Hello players,
The Schine Team has been hard at work since TwitchCon, and we are super excited to finally be able to show you what we’ve been working on!
Side Note: We will be jumping back into our planned 2 week release cycle schedule, with our next release scheduled for November 6th.
Transporters
A long awaited feature is finally here! Transporters! Transporters allow you to instantly warp between transporter platforms within a short distance (the current sector, and any adjacent sectors). Be careful though! Using a transporter between ships will temporarily bring down shields on both the sending and receiving ships. If shields drop from transporters, they will recharge back up at the ship’s set shield recharge speed.
Much like other systems within StarMade, the transporter system comes with a transporter computer and transporter modules. The modules are simply pads that you stand on, while the computer is used to control and activate the module. Make sure that you can either reach the computer while standing on the module, or have someone manage your transporter room. Logic will be added to the system in a coming update.
Destination setting can be done from within the computer. All available destinations will become available. Any transporters that are located within the current ship or any of its docks will be available as a destination. Any transporters that are on other entities located either in the current sector or adjacent sectors, can also be made available by setting them to “public/faction access”. Be aware though that upon warping to a transporter on another entity, the shields of both entities will be dropped and have to be recharged! So never leave your transporters open; or you might find your shields dropped or a boarding party invading your vessel.
Transporter Beacon
The transporter beacon is a personal tool that enables the user to warp to a transporter as long as the vessel is in vicinity. Just use its beam to mark the transporter controller you want to be warped to, then open your inventory, right click on the item, and hit ‘transport’ to be warped to that transporter. This is very handy for exploration without a proper way to get back. In a future update there will also be a ship beam that lets the player set a manual target for a transporter.
Activation Gates
Activation Gates work just like Warp Gates with the difference being that instead of warping, they will emit a ‘true’ signal when a ship is passing through. This is only activated on actual passing of an entity. This feature will help for logic with much bigger structures where the trigger area blocks start to lag.
Race Gates
This is a feature I wanted to do for some time. It seems a bit random but is part of a bigger picture. There are most likely several bugs with the race gates, however they should be mostly functional for basic racing.
To create a race track, you will have to create a chain of Gates. These gates can be on the same or multiple entities. To link gates, the same method as the warp gates is used: the marker beam. Right click with the marker beam on the computer of one destination gate and left click on the gate you want to create the link from. Continue to do this process for each Gate in the chain, linking the Race Gate Computer to the next gate’s computer.
Then you can create a race by activating the Race computer with ‘R’. The computer you use is going to be the starting gate of that race. Players can join either from the computer itself (if it’s public access), or from the menu on the top (messages/quests) if you have any dialog open.
To start the race, you have to link from an activation module/button to the race computer you used to create the race (the starting gate). The race will start when a true signal is received in that race computer, so it’s possible for the builder to set up logic count downs and other mechanics that all racers can see.
The race creator can even set laps and buy-in money which is then paid out to the first 3 finishers. We will keep an eye on how this works in the real world and tweak the settings if needed in a future update.
Raycasting Optimizations, aka a lot less lag from extensive mining
Planet eating miners that in the past brought down a server in seconds now only create a fraction of the lag they did before.
Database update to get rid of block data for found stations
Databases now load the NPC stations without copying them to the database as long as they are not modified. This means a huge decrease of database growth.
Admins can retroactively apply the feature to their db (as it only is applied to newly spawned stations) with the startup parameter:
-cleanuptransient
PLEASE NOTE: Depending on size, this can take hours (we are talking 48h+ for 200gb. This will most likely be optimized with the next update), as the program looks through every file looking for similarities and header matches.
Also PLEASE BE SURE TO CREATE A BACKUP before doing this.
Asteroid replenish server option
There is now an option to periodically let the server replenish asteroids in the server cfg. To trigger, a sector will have to be unloaded and completely empty. If the time of the time it last replenish is beyond the waiting period set in the config, the sector will regenerate. This will help bridge the time until a better system takes its place.
Bug Fixes
One bug that had haunted me for a long time is (hopefully) finally fixed. Players should no longer fall out of moving ships upon sector change.
A full list of bug fixes can be found in our news section here.
Next update
As noted above we’ll be returning to our planned 2-week release schedule. This will help make development a lot more predictable for the community and especially servers. To get us back on schedule our next release will be later this week and will be addressing a lot of bug fixes and performance optimizations that come out of this release.
Thank you for playing StarMade,
- The Schine Team.