This universe is coming to a close. Scientists predict the full collapse will occur on the 7th of May at 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 17:00 GMT).
Earthforce would like to remind you to pack your stations, recover your drones and for the paranoid, dock your bots before the collapse.
We hope to see you on the other side!
Tracked down and fixed weird crash issue relating to Control bots.
Preperation for Christmas to go live in a few days.
I’ve been working on some brand new christmas content! I think everyone will like it a lot, there are 11 new gals and a boss that scales based on how many people are attacking it (and everyone will get personal loot).
Worked on some lots more pretty artwork which you’ll be seeing in game soon, as well as some cool sounding items
The Astro-Santa letter competition is now drawing to a close with just a few hours left, so if you want to be in with a chance to win, you better send your letter to Astro-Santa!
You can find out more about this here.
The Scientists have been at the eggnog, getting their party on early and in their drunkness have missed the prediction of the universe’s imposion. Fortunately, being the time of Christmas, Astro-Santa’s Astro-Elves have been hard at work making all the presents as well as conducting research for new ideas! Amongst their research findings the Astro-Elves have learnt that the universe is becoming unstable and have predicted that it’ll eventually suffer a total collapse at 540 on 9th of Aer, 153rd Grand Age of the Elves. However, due to also being drunk the Elves have made a mistake and actually the date of the collapse will be around 14 Earth days later, making the demise of our universe occur on January 16th, 2016 at 1PM EST.
Astro-Santa is soon returning to our universe to dash our systems with his presents. He’s made his list and checked it twice but he doesn’t know what to get anyone?!
Can you help out Astro-Santa by writing him a letter claiming what you want?
Yes, it’s time for our annual Astro-Santa Letter competition.
The challenge is simple and easy to do, write a letter to send to Astro-Santa and submit it to us. Your letter doesn’t even have to be a letter, it could be a song you’ve made up, a poem or haiku about Christmas. As usual bonus points for apt references to Star Sonata.
When the competition ends, we’ll choose a few of our favourites, depending how many entries there are (maximum of 5), and award the players who submitted them. Winning players will get their letter added to the game with a corresponding mission to go with it and a collection of items will be given to each player too.
** Update **
The issue has been found and fixed. There may still be other crashes out there so keep an eye out. But right now it appears to be stable. Thank you to the players who sent me informations on how to reproduce the previous crash.
The patch brought a new crash that is unfortunatly very hard to track down. I am currently working on it but knowing the cause would go a long way into fixing it fast.
If any player think its crashing on a specific action they are doing, please head on livetest.starsonata.com port 3030 and do the action here. Both servers are running on the same code currently, if you do crash livetest with the same action, please send me a forum pm detailing the action so that i can reproduce and fix it quickly (pm Jey).
Offcourse im hoping to find the source of the issue using the crash data, but its one of those weird crash that can take an unknown amount of time to track down without something to narrow down on.
If you have problems with some skins and ships not appearing correctly after the most recent server patch, you can go to the following post in the forums with instructions on how it can be hopefully fixed.
Still working on fixing the issues on the current beta client, progressing steadily but still unable to give an eta, could be now or could be this weekend. There is a full patch in preparation, date will be announced once it’s certain. I also did some slight tweaks to our database configuration to reduce the website slowdown whenever the team scores are updated.
Not a lot of interesting stuff going on in my world of late, but I’ve got some good stuff on my plate for next week!
I have had a horrible frustrating week of no internet! But despite that, I managed to fix the sentinel spawner issue in Trials of Adum. After it’s patched in you’ll be able to do the trials without being auto aggro to the sentinels.
Moving!
Working on a new look for the new account dialog.
What are your favorite aspects of Star Sonata? Such as combat, building bases or the colony/ruin system.
Col Legno: I like having alts on everyone’s teams and know peoplg. Game politics and social interactions.
Jey: trading and politics
Jeff: building bases
Ryan: bases and teams
Blue Dwarf: Story, lore and universe generation and teams in the days when I was more active.
Anything more you can tell us about the Steam launch, understanding you cant reveal everything now. Such as when it happens will be it be something mid-uni or timed to align with a uni reset? Are servers prepared to handle that big of a influx of new players in the Nexus? Any big changes or other things in the works you guys are doing specially to support and refine the game for the steam launch?
Jey: Uni reset is not needed for steam
Jey: Server have a queue system planned to handle the influx
Jey: Rest is content so I cant answer those, but i hope more cleaning / bug fixing to ensure as smooth as possible experience for new players
Here’s the link to submit a question!
Ahab’s Bubble and Squeek brews have been dropping in quality lately and that can only mean one thing! The Space Rats are falling ill. Enquiring with Farmer John, Ahab has established this is because the binding forces of the universe itself are breaking apart! Creaky the Robot predicts the final collapse will occur at August 29th, 1PM in the Earth time of Eastern Daylight Time. We hope to see you all on the otherside!
It’s finally here! Apologies for May’s forgotten event, that was the weekend of my last uni exam for the year and then I was away the following weekend.
So to cut to the chase this event will include +150% XP, double DG and drop mod chances for six days (ending July 2nd, 13:00 server time).
Finally, starting with this event, all future weekend events will be every four weeks rather than the third weekend of every month and BobboBot on our IRC knows when the next event will be, which you can find out for yourself by sending ‘!countdown event‘ to him.
Enjoy the weekend folks!
The special bonus event:
In Improcerus there is a wave spawner, configured to spawn 9 iconic-ish AI in series. Improcerus only allows tech 0 ships and no slaves.
Provide me (post it in the forum) with a screenshot of the kill (in event chat) + your squad, and I’ll reward your squad once verified. The rewards will go to the squad leader, to be divied up.
For each kill there is a credit reward
1b credits for the first kill,
2b credits for the second,
4b for the third,
6b for the fourth,
8b for the fifth,
10b for the sixth,
14b for the seventh,
20b for the eighth and
40b for the ninth kill.
Additionally, if your squad makes over 30b your squad will get a free Zebucart skin (which’ll go on all Zebucart variations), if your squad makes over 10b your squad will get a permanent unique holoprojector.
We’re currently experiencing some unexpected downtime following the micro patch to address the source of the recent crashes.
It seems that the server is crashing on load and we’re currently looking into it.
Thank you for your patience.
**Update** The biggest part of the migration is now done, the web and game should be fully functional, but the migration is still in progress in parallel so expect a few hiccups here and here.
the new irc is accessible using irc.starsonata.com port 7777
or
kiwi irc
or
mibbit irc
As mentioned in http://www.starsonata.com/blog/new-servers-migration-soon/ we have been working on new server hardware / location to increase performance on the webserver/database/test servers and in doing so found upgrade for all our machines. The downtime will begin at 11h00 pm ET (server time) and will last about 8 hours
I have been doing just about everything that could be done without causing downtime to shorten / facilitate the final transition. But a final downtime is still needed to move the dynamic data (forum data, game database), to update the dns and tie everything together on the new servers.
During that downtime, the website will be switched over to a maintenance page. Forum, wiki and blog will all be disabled to allow for a clean transfer. The game server will also be stopped to allow for the database and website communication interface to be transfered without problems.
Website and other secondary services will come back up as they become available. The game server will be the last thing to come back up and in all likelyhood won’t happen before those 8 hours are elapsed.
It’s that time of the year again, with all kinds of fun easter stuff!
Until the 13th of April, Easter Warren’s in Sol for a lot of fun missions to do.
The (Zombie) Easter Bunny is back as well, with a vengeance! Can you manage to kill him?
We also have the roaming rats and egg crates, as well as some Easter drops which drop… Everywhere!
Are you ready to hunt some eggs?
As an added bonus, we’ve added a +40% XP bonus until the end of the event. Enjoy, everyone!