something something advanced science something magic...
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Starbound Beta Thread - Begins December 4th!
- Thread starter Retro
- Start date
something something advanced science something magic...
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
JonnyKtyler
Member
I haven't played since the earlier betas, been waiting for the quest system to be implemented and stuff, so I'm sure i'll put in many many hours on this release. Pretty pumped to play Starbound again.
"What you call magic we call science..."
"i come from a land where they are one and the same..."
FleetingFlowAir
Member
The debt will never be fulfilled.
Ingueferroque
Banned
After being surprised by how well Terraria controlled on Vita, I'm excited about the prospect of handheld Starbound. But I just don't see it happening.
I look forward to trying out the new melee system.
A slot machine would be great by the way, I was so addicted to the casino in Dragon Quest VII
I look forward to trying out the new melee system.
A slot machine would be great by the way, I was so addicted to the casino in Dragon Quest VII
I am looking forward to Starbound on Vita. However, since update 1.2, Terraria has significant slowdown on the surface. It does control well, though. Still hoping.
That's incredibly sad.They said the game would come out in 2013 initially, so no, its not really your fault.
Yeah, it needs to be stated that nobody is really blameless here; the devs were insanely optimistic or overconfident when giving dates, which is something all game developers learn pretty quickly not to do (i.e. why Blizzard is notorious for "when it's ready"-type comments and Valve just never says anything). They've apologized a bunch of times for that (and other things). The community, in so much as you can point to the group as a whole, generally behaves well but with all large groups there tends to be a few rabble-rousers who whip everyone into an angry frenzy every few months. The vocal minority is pretty common in gaming too, so nothing new here.
Both sides of the coin are interesting, however because of how this is a small indie dev. On the Chucklefish side, it's like watching the big AAA developers learning their lessons in real-time and on smaller scale, while on the community side the speed at which things turned ugly was alarmingly fast.
Weltall Zero
Member
The exact same, although I might have played more than 60 hours
.As for optimism, I see it everyday in this field (I myself am pessimistic or 'realistic' when it comes to time estimations). I cut them a lot of slack because their game is ridiculously ambitious and they're managing the incredible feat of actually delivering, with an amount of grace and style and plain old beauty that boggles my mind every time.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
The exact same, although I might have played more than 60 hours
I have about 60 hours played too. It would have been MUCH more but they announced the progression overhaul and such and I liked the concept of the new system SO much more that I decided to stop playing and wait for it. I just had no idea it would take a year to patch in, LOL.
I have over 160 hours played with Terraria, and I have total and complete confidence that my hours with Starbound will easily eclipse that number. Civ 5 is my most played game on Steam at 230 hours, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Starbound someday challenge it for my top played game. We'll find out someday....
Shining Sunshine
Banned
According to Steam, I played for 1496 hours lol.
I probably only played like 500 hours.
I probably only played like 500 hours.
cheststrongwell
my cake, fuck off
Yeah, mine shows a lot more than I actually played. I left the launcher open a few times.
Weltall Zero
Member
Same, plus the server I left running for me and the missus.
Sunshine's 'only' 500 hours, heh.
Shining Sunshine
Banned
Yeah I loved building stuff. Takes a while to get material legitimately.
I'm pretty sure my ship is gone.
Yeah, and until they implement / someone creates a mapping program, there's no way to copy builds from one map to another like we could with Terraria.
You will be happy to know that building a ship like that got easier and cooler, as you can now position propellers and such on floors, ceilings and walls instead of just floors now. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone builds...
... I may already have sketches of large projects already waiting to be built...
InfiniteBento
Member
That's so damn awesome ^
Wow, regardless of how rough the release cycle of this game was, that image makes me want to drop everything and start playing Starbound again.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Yep, me too. Just hold fast, the big update will be here before we know it, and it will be worth the wait.
I'm almost glad it's not coming until January, that gives me time to play Elite Dangerous and the new KSP update. Because I know that once Starbound does get the big update it is going to consume all of my game time for a very long while.
Hey guys! glad to see all the positivity here. We know the wait was long but it's nice to see our hard work has been appreciated!
We're aiming to push the release to unstable branch just before our office officially closes for Christmas, allowing us time to fix any showstopper bugs and other issues. Then in the new year we're aiming to push that build for a proper stable release! excited to finally get it out the door, although we still have a bunch of work to do..
We're aiming to push the release to unstable branch just before our office officially closes for Christmas, allowing us time to fix any showstopper bugs and other issues. Then in the new year we're aiming to push that build for a proper stable release! excited to finally get it out the door, although we still have a bunch of work to do..
can you give a rough estimate, maybe a percentage, of the winter release that may make it in?
Train of Midnight
Banned
Do all planets in this game have the same gravity? Can you modify gravity in your ship?
Planets have different degrees of gravity. Not sure about the ship.
No shit? That's a great touch.
Yeah, and the upcoming update will let you see the gravity levels, along with a load of other handy info when you select a planet in the map.
I poked one of the nightlies for a while and was impressed with all the different things. I just hope performance is better in unstable/stable. Any place with lots of objects starts to make the game chug quite a bit. But it's always been like this for me, so maybe it's just my weak computer.
Train of Midnight
Banned
They should let you turn off gravity in your ship. That would be fun
InfiniteBento
Member
Can people who paid for this please get the alpaca outfit because damn.
I want it.
I want it.
KCroxtonJr
Member
It's definitely not your computer, I have 8gb ram, a fx 8350 and a 660Ti and I can't get a steady 60fps at all. I'm not even sure what's causing the performance issues, just running around (no enemies on screen or anything) the framerate drops into the 40's constantly. Run into a town or a dungeon with lots of enemies and it REALLY starts to chug. And this is at the mid zoom level too, setting it to the furthest zoom level makes it much worse.
Really hoping they sort out the performance, because all the new stuff I've seen in the nightly build so far is great, but I really just can't deal with the bad performance.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Yeah, the amount of awesome things added to the nightlies is impressive actually. Improves the game by a lot. It's been unstable and buggy though, so I'm excited to hopefully be playing a stable version soon.
I like this getting science in to games is awesome.
It's unfortunate that the environmental and hunger elements have been simplified and stripped out, respectively. The idea of surviving in absurdly inhospitable environments (ultra hot, ultra cold, acidic/radioactive atmospheres, crushing gravity, etc.) was one of the cool "survival" aspects of the game that has gradually been whittled away.
The hunger aspect especially bugs me because the early game is hitting all the right notes for that kind of gameplay; you're on a wrecked ship with no fuel, orbiting an unknown planet and all you have are the clothes on your back, a matter manipulator, a flashlight and a rudimentary weapon. But you can't starve at all and food is now just a boring buff system.
I'd much rather have hunger be an element you gradually automate; when you're in a hostile environment food is hard to come by, but as your technology level improves food becomes a non-issue. Start with hunting and gathering, which would transition to agriculture. As your agriculture develops new, more nutritious crops, you have to eat less. Cooking better meals would do the same. Eventually there could be technology that makes eating almost a non issue (something like Star Trek's replicators) or removes it entirely (suit tech that automatically absorbs nutrients from the environment).
I can't say I care for it, but I'm fully aware that 90% of my time will be spent building so I'm in no position to complain. I guess I just like the idea of a little hard science in Starbound, but I can see how it could interfere with gameplay (which is more important).
Train of Midnight
Banned
I'm 100% positive this will be added back to the game in a hardcore-mode, either officially or though mods.
Yeah, when they announced the change to hunger they specifically said they'd enable it for some kind of additional mode, so I'm not worried. I just think the narrative of the game sets it up with no payoff, and the progression system could be leveraged to incorporate it into the base game.
As for mods, I'm sure I'm at odds with like 99% of gamers, but I strongly dislike mods, especially when they're used as an excuse for how to 'fix' a game that shouldn't be broken (not saying that's the case here). The fact that every player may have completely different and potentially incompatible mods irks me, especially for a game like Starbound where we'll theoretically all jump online together at some point or another.
Train of Midnight
Banned
The mod support by the developers is actually quite impressive. They bend over backwards to make it simple and effective to change the game how you like it. And compatibility is going to be far less of a problem than something like Skyrim, for example, based on how much simpler the game is.
We're pushing to unstable branch!
http://playstarbound.com/the-more-you-know-about-the-unstable-update/
http://playstarbound.com/the-more-you-know-about-the-unstable-update/
Hey there!
Were pushing the changes mentioned in our recent trailer to the unstable branch tonight rejoice! Anyone whos been playing the nightly builds wont see a huge difference, but anyone who makes the switch from stable to unstable will see some pretty massive changes.
So heres what you need to know about the unstable update, starting with
How to Switch to the Unstable Branch
Theres a handy tutorial right here about how to switch to the unstable or nightly branch of the beta. Be sure to follow the instructions to switch to unstable.
World/Character File Compatibility
If you choose to switch to the unstable branch, please know that your characters and worlds will not yet be compatible with the latest version of the game. Your old characters and worlds will still be there, but the unstable branch will use a different storage location than the stable branch for the time being, while we work out how to upgrade old characters.
We will try to maintain save file compatibility within unstable as much as possible, but it will depend on what sort of changes we have to make during unstable, so we cant make any promises.
If you are currently running nightly, then you probably already know how everything works already. FYI The unstable branch will use a storage_unstable directory while we work on compatibility with stable.
Known Issues:
- Many progression quests arent final, some are placeholders for future missions
- Combat balance is still WIP
- Performance issues, particularly in dense areas like dungeons and the outpost
- Background parallaxes have problematic transitions between world layers, e.g. oceans
- Pixel costs and rewards not yet balanced
- Interface windows (containers, AI, etc) can remain open after switching worlds or moving away from the triggering object
- Cooking recipes for tier 5 and 6 crops need to be implemented
- Crops sometimes get out of sync when grown on ship
- Enemy hit/death sounds sometimes fail to play
- Some errors in enemy movement and pathfinding
- Rare crash when removing items from containers, appears as (InventoryException) Not allowed to discard stack when locked.
- The launcher, on some peoples machines, will spew dll errors about missing ordinals. This is not fatal however, and the launcher will still work after you close them.
- And a whole lot more (probably)
Well keep everyone posted as we make more updates and plans evolve, but thank you all for being so patient! Have fun!
I think I just have a personal bugaboo about mods because I've picked up a lot of games where you find a really awesome, useful mod and then the developer updates the game and the modder just never gets around to updating it for the new version.
The Starbound team has been MUCH more supportive of the mod community than the games that left such a bad taste in my mouth, so I'm sure we'll be fine, but would still prefer as many options be built into the game as possible.
Yep, was just about to post about it. For people who haven't been in the nightlies, this is gonna rock your socks off.
thanks for the update, will check it out momentarily.
*edit* i started on a nice world, with an abandoned mine.outpost sprawling right under world spawn. i have so much to explore, and i really don't want a wipe...
Yep, waiting for stable release before I make the server live again.
CarbonatedFalcon
Member
Will probably get back into this a bit when the stable update rolls out. Played something like 12 hours and haven't really touched it in a year. Was just too empty, I guess, back then.
