Starbase

by Frozenbyte

Week 11 (March 9th – 13th)

Hello everyone! Another week and another post of Starbase progress notes.

A special note: we at Frozenbyte have switched to remote work. It is not unusual for us, but switching to remote work completely does bring some extra arrangements and work. Overall, our work will carry on as normal, so please continue to enjoy the Starbase Progress Notes!

Design

Features

Components and locales configured for the Assembly Job.
Instancing areas added to the Assembly Job workstations.
Spawners and component arrangements configured, so more products can be spawned.
Decals added to the Assembly Job workstation floor, to indicate where to drop the assembled products.
New special ore zones added to the asteroid belt, there are now 13 special ore zones.
Icons added for rails and other objects, missing inventory icons added for missile parts and two plates.
Chat bug and feature fixes: incorrect opening and closing of the context menu, highlights and missing or incorrect elements fixed.

Stations

VIS Headquarters grid slots have been added to mega stations: Capital Imperial A, and Empire Headquarters B.
ShipTransportAreaEntities and ShipSpawnTerminalEntities have been added into Ship Design Workshop.
Vertical Bridges have been added into build.

Spaceship Designer

Total object limit configured so that attachment plates, cables and pipes are excluded from total object count.

Code

Gameplay

An issue where built lot objects were not saved has been fixed.
Grabbing Tool’s invalid pose highlights causing FPS drops have been fixed.
Lot blueprint unload not unloading whole blueprints has been fixed.
Ship despawning is now allowed for a group member if the ship owner is not present.
Client issues when buying large amount of items have been fixed.
Buying more items than inventory has room for has been prevented.
Various aspects related to Grabbing Tool’s pose validity checks have been fixed.
Normals of collisions involving LODs have been fixed.
Blueprint snapping issues have been fixed.

User Interface

CV profile page has been updated to match current design, unused variables deleted.
Bolt Tool has been improved, bolt profile visualization worked on.
Assembly Job has been updated, locales changed.
Feedback Tool’s text inputs and menu structure have been updated.

Audio

Various UI sounds have been added to the game.

Spaceship Designer

Esc menu now has button for exiting test flight mode when in Spaceship Designer.
Asteroid pieces in Mining Job won’t turn to debris anymore.
An issue where ships would not fit into Spaceship Designer has been fixed.

Planets

Grabbing Tool issues with planets have been fixed.
Asteroid rock spawning has been fixed.

Art

Stations

More animated signs have been added to Market Station.
New logos are in the making.
Sign and advertisement gradients have been updated with dithering to reduce banding.
Animated pointing arrows and holographic area have been added to Asteroid Hall.
‘Sell’ advertisement has been made for Market Station.
Skyscraper roof building is underway.
New farLODs are in the making.
New commercial signs are in the making.

Moons and Asteroids

More asteroid clusters have been worked on.
Planet terrain height tests are in the making.

Animations

Small improvements have been made for various animations.
All tools/weapons now have sit animations.
Pistol and tool aim animations have been fixed.
Jumping and landing animations have been polished.

Other

Inventory icons for alloy materials (Velidenum, Armored Velidenum and Bastonium) have been made.
Assets and inventory icons for the current alloy materials have been made.
Job Instance effects have been made for station use.
Floating decals and decal bleeds fixes have been made.
Armorsets: Hammerhead set textures and paintjobs have been polished.
First iteration of the new area indicator cube for certain areas in space is in the making.