Star Explorers has been updated!
This is a bigger update than previous ones, with new content and some bug fixes.
First, a couple new features:
- Alien Ruins - Some planets may have the remnants of ancient alien cultures, with ruins to explore and in which to find rare items.
- Dungeons - These anicient ruins may occasionally have cavernous dungeons to explore. Similar to the existing caves, they are the beginning of adding more variety to the types of environments to explore.
- Planet Suns - This is not the finished product, but now you can see a little glowing sun up in the sky when on the surface of a planet. This will be tweaked a lot in the next update, with different sizes and colors depending on the sun's parameters.
Fixes:
- Shadows Flickering Issue - The shadows on planet surfaces were flickering. I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to remove this issue, and I think it is successful. There are still a couple of planet objects that will show the flickering shadow problem, namely the landing craft and any stray treasure chests you find. However other objects like trees, rocks and ancient ruins should no longer cause this problem.
- Landscape Density and Intrusion - Landscape items occasionally created problems by appearing over cave entrances, or intersecting the player's landing craft. This issue should be resolved now, and landscape object density has beed reduced a bit.
As with previous updates, your existing games *should not* be effected. I hope they are not, but let me know if you experience any issues. Any planets you visited before the new features will remain unchanged, but new planets will have a chance to exhibit the new ancient ruin features. The shadow flickering issue should be resolved regardless of which planet you visit.
In other news, I found out that the "Star Missing from Database" issue is not quite gone yet. Reducing the number of stars that form in each sector helped prevent this in some cases, but there are other possible causes for this. I am closing in on the causes, and I will ask anyone who encounters this to consider helping me out by sending me a file from their local Star Explorers folder. I will write an explanation of what to do in the Discussions Tab.