This is a summary of development for New Stars in January. The 'Meta' update focuses on stabilizing and optimizing the game with long-term improvements, while also implementing some features based on player feedback.
Last January focused on reworking core calculations to support a client/server model, but this January focuses on reworking core calculations to use parallel processing for long-term performance improvements.
Improved Ship Pathfinding
Ship movement and pathfinding has been redesigned and is now a lot more stable.
Before
Previously ships often got stuck when moving around planets.
After
Ships now curve around planets instead of following a polygon around the planet, resulting in smoother movement.
Ships also better avoid collisions with other ships in battle, or while in formation.
Multithreaded Optimizations
New multithreaded optimizations are being introduced for heavy CPU calculations with a lot of potential to reduce lag spikes, implementing parallel processing.
Fleet Pathfinding Optimizations
Fleet pathfinding now uses parallel processing and large lag spikes no longer occur when pathfinding across long distances.
Galaxy Size Changes
Huge: Now spawns with 300 stars instead of 500.
Large: Now spawns with 250 stars instead of 400.
Medium: Now spawns with 200 stars instead of 300.
Small: Now spawns with 150 stars instead of 200.
Tiny: Now spawns with 100 stars instead of 150.
Galaxy sizes were way to large, and increments of 100 stars didn't make much sense for the size of the game.
Duel - New Galaxy Size
In addition, a new 50 player map has been added, which is most suitable for 1v1 scenarios or quick games.
What's to come...
There is significant potential with parallel optimization in terms of reducing lag, however it requires an extensive codebase redesign, but I believe it'll be worthwhile. Hence, updates during this period may be slower than they were before.
View all changes at newstarsgame.com/changelog.
New Stars continues to be in active development, so if you would like to inform future updates/improvements you can do so via this form.
Stay tuned for more updates...
Feel free to comment your suggestions below.
🪵 View the Changelog: newstarsgame.com/changelog.
🕹️ Playtest New Stars: adamjr.xyz.
⭐ Wishlist New Stars to support development.
This page is intended to be a development preview, which may not reflect the final state of the game.