I have just updated the beta again, this time to version 1.7.
It's getting much closer to the official 2.0 version, which I hope to have ready before the end of the year. There are a lot of things to talk about with this update, so let's start with the biggest features.
New Main Menu
- The Main Menu looks exactly the same, but the functionality has been updated significantly
- Now you can access the main menu while you are playing the game, it no longer restarts the game
- From the main menu, you can start a new game, or load a different saved game
- Note, if you try to start a new game or load an old game, you will still lose your current progress
- There is a warning that will appear before you do this, so pay attention
- If you are in your ship, you can always save the game before doing these things
Video Options
- The new video options panel does actually require you to restart the engine after you make changes
- This is to (hopefully) prevent some of the graphics and video problems people were facing with the old version
- Note: It is still recommended to play Star Explorers at the default 1280 x 720 resolution if possible
- If that's not possible on your monitor, try to keep the width at 1280, and adjust the height to match one of your monitor's available sizes
Star Chart
- The Star Chart has had a big overhaul
- It looks pretty much the same as before, but a lot of the functionality has been updated
- You should no longer experience the shaking camera when zooming in and out with the scroll wheel
- Hovering over sectors, stars, planets and other clickable objects will cause the mouse cursor to turn red, just like in your spaceship viewport
- There was a problem when the camera was low and a different sector appeared behind stars or planets, causing them to be un-clickable, that should be resolved now
- Clicking on "Planets" with the mothership selected caused planets to appear around the mothership (in the chart only) this should no longer occur
Flex Suit Upgrade
- The flex suit is available only as a blueprint for those daring explorers who are determined enough to find it
- This flex suit originally allowed the player to move unhindered underwater
- It still has this feature, but it is also a much more powerful suit overall
Bug Fixes and Other Improvements
- Alien spaceships on planets used to sometimes intersect with the larger landscape objects, causing aliens and their cache boxes to appear inside of the larger rocks or trees - this should no longer happen
- Keys for ancient ruins were somehow always "Emerald" - now different kinds of keys should be available
- Sizes of items dropped have been fixed
- Selling space suits will now get you some cash, previously space suits displayed a selling price, but did not actually increase the player's money when sold
- Storage caches are now saved at the time a planet or cave is loaded, previously these were only saved when leaving a location, so if you died or the game was shut down, those caches and their items would be gone the next time you visited
- Transferring items to your ship's storage should now update the amount in storage (it actually just causes the detail panel to disappear, but when you click it the quantity should be updated)
- Closing an alert panel with weapon drawn should no longer cause your weapon to fire
- Your ship can now only be repaired while you are aboard
- A big terrain bug was fixed, but it would only have effected players who changed their "max terrain size" to lower than 14
- A game crashing bug was fixed when enamy UFOs were present and player warped to another system
- Another game crashing bug was fixed when asteroids were destroyed, but player did not pick up the space ore before warping to another system
- Planet textures are now purged during every warp, preventing RAM from being over-used, along with random crashes that may have occurred as a result (Note this would only effect players who warped to multimple systems without ever landing on a planet, as landing on a planet would also purge all the planet textures)
- The close button on the trade dialogue with aliens now works
Also, don't forget to vote for Star Explorers for Indie of the Year on IndieDB!
https://www.indiedb.com/games/star-explorers