StarMade Alpha 0.080 released: Planets news

Planets

Planets in StarMade are disk worlds. You can do anything with them, just like Space Stations. There are currently two types of planets: Earth-like and Mars-like. Expect a lot more shapes and types in the future, because a goal of mine was to implement planets as versatile as possible. While it was hard to do, it now makes the generation of types in all possible colors and shapes and atmospheres pretty simple.

While I didn't include automatic gravity for now on planets to get the player accustomed to the new objects, you can still just place down a gravity module on a planet and activate it.

New Artwork & Textures

StarMade for the first time got another person to help me with the artwork. The awesome beetlebear made new textures for every block in the game. He pixel'd every block side by hand in a resolution of 16x16, and will later add detail to blow it up to 64x64, which is what the StarMade engine supports. He also made the amazing teaser for this update and has some great ship building skills. Check out his Falcon on www.star-made.org/ships

Expect a lot more awesome artwork from him in the future.

Performance

The most work of this update went into performance in generating, loading, and displaying blocks. I managed to reduce the time to calculate lighting, loading blocks from disk, and to draw it all by a lot. Also I reduced the memory taken by complex caching tricks. Furthermore, the required graphics memory has been reduced to draw even more at once.

Advanced Lighting

A new lighting model has been developed to support infinite fully colored light emitting blocks. Different colors even mix if they overlap. The best of all is, that in the StarMade engine, light emitting blocks don't cost any performance at all, and an infinite number can be used.

Furthermore, I improved the lighting to calculate a approximate version, if not all blocks to calculate a full lighting are available yet. This prevents the display of grayed out blocks, and makes block loading a lot less noticeable.

Notable Bug Fixes & small features

• Fixed Saving: saving didn't work on some machines (mostly mac OS).
• Fixed physics: fixed bugs that caused the character to walk, jump, or sink into blocks, and improved the overall character physics.
• Fixed physics: blocks could not be added from a few angles.
• Block Modding: all information about blocks is now available to the players in data/config/blockConfig.xml. You can now modify all variables, textures & icons of any block to mod the game. You can even add new blocks!
• Improved Block loading requests: Requests of new segments are now taking a lot less time.
• Fixed block distance display: Implemented a new system for fast segment sorting and improved the display algorithm.

What will come next

I'm very happy to release this version, because it has some features, that I always wanted to include, but though are impossible to realize. After this big update, I will be able to push out the next updates a lot faster, since they won't require to take apart the basics of the game. I will now focus on economy and resources for the next updates. I will also further expand the structure of the universe in sectors -> solar systems -> galaxy -> universe.

Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema