplies.
In the shipyard during thermal analysis, this emissive component gets a color added to it to show the heat levels.
At some point I had added an optimized version of the module shader that removed the emissive property for modules that didn't have any glowy-bits. But I forgot that the thermal visualizer was relying on it (it may have been less obvious because most heat generating modules are also emissive).
The simple solution would be to switch all modules to use the emissive version. But this adds a small GPU cost for every pixel of every ship module on screen at all times, even if they never glow outside the shipyard.
Instead I decided to bite the bullet and use a similar trick to the one I used for cloaking ships, where a second material is added but only when needed. Due to the nuances of material stacking, it looks a bit different from the existing thermal analysis. I also added some light mottling for a more entropic appearance.
Additional things worked on this past week:
- Steer to mouse bindable hotkey
- Plasma autofire setting in ship info
- Changes to some AI targeting values
- Changes to plasma autofire: higher tactics skill improves target selection
- Added lower particle count versions of Havok and Shroud bursts if graphics settings below "high"
Until next week!
- Kevin