Hello players,

This is one of the bigger updates as shipyards are finally done. Their main purpose is to create a bridge between normal game play and a new creative mode. But it has a lot more functions than that. You can automatically construct or deconstruct ships, repair ships according to a design, test out ideas, and much more.





Creative Mode for Blocks

Before we talk about shipyards themselves, we shortly want to talk about a long anticipated feature: Creative Mode.

This can be either in the game startup settings (below Tutorial) for single player, or via the admin command ‘/creative_mode <playername> <true/false>’ for multiplayer.

This mode adds an extra tab in your inventory with unlimited amounts of every block type in the game.

In future updates the sorting option as well as the assignment to the hotbar will improve, as at the moment the nicely sorted blocks quickly get unsorted when used.

In this absolute creative mode you can also drop as many items as you want into other inventories like chests.







Shipyards

Now for the main part of this update. Shipyards are now available for stations.

They come in 3 blocks:

The shipyard computer, from where the shipyard is controlled and managed.

The shipyard module, which defines the shipyard physically

The core anchor, which defines where ships in a shipyard will be docked.

How to create a shipyard

In future updates, build mode will be enhanced not only for shipyards but also to give a visual guide on how to construct different systems. At the moment, the shipyard will give feedback in the form of text raising from the shipyard computer or the modules if it was constructed incorrectly.

Shipyards are the most advanced entity in terms of structure next to warp gates. It has to be built as a series of arcs.

So here is a guide on how to construct your first shipyard:

Place down the shipyard computer and select it. (All shipyard modules have to be connected to it) Place down an arc, or a U shape. Both end points have to be in one straight line. Place down another arc that looks exactly like the first one to create a corridor. (The maximal distance from arc to arc is currently 50 blocks, but it is configurable in the blockBehaviorConfig.xml) Place down exactly one shipyard core anchor anywhere in the corridor. You can orientate this block in all 24 directions like a rail block.

And you are done already.

The size of ship you may dock is unlimited but the shipyard will not work if the length of the yard is too small (the other dimensions don’t matter as long as the docked ship doesn’t overlap with any block except the anchor).

Keep in mind that docking your ship will put its core directly into the anchor. There are plans for the functionality to be able to add multiple anchors to serve multiple shaped ships.

Designs

Ship designs are a new type of meta items. They are bound to a concept of a ship and can be loaded in shipyards to edit or to construct.

Shipyard functionality

A shipyard has several features. To access them, just hit ‘R’ (Activate/Open) on the shipyard, and press the “Place Order” Button.

Here you can choose from several commands depending on the shipyard’s current state (e.g. if a ship is docked or not)





Create New Design

This will create a new design meta item, and load its content into the shipyard. A core will be placed exactly where the shipyard anchor is. A design is just a projection, so while you are able to edit it in the shipyard, you are not able to undock it. The huge advantage of editing a design is that you can edit a ship in creative mode.

Unload Design

This will unload the currently loaded design so the shipyard can be used for other tasks. This can also be done by right clicking on the currently loaded design meta item.

Load Design

You can either choose a design from a dropdown, or you can right click on any design that is currently placed in the inventory of the shipyard to load it.

Construct Design

This will create a real ship from the currently loaded design. It will calculate the required resources and collect them from the shipyard inventory. You can also activate item pulling for the shipyard to acquire blocks it needs from inventories that are connected to the shipyard computer. Once a ship is done constructing, you can undock it and use it like any other normal ship.

Test out Design

If you want to test out your loaded design before collecting the resources to build it, you can use this order. It will teleport you and the design into a virtual test sector. In future updates the test sector will contain several targets as well as an option to spawn in AI waves.

Create Blueprint from Design

You can also create a normal blueprint catalog entry from a loaded design.





Deconstruct

This can be used if a normal ship is docked to the shipyard. You have the option to either deconstruct a ship completely, or to create a design from it. All blocks the ship consists of (as well as the content of all chests) will be placed into the shipyard inventory and connected chests. All items that have no room to be placed in the inventory, are going to spawn in space beside the shipyard.

Repair

This option restores a ship according to a design and places any leftovers into the inventories/space. In future versions, an option will be added to assign a design directly to a ship’s core to make repairing even more streamlined.

Future Functions

There are many more tools we want to add to shipyards, including being able to move a ship’s core, and connection to the logic and rail system for automatic deployment.

Create Docking Tool

There is also a new feature in the advanced build mode. You can now create a new dock in any shape and orientation. Just click on the button, select a rail surface to spawn it on, place the core and select its orientation with the mouse wheel.





Optimizations

There were some optimizations in physics and rails to decrease the resting load of structures with a lot of them. Also, the collision routines of anything non cube (wedges, players, etc) has been improved.

Furthermore, planet generation has been optimized a bit so it will be faster and put less total load on the cpu.

Graphics

Continued textural improvements include:



Cleaner PlexDoor texture.

Cleaner Metal Mesh texture.

Revised computer back face.

Revised Effect module tessellation.

Revised Factory textures to fit the same theme as Shipyard blocks.

New Motherboard textures.

New Circuit textures.

New Charged Circuit textures.

New Decorative Fan texture.

New Shipyard Computer / Shipyard Module / Shipyard Core Anchor textures.





In preparation for coming graphical updates, we have performed a full overhaul of our normal maps and it’s shader for more accurate results. Accurate texture padding has also been added to avoid unsightly seams on block edges.



For more information and samples see this post; http://starmadedock.net/threads/kupus-thread.839/page-38#post-221795





Bugfixes + small config change

There have also been some bugfixes like a softlock in the tutorial, and several crash fixes.

Power penalty has been reduced for missiles (10% -> 2.5%) and disabled for damage pulse.

Server admins can also now choose to not let players spawn directly from blueprints (mostly interesting for Role Playing or servers with harder settings). Also, it’s now possible to combat heavily modified blueprints by enabling a check in the server config that will remove any ship that has disallowed blocks on it (e.g.jump gate on a ship)

Here is a list of other fixes:

Starmade (Private) | T488 Ships that are piloted dissapear and eject the pilot when pilot fires weapons

Starmade | T483 Nullpointer with "T" weapons menu

Starmade | T467 Highlighting/selecting sectors on galaxy map

Starmade (Private) | T450 Fix for entity-flag exploit does not affect already created entities.

Starmade | T444 Turrets shoot at targets out of range in "Selected Target" mode

Starmade | T417 Moving stations as admin by using /change_sector or /change_sector_for breaks territory claims

Starmade | T400 Warpgate faction issue

Starmade | T398 Ships can instantly use the cloaker or jammer after they have been revealed by a scanner

Starmade | T313 JVM Crash detected: incorrect dialog

Starmade (Private) | T225 radarjammer pirate exploit

Starmade | T215 Players on docked rail entities are left behind during sector changes or jumps

Starmade | T14 mouse sensitivity sync

That’s all for now. If something is is broken, please report it and a hotfix will attempt to fix it as soon as possible.





Thanks for playing StarMade,

- schema and the Schine team