Experimental Pre 6.0 Version 0.1.2 - Jul 4, 2024

I am working on a major update for Star Explorers. It will eventually be Verision 6.0.

This is an experimental testing branch for anyone who wants to try some of the new features and improvements, but please be aware there may be some bugs and issues that still need resolving here.

Currently the new version has a completely different star chart that is no longer compatible with the Version 5.0 games. It saves and loads your galaxy in a completely different way. This is all behind the scenes so you may not notice the differences yet.

The star chart now allows you to warp to stars without having to leave the computer. Here is a list of other updates and fixes that have occurred...
Trade Issues

There were a couple bugs when buying and selling to merchants. Prices were not calculated correctly when selling, and weapons were not priced correctly when buying.

I also changed the "price" to "n/a" whenever the player is not actually dealing with a merchant, as that was just a bit confusing.
Sonic Cannon

I have once again fixed the sonic cannon. It works as of the moment I am writing this. I cannot guarantee it will work by the time you try it.

I have now overhauled the whole inventory system and added some other cool stuff. It will also require a new game if you want to play it.
New Inventory System

The old inventory items had a very confusing system and I revised the whole thing, so it will not be compatible with old saves games.
Menu Update Underway

The menu and inventory graphics have all been spruced up to look more spacey, and I was able to add some nifty sound effects to these interactions. There is still work to do here, but inventory, quests and blueprints/crafting have all been improved.
Quest Panel

This has been updated to include some helpful information about where to find certain items
Bugs

During these updates I was able to discover and resolve a large number of bugs. Items should retain their correct values when trading A bug occurring when shooting the rocket launcher was fixed The "Place All" and "Take All" buttons now appear correctly depending on the item type UFO interior bug was causing staircase colliders to appear in the wrong place (these colliders are invisible so it's possible no one noticed it)

The trade menu allowed players to cheat by manipulating the amount of an item bought or sold (I won't get into details).

I was able to reproduce the bug, and find the root cause. Now it should not allow for this kind of swindling to occur.

There was a bug in the blueprints. When crafting an item it used the older values and the resulting item would have strange features like having a negative value for trade.

I had updated items which appear in caches and merchant inventories, but forgot to update the items when crafted with blueprints.

This will not fix items that were already crafted, but should produce the right results when crafting any new items. The blueprints themselves should be fine, so don't get rid of those.

I found out recently that the game engine I am using (3D Gamestudio) actually prefers pcx and dds files to bmp, jpg and png files. I have been using a variety of image files for Star Explorers and I occasionally have encountered some "bad file format" errors.

So in an effort to eliminate these kinds of errors, I am going through all the image files and replacing them with the recommended formats.

It is a long process and I am just starting. One good side effect is that I am saving disk space in the process, as well as eliminating a bunch of unused functions in the game script. So by the end of this process I think Star Explorers will become a much tighter program that takes up much less room on your hard drive.

In the process I was able to identify some textures that were missing from the game files. However, I am guessing I will mess up in the process and some textures might be missing (if I failed to reference the right file or something).
Day/Night Cycle Issue

I was also able to identify and fix the bug that caused planets to go to night time after players left a cave, so the day/night cycle should be more consistent now.

Two issues have been addressed and resolved in this update.
Biped Weapons

Bipedal aliens that carry weapons were still utilizing the old inventory system, so the weapons were unusable. I have updated this so those weapons can be used after they are dropped. I also prevented the bug that allowed players to take the alien weapons while they were still being held (although I am thinking about re-introducing this as a possible feature in the future).
Alien Bits

The animal type aliens have been updated too. In the past when they were killed their body parts would fling off in different directions. I am not sure what happened but that feature no longer worked. I was able to update it so that it is working again.

A helpful player pointed out an issue that caused the game to crash to the desktop in the testing branch.

If you approached the mothership for the first time, then instead of clicking on the computer panel, you chose to first travel to another solar system, it would then crash once you clicked on the computer panel.

This was easy to fix, it was just one of those things that I failed to anticipate people doing. So it's always helpful to get this sort of feedback!

There was a bug where, when approaching the mothership, if you cancelled the docking procedure, the UI would become unresponsive and you could no longer click on stars or the mothership itself.

I believe this is fixed now.

I was also able to fix the issue where the docking sound would play even if you had the volume all the way down (sorry for scaring any of you).