Heyoo! It’s time for our Monthly Event!

This time we’re hitting you up for 25% Bindomite drop chance from Dungeon Bosses and 50% extra Experience!

In addition to this, Midday Sunday (server time) will see some strangely appearing outposts across the universe.

The event will last until the 1st. Happy hunting!

- 07/08/2014 276.352 -
* The optimizations mentioned in my recent blog post are now in the beta client.
* Added glowmap for Shrimp
* Some more skins related data for livetest and soon live.
* new ship stat window (broken on live since it lack the proper message, but should work on livetest)
* Fixed the band at the top of the screen not being clickable
* Fixed an issue with the rightclick -> activate control bot not working sometimes when the ship had never been opened.
* the client now know if a ship has skins or not (non functional on live for obvious reasons)
* hopefully fixed the issue causing docked ships to appear when docking.
* fixed a problem with drones initliasation, causing them to sometime go out of sync.

- New micropatch 276.237 (This client contain the client side of the quickfixing session and is needed to connect to livetest).
* lower the autopilot message a bit and fix the message when traveling to unknown galaxy.
* Add an x button to the radar window
* Add a /command (/HideHuiMethod) to change the function of h from deadman switch to a toggle for the session.

* Added tooltip lightly explaining the benefit of DDS textures
* support for the first iteration (still wip) for the ship skins system. (SKIN_FEATURE_1_0)
* Added support for the server/client feature system, allowing for better retrocompatibility between different versions
* Multiple crash fixes
* Fixed the commodity tab in stations to be consistant
* Fixed an overflow causing the “owned” column in tradebay to go into the negative with more than 32k of an item.
* Fixed a flag related handle leak
* Fixed the issue that caused flags to randomly not show next to the ship nametag.

livetest will be updated soon with the first iteration of the skin system, this client will be required to connect to it (trying to connect with live client will give you an unsuported feature error and wont connect).

If you do not have the beta client and wish to install it. It can be downloaded from http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. The installation is separated from the live client, and it is recommended you keep the live client at hand reach, in case beta client update break it for you.

So it’s about 11:26am right now and the server’s been down for roughly 30 minutes. Jey is working as fast as he can to fix some last minute issues that creeped up in our final testing before reset. He is approximating that the server will be back up in 30 minutes from now (So roughly 12:00pm MST, 2:00pm EST).

One issue that will not be fixed prior to the universe start is the AI Outposts will not spawn. This means that neither the Faranji, Mzungu, Bule or Vazaha Bases will spawn, and neither will the Green Meanie or Iceprick bases.

We are however planning to manually load them in later and do an event on this. This would require much less work and we will announce this event in good time before it goes live!

Thanks for your patience and you’ll be exploring the universe soon!

EDIT: Live will be open at 2:20pm EST (so in roughly 15 minutes)!

Hey guys, as of now the server has been down for roughly 45 minutes. The server was locking up on restart due to some issue with a specific persona. We’re fixing the issue as we speak and should have more information for you shortly. We hope the server will be back up within the hour, but as with all server crashes that last longer than 10 minutes, giving an eta is a very rough estimate. Thanks for your patience!

EDIT: And we’re back! Thanks for holding on while we zapped the server hamster back to life!

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).