So first off I want to give an update as to why the scoreboard on the website isn’t working. We are waiting on Jey to fix it, but unfortunately he’s been completely cut off from internet access due to extreme weather conditions for three weeks. Luckily he just got home today (like as I was writing this post). Yay! We’ll have an update later on this week with the status of that fix.

And yes, the monthly event didn’t get turned on and that was totally my fault. I’ve been moving since Thursday and doing way too many things outside of the house (appointments, meetings, blargh). I didn’t get computer and internet access until yesterday. But I’m back now as is Jey so things should start to return to normal. The monthly event will actually occur this Friday instead.

Thanks for your patience!

This is why I don’t give dates, I jinx myself and end up more than doubling the time I estimated. But I am FINALLY happy to announce the winners of the Class Rebalance Contest. I’m pre-warning you, this post is going to be a Resident Evil Love Fest. We received 698 posts, and 84 distinct bug reports. Holy crap you guys rock.

We are thrilled with the feedback we got from the testing forum, and we’re hoping to have similar contests in the future (maybe something a bit more automated). Thanks to your efforts we caught some highly exploitable bugs from hitting live, and were able to tweak our balance changes.

Without further adieu here are your winners! These winners MUST private message me on the forums to discuss their prizes! If they do not they won’t get their choice of prizes!

Top 5: 

1-800-USE_THE_FORCE (This guy scored more than double the next on the list!)
topbuzzz
Johnston V2
your doom9
zogarn

Prizes for the Top Five are: Custom Ship Skin using the new skinning system, 20 Space Points, and their choice of three Imp Seals or a Trophy ship

Top 6-11:
(There was a tie in this group for the last position)

buggy
i love my life
Potential
PSS Metal
Pangea
Urzaserra2

Prizes for the top six through ten are: 20 space points, and their choice between three imp seals or a trophy ship. 

10 Point Achievers: 

Doctor Octogonapus
Lord Runningclam
Snakeyes.

Prizes for the ten point achievers are the new trophy ship! 

We are creating a new trophy ship for this contest, the Doge-age. If that’s a little too silly for you, the winners of trophy ships can choose to have the Nyan’s Reaver instead. The Doge ship will have the same stats as the Nyan’s Reaver so there is no difference.

If you felt as though you should have been on the leaderboard please PM me. Some posts were incorrectly formatted and did not include all squad character names as the rules stated and those people weren’t counted because we had no way to confirm.

It is my goal to have all prizes awarded within the first month of the new universe (so June/July), the delay is because the skins and trophy ship will require a patch.

Also, congratulations to Resident Evil for successfully holding the Emperor until the end of the universe (last uni of course). Can they hold it this universe?

The micropatch is in and Double Team EXP is live! It will end on June 7th at 11:59pm EST. This micropatch also fixed the issue with the recent crashes.

Arctia and Vulcan, two new zones that will be coming with the next universe reset for lower level players, are up on test and need some playtesting!

At this point I’d like if some players can run through both areas and give me their overall impressions on the design, AI, bosses and loot. It’d also be great if some players could try the zones on characters that are level appropriate for the zones. For Arctia, this range is 20-50 and for Vulcan it is 20-100. This kind of testing is important because it lets us know if this area is properly tuned for players of the target levels! Feedback can be posted in the auto-generated forum post!

If you’d like to find out more about these two zones you can read both my previous posts about Arctia and Vulcan. If you’d like to help test log on to test.starsonata.com, port 3032.

For the past few months Jey’s special side project has been working on a skin system. This awesome system will allow you to purchase skins for your ship with space points! I know what some of you are thinking, “But I wanted CUSTOM skins, that I designed!” Fortunately for you, you still have the chance to nab a custom skin. Our current predicament is that we have the system, but we don’t have the skins!

Thus, we are launching a Skin Creation Contest. We’d ideally like to get two custom skins for each ship. That’s right, TWO FOR EACH SHIP. There are a lot of ships in game so that’s a LOT of skins to be designed, and there are a lot of you with amazing talent so why not make a skin creation contest with awesome prizes!

Rules of the contest

1. You may submit as many entries as you desire except only one skin per ship. This is mostly to allow other people to submit skins for their favorite ships.
2. You may only submit your own artwork or modifications to the default textures. You may not submit someone else’s art or modifications and claim it as your own. Plagiarism is an immediate disqualification.
3. When submitting your entry to the thread created by this post you must have certain things in your post in order for us to count it.

A screenshot of your skin in game
The texture.png file you modified
Optional: The specular map, normal map, and glowmap files. (If you worked with someone else on this part include their account name as well, only ONE person needs to post).

4. Being a jerk in this thread is grounds for immediate disqualification, be nice and respect others and their work.
5. You may work with someone else on your skin ONLY if your skin includes normal maps and/or specular maps. If you work with someone else make sure you include their account name in the submission, otherwise they won’t get the prize! You may also PM me with questions on this one.

Creating and Testing your custom skin

1. Navigate to the Textures folder in the Star Sonata 2 client and find the texture you want to modify. The default location is:

%APPDATA%\Roaming\Star Sonata 2\Content\Default\Textures\Ships

2. Copy the ship texture you want to modify to the skins folder in that directory.

%APPDATA%\Roaming\Star Sonata 2\Content\Default\Textures\Ships\Skins

3. Open that copied texture in an image editing program of your choice. Paint comes installed by default on windows systems. I personally recommend Gimp since it is a free Photoshop alternative that lets you make very powerful changes to an image.

4. Edit the texture to your heart’s desire and SAVE OFTEN. You might even save multiple copies of your texture just in case you make a change you’re not happy with.

5. Once you’re ready to see what your skin looks like in game make sure you save it, and then load up your Star Sonata 2 Client. We recommend setting up your Star Sonata 2 client for faster testing. Make sure that DDS Textures is unchecked, and preload textures is unchecked. Your client must be restarted in between each change to the skin.

6. Make sure you’re in the ship you want to test the skin on and type
/debug testskin skinname.png into the chat. You will be the only one to see your skin as these tests are local to your client. These file names are also case sensitive!

7. Once you’ve hashed out your design submit a cool screenshot of it and the .png texture file to the thread on the forums!

8. (Optional) If you know what normal maps and specular maps are you can create custom ones for your ship texture! Name your normal map skinname.png_NM.png and your specular map skinname.png_SP.png. To test those maps just add those file names to the command mentioned above. So

/debug testskin skinname.png skinname.png_NM.png skinname.png_SP.png

9. (Optional) If you would like to add glowmaps you need to grab the latest beta client. You can put your glowmap into the same skins folder as a .png. After you have the glowmap in the skins folder you’ll want to launch your client and type:

/debug glowmap glowmapname.png
/debug skintest texturename

(Note, the glowmap is a newer feature, and the instructions for glowmaps may be incorrect and the feature might be buggy since it is untested. A post will be made if the instructions change.)

Prizes and Final Notes 

If we decide your skin is one of the two for a specific ship, you’ll get that skin for FREE in addition to a cool holoprojector specifically for skin creators. So if you want to get that skin you’ve always wanted in game (I’m talking to you Daedalus and your green Poseidon Wave), design it, post it, and win cool stuff! We will announce winners a week after the contest concludes, and then keep the thread opened for more skin submissions. After the contest concludes and you decide you want to submit a skin, if we accept your skin you will still get it for FREE! The contest just gives you a cool holo projector or two.

The contest starts today and will last one month. So ending on June 5th at 11:59pm EST. Contest winners will be announced the second or third week of June.

PS: We are literally 30 minutes of work away from having the winners from the Class Rebalance  contest announced. That post should come probably Wednesday depending on scheduling.  

After more feedback from you guys, we’ve made several critical changes to how our suggestions system operates! We now allow for player submitted suggestions!

On the first of every month we will review the top three suggestions and give responses. We’ll either approve the suggestion and assign it to a developer, make tweaks and assign it to a developer, or reject the suggestion and give our reasons for the rejection.

To create a suggestion visit the suggestions page and select the new “Create” button. In order to create a suggestion you need to either have one character above level 100, or subscribed. The restriction is in place to prevent spam from cluttering the suggestions board. Creating a suggestion costs three votes.

We will award 30 votes every month to subscribed players or players with characters above level 100. For now we still will restrict the amount of votes you will get on a monthly basis until we settle into the new user submitted system. Likewise we may also tweak restrictions on voting and submitting suggestions based on player feedback.

To kickstart the system we are zeroing out all existing votes and granting 50 votes to all eligible accounts.

The suggestions forum will still be open for you to brainstorm ideas with other players, but we will no longer be curating that forum (we honestly weren’t culling it too too much, but would read it and discuss ideas).

Well, the time is here. Astro-Bunny has finalized preparing all his Easter goodies and has entered our universe. As usual, Astro-Bunny has set up shop in Easter Warren, located off Earthforce Celestial Garden Outpost and his Egg Boxes and Resurrected Rats roam the universe.

This year includes a new chain of missions like the 12 Days of Christmas missions, which start on the 15th and a few other bits and pieces.

The winners of the competition (link) will be announced later.

Lastly, Happy Easter from the Star Sonata Development Team!

The winter blues have passed us by, and now is a warmer time coming, with plants flowering, eggs to decorate and find. Astro-Bunny will be visiting us soon with lots of chocolaty goodies and Easter joy.

But before that can happen, we need some eggs, every size, shape(?) and colour. That’s why the Easter Bunny wants you to decorate, or make an egg and send it to him. Your egg can be a drawing, a hard boiled one or any other egg-tastic idea for eggyness you can come up with. Five winners will be picked from the submissions based on creativity and design, with bonuses for Star Sonata themed entries. They will receive a collection of Easter items and a special permanent holoprojector.

You have until 00:00 Server Time, Sunday 13th April to submit your entries, all submissions are to go to the forum topic. This gives you about a week and a half to get them done. Winners will be announced later that day and prizes handed to them.

Greetings Sonatians!

Many of you were around for our 2013 player survey! We received a lot of feedback and were able to apply much of what was said into development of Star Sonata, but we discovered that there were still some questions left unanswered.

With that we created a much shorter survey to specifically ask questions about the Quality of Life while playing Star Sonata. What we mean by this is things that are annoying to use, and could be much simpler in it’s implementation. For example: the tooltips on items are frustrating to use and disappear when I’m reading them.

This survey will close at the end of April! Thank you for your feedback!

Take the Survey Now! 

Hey guys! Sorry for the radio silence since the contest’s conclusion. We’re having to do much in the way of manual work in order to track everyone’s points. The contest was way more popular than we anticipated! We are expecting winners to be announced late March-Early April, with a new contest announced shortly after (with much less manual work involved).

I can’t say much about the new contest yet, only that it involves a new system Jey’s been designing for the past month and that new system involves skins for player ships.