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 week’s update is going to discuss some of the changes made to Arctia and Vulcan based on the recent testing as well as another new GUI mission feature.

Firstly, I appreciate all the testing and feedback that was done after I made a request to check the new zones out two weeks again. I got some extremely good critiques, suggestions and bug reports and I’ve made a few changes to both zones based on that feedback. The two biggest changes made were related to sound.

Lavrite, the second boss in Vulcan, plays kind of like an old-school game of Snake. To accomplish this, he drops a stream of drones that damage the player if they get too close. With sound on, this ended up being a very noisy and annoying affair. To remedy it, I’ve added a new tag content developers can use to specify which sound gets played when a drone is deployed. I’m using this both in Arctia and in Vulcan to make the drones a bit more interesting (and Lavrite a lot less annoying). I’ve also added new sounds for both the Arctia and Vulcan AI using our new Attack Sound system that was added a few months ago as part of the Nexus revamp. Both these changes will make these two zones a lot better to listen to for players that play with sound enabled.

There were some other small changes and bugfixes, but listing them all would be rather boring for an update!

Secondly, I’ve added a pretty big GUI addition for missions in the form a new arrow marker. As part of refining the starting experience we’ve been working towards the ability to complete tutorial missions without having to read the mission dialog. For most goals, this is fairly easy, as objects in the gameplay field are plastered with mission marker (and given red flashing floaties). This however doesn’t work for mission goals involving GUI elements, such as ‘click your super item in the hot bar’. To remedy this, I spent a bit of time working on a new special mission indicator we can toggle with missions that has an absolute position in the GUI instead of a position relative to the gameplay field.

When I finished and tested my first iteration of the ‘special indicator arrow’ it was extremely easy to ignore and kind of boring. To make it a bit more interesting I’ve also added a new GUI element animator to the client to make GUI elements bob. A bobbing arrow pointing at a button you need to click is a lot more visually interesting than a static one and overall I think it’s a lot harder to miss. It also gets us another step closer to the end goal of making our tutorial so easy to figure out you can skip the text!

That’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update. Until then questions, comments and suggestions are always welcome in the forums!

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?

Hello again everyone As I said in my previous blog post my next Quality Assurance and developer project was going to take a quick look at drone size, and in specific this means that I will look at the size of temporary drones across all levels – tech 0 to tech 22!

This is also a suggestion proposal open to all kinds and types of feedback and discussion, so you can have a large impact on what the final product will be!

The reason to why I find this important is that several drones are way oversized compared to player ship hull space, just take a look at the Mini Blue Alpha Drone, with 48 size at tech 4 you pretty much need a Bulk Trader to use these drones in a tech 4 ship if you want any leftover hull space for gear and loot And another example is the tech 2 MagCannon Drone, with its 50 size it is the same size as the tech 20 Armada Inferno Drone! This just screams of unbalance

Drones have never had a proper balance sheet so with the help of yclepticon I made a size formula that gives us some guidelines to what drone size ideally should be. It gives us the power of designing each individual drone with modifiers towards their tech level, source, type of drone and so on From levels 16-22 I added a small additional increase to drone size because it seems that size is more appropriate at these levels than the levels from 0-16. And for you seers – I made a special value that lowers size on mines so they come out at 30% of the size of a regular drone

Here is a chart showing the new drone size values according to the new formula I plan to use. Pretty much all drones between tech 0-16 will see a rather drastic size decrease and from 16-22 there will also be size decrease as well but not to the same degree.

The old sizes are shown in this chart above, where one can see that drones at tech level 0 started out at 15-20 size, and apart from a few exceptions, they normally ended up at around 30-40 size at tech 10. With the new sizes no drones below tech 10 will exceed 30 size, and drones between tech 0 and 5 will on average be reduced with 66% size. Drones between tech 5 and 10 will on average be reduced with 56% size, and between 10 and 20 on average 35%

Keep in mind that this is only a QA suggestion proposal, so I will more than gladly discuss this on the forum, and I welcome ideas and feedback

This week’s update is going to be a little shorter and will cover some more upgrades and changes coming with the improved Nexus.

One of the main goals in reworking the Nexus was to improve flow and really give a new player a much better handle on the game. Recently, I just finished up two more mission goals to further augment the starting experience. The first of these is the use item goal. This mission goal is rather self-explanatory; it lets us specify an item the player has to use. The primary reason I added it was to showcase the starting super item on a new player’s Zebucart. Super items are extremely powerful for the low level player and can make their life easier so we felt it was definitely important to introduce them early. With the new use item mission goal we can easily do that now.

Secondly, I’ve added a docking goal so we can explicitly state to a player where they need to go. We can tell the player to dock places in mission text, but having a goal means we can plant a giant mission indicator over the base for the player to make a it a bit more obvious. We’ve been trying to remove as much docking as possible from the Nexus, but when we do want them to dock, we want to make sure a new player knows it and more importantly, where!

Other improvements have been made again with the UI functionality. Currently when you complete a mission that rewards an item, the game automatically opens up your main ship inventory. During our testing we noticed that it was a little annoying to always have to close your inventory when undocking, so the game also takes care of that for you now. This will only happen if the dialog was opened up by a mission though (so it won’t automatically close the inventory dialogs you open up yourself!).

That’s it for this week’s update! I’ll be back again with another update next week. Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

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.  

This week’s update is going to focus on another new mission features that I’ve worked on the past week. Keep reading to find out more!

This past week I finally got to the Deep Space section of the Nexus. As I was going through the missions there, I came to the first mission in the Augmenter Tweaking chain. It requires that players find a Minor Docking Augmenter. This isn’t that big a deal outside the Nexus, but inside that’s a very, very specific request for a new player. Ultimately, I decided to move Augmenter Tweaking (and Focus Selection) outside of the Nexus, but it left me wondering a few things; mainly, why don’t we have missions that can take items from categories?

That thinking led to a new mission goal I have been working on, the Egg Carton, or a mission goal that lets you turn in any combination of items (or easter eggs)  from a set of items. With this mission goal content developers will be able to flag items with a set, for instance, Minor Augmenters, and then specify a ‘collect item’ mission goal that will accept any items from that set. This will let us reduce mission bloat a lot for turn-in type missions and make some earlier missions, like the Augmenter Tweaking one, a whole lot easier for new players to finish. A very good example of where this could be extremely useful is in Lyceum. Between the Honorary Mention and Diplomas, there are over 50 turn-in missions. With this new mission goal, I can reduce that number to 2, and offer the added benefit of mixing and matching blueprints!

This mission goal has a few turn-in options as well. If you try to complete with exactly the number of items from the set the mission requires, it will take all of them. If you try to turn in with more items you get two options provided via a pop-up menu. The first lets you pick which items you want the mission to take. The second lets the server automatically pick the items until enough have been taken to fulfill the mission requirement.

Finally I needed a way to let players know what items belong in a set. For that I have my first solution, which is to put a colored field in the item tooltip as in the example image above. However, that is not finalized and I would like to get player feedback on that. I could change the tooltip text to be reliant on having the appropriate mission to be visible, or put it as part of the general tooltip text so it doesn’t stand out as much. Player feedback on this is definitely appreciated so I can come to a final decision on this.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update, but until then, please post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

So things have been a little quiet on my end for a little while, so I thought I’d give an update as to what’s going on behind the scenes.

Class Rebalance Contest

We have our finalized list of winners but we’re doing final checks to make sure there are no duplicates. I said in a thread that people with multiple accounts would only have one account for the contest, and our final step is confirming the individuals getting prizes are actually different people. Right now it looks like there are 15 testing badasses among you that received 10 or more points! These people will be announced next week once I chase Jey down to help me with the final checks. Winners will be contacted by me to discuss your custom skins.

Compensation for Team Experience: 

Since team EXP was rather broken for a month, we’re giving one month of double team exp. Unfortunately we require a micropatch (a scheduled server restart) for this and we were unable to start the event on the first of the month like I wanted. I am scheduling a Micropatch with Jey and the 31 days of double team EXP will start immediately following. I am expecting the Micropatch to be no later than Friday, May 9th.

Monthly Events

The monthly event for April kinda didn’t happen. Things have honestly been a little chaotic back here for the month of April between various team emergencies and people moving around doing jobs they’re not quite familiar with. April’s Monthly event will actually start today and last through Wednesday at 12:00 EST! May’s event will start on time.

Skinning Contest

In between the chaos, Jey has been working on the new skinning system for ships! We are going to be doing a contest for this skinning system. The details of that contest will be announced in a post following shortly after this one.

Steam Greenlight

We were one of the first 30 games on Steam Greenlight, but unfortunately never got much in the way of traction on that website. However, the folks at Steam have been Greenlighting 75 games to go onto Steam regularly every two to three weeks. We are now in the top 75, but there is no guarantee we’ll stay there! We need your help to get on Steam! Vote for us today!