Time flies so fast.



So yesterday I said we’d make speech bubbles prettier. We worked on it and now they look more or less like this:



still needs a little bit of tweaking positioning/pixel ratio wise. But I think they’re far more bearable now.

We’ve also been working on NPCs, giving them new behaviors and making them all around much smarter and more interesting.

NPCs spawn really nicely now too. They spawn in packs that looks very natural. More importantly they know where they shouldn’t spawn.

We’ve also been working on getting the ship upgrades to work nice and seamlessly so you don’t need to reorder any of your decoration when upgrading.





Until tomorrow!

A small one tonight guys,

We’re working on a bunch of things I can’t really post too many screenshots of because they’d be outright spoilers.

But just to keep you in the loop.

The tricky final polishing on the Speech bubbles is being finished up.

Work on flying NPC behavior is ongoing, as well as additional work on various behavior scripts.

A ton of unique ore based weapons have been created and more are coming. A full set of weaponry for each race at each tier is being produced. That’s 60 ore based weapons per race. Not including other uniques.

Biome work is constantly on going.

The avian tomb generator is being fleshed out a bit more.

The transition between ship upgrades is being worked on.

A whole bunch of cooking recipes are being designed.

We’re beginning work on the in game option menu.

and a bunch more stuff

Here’s a random screenshot:

Hello guys,

Today we finally got the speech bubbles nicely finished up. They’ve taken a little while because they’re much more complex than they look.

Now they’re automatically arranged nicely so you can easily follow a conversation, even between a lot of different people.



We’ve also been working a bunch on the games intro sequences. These are comic sequences with narration that set the scene for each race.

An example of some of the art:





Legris is amazing!

We continue to work on NPC stuff that I can’t really show off yet.

A lot of work is going on with cooking and various recipes and meals you can make.

Biome and terrain work is ongoing, I think I’m going to show off a bit more about how the terrain works tomorrow.



Also a thank you to everyone sending us narration auditions. It’s going to take a little while for us to go through them all.

Hi guys,

So today we put the finishing touches on in game chat with character expressions.

When you type now your characters lips will move. Typing in various different ways or using emotes like :o or ;) will cause your character to mirror those emotes.

Here’s a terribad video of it in action:
http://youtu.be/YLFO2Zq1X2A
You probably want to watch it in 720p full screen, to actually see the animations.

Work has been going on with the art for mechs / other vehicles.

They’re starting to look really nice:





We’ve also been working on adding more ‘Terrain features’. These are small portions of terrain that make use of our dungeon system code to place very interesting set pieces on the terrain. They blend in nicely with existing terrain and there are hundreds of them.

Here’s an example of a terrain feature, a natural bridge:

Terrain features look different depending on the planet they appear on. We wanted a way to create natural structures the terrain gen would struggle to create naturally.

A really short one today folks,

Today we’ve been swamped with dealing with webserver stuff, so we didn’t get as much done as we usually do.

That said, we’ve now got a whole bunch of nifty functions to use in the intro comics, zooming, fading, that sort of thing.

As part of the flying NPCs update, Kyren has begun adding some nifty functionality to player physics that will allow us to do some really neat powerups.

We’ve got tons of mechs being produced by our artists. There will be at least 1 mech and 1 hoverbike per race.

We’re working on the in game options menu, which we haven’t bothered with for a long time (the defaults are good!) but we figured we should finally get it done.

A lot of costumes and clothes are going in, some of which terrify me..

We changed up the travel sounds, now theres more of a thunder boom as you enter hyperspace

Sorry for the lack of screenshots! Anything I screenshot for today would be spoilery.

Might be another sort of boring update today, sorry!

Today has been mostly about technical improvements and getting ready for things.

Omni is working on several things right now, he should be finishing up the Options menu and getting all the back end stuff tidied up with that. He’s also still doing some work to get ship transitions working properly, which turned out to be a pretty big technical challenge. The details are a little hairy, but essentially we have special Worlds just for things like ships, and transitioning a live world between one ship and another ship without causing all sorts of chaos is a bit tricky! Getting all that straightened out turned out to involve both Omni and myself, but it seems like it’s all straightened out now and ready to finish up.

Bartwe has been hard at work fixing bugs and making improvements to the code that runs our intro comics and splash screen. He’s also made emotes configurable and moddable in data and he and the artists have been hard at work making more emotes and fixing timing and things like that.

Both Omni and Bartwe are doing lots of GUI improvements and fixes that are required for later GUI work. GUI work is generally way harder than you would think it should be and kind of boring and thankless, so everyone really appreciates all the work they’ve put in to making the GUI well.. work!

I’ve been working on a couple of things also, like doing the big technical improvement that allows Omni to dynamically change ship structures, scripting flying NPCs, and of course The Big Physics Change. The Big Physics Change was necessary to get flying NPCs working properly, and like Tiy said, will allow us to be a lot smarter and more capable about giving the Player upgrades, handling vehicles, and things like that. Now, finally everything in the game has been moved from the old “approach” based physics to new physics with actual mass, force, friction and all that good stuff. Planets with different gravity levels are also back in now, and this time they work without bugs! Also, by by turning the player’s mass way up, the air friction way down, and the bounce amount to 0.9 you can make bouncy castle mode :D

The artists have been doing their thing, writing more recipes, drawing more costumes, adding emotes, and generally doing artsy things that I’m utterly incapable of doing.

So no exciting updates today, but it’s all important stuff! More to come tomorrow!

Greeting citizens,

It is very late, and the server maintenance has been delayed. Also it seems that the daily update falls to me today.

I generally keep to my coding cave, so I’m going to infer what everyone was doing from the git updates (24 commits today), because I’m kinda just winging this right now.

For what I did today, I added another widget type to our gui toolkit. It’s a slider bar (whee). That’s pretty boring. It’s also something that probably should have already been in the toolkit. But because I wrote most of it, I have no one but myself to complain to. :X

I also standardized the expected name of the json map in the assets. It used to be that each layout configuration was expected to have a random different name from nearly every other configuration, so I took some time to standardize each of the names. It’s not a big change, but it’s one that will have modders thanking us later about. (Or at very least, not being confused, annoyed, and cursing us and our firstborn.)

Armagon, Bartwe, and Tiy made several commits today concerning cinematics. Work is continuing on that, mostly getting the first one in is the biggest challenge, because it comes with developing the system. After we get the first one in the 2nd, 3rd, etc. go much faster. There’s still more work to make cinematics a “thing” for in game, though.

A Helper Elf pushed a change that includes several minor changes to many items that I was completely unaware existed within the game. Like, one off costume sort of things, pretty cool! Horsemask? Horsemask.

It looks like Kyren is continuing her work on enemies, she made a small commit to tweak some behavior of the smaller bipedal enemies. I assume there is more that she simply hasn’t committed yet. As I’m actually currently at her home, I could probably snoooooop her computer and find out, but I’ll be good. Because that’s not cool, yo.

3 days without a screenshot? There’s no way I’d let that happen, so here’s something random.

Is this in beta yet?

not yet. hopefully soon

Hi guys

A whole lot of our day was taken up with getting the website steady on a new host today.

Let us know if it’s faster/slower or if you have any other problems with it.

Kyren finished her big physics change and will have some fun things to show on that front soon.

I spent an absurd amount of time (12 hours?) tweaking intro cinematics.

We didn’t want to simply load a video, that’s always very obvious and ugly.

So we have an in game system that allows us to create comic style cinematics, getting all the cinematic timings right (by tenths of a second) however requires quite some patience.

Omni is putting the finishing touches on the options menu.

Legris is working hard on providing utterly beautiful art for the intros.





On an entirely different note, by popular demand (and because it’s funny). We’ve decided to have a cosplay competition.

It’ll be up on the forums soon, you can post your best (or worst) attempts at Starbound cosplay.

And we’ll pick 10 for a free copy of the game + getting your name in the game as an NPC.

If you want to win, either make sure your costume is really awesome or really embarrassing.