Dev Blog 16th November - The Vaults in Our Stars

Hey everyone!
In our last post we showed off terraforming which can completely transform the biome of a planet (including the background)!



Control over the very nature of a planet itself? That sure seems like some form of mysterious, ancient technology, doesn't it? No ordinary explorer can get their hands on something like this - you're going to have to enter the Ancient Vaults to hunt them down. What other bygone secrets do these vaults hold, and what guards them?



The update isn't far away now, so we hope you're all excited!

In other news, our friends at Sanshee have made some really cool Protectorate t-shirts and tanks! We've had loads of requests for Protectorate shirts, and Sanshee's done a great job turning them into a real thing!

Go check them out on Sanshee!

 

Vault eh? Let's hope Gearbox doesn't get annoyed. Maybe slip in an Easter egg to appease them?
Very excited for this...

 

I smell a little bit of Borderlands making its way in. I can approve of this. Yes.

 

Looking forewards to these vaults. Hoping we can get our hands on those sweet vases and blocks...

 

Awesome! Another adventure awaits!! Glad the item wasn't just a crafted thing and now is tide to a quest/dungeon.

 

I got to say, that thread title is clever.

Can't wait to see more updates coming.

 

Any news on whether the lag issues are being addressed?

 

Am I hallucinating with false hope or do the shadows in the gif where the apex beams down look a lot simpler than current shadows?

 

Please, don't start that again.

 

Fallout vaults weren't made by ancient aliens and they don't hold powerful alien technology.

Just saying.

 

Now while the thread is fresh and the devs are probably still paying attention to it, I'd like to bring attention to this post I'd made in a previous thread... but probably too late to catch your attention. Very easy way to get things moving faster for people(especially with animated objects). Doesn't require a single line of code changed. Doesn't hurt quality. Win-win.

Especially look at the bottom right. Saved 90707.29 KB total!

I unpacked the 1.1.1 assets., dragged my whole unpacked assets directory into PNGGauntlet, and hit the Optimize button. Do you see how much total size was reduced? That's pretty substantial. That's not only bandwidth/download size/storage size. That's faster game loading time. That's lag reduction - especially for animated files because that's less hard drive loading time. And that's WITHOUT you changing a single line of code.

I've been doing this for a while with my own mods. I was amazed how much faster my giant shipworld loads with the blockImage shrunk. A few KBs somehow makes a big difference. Likewise for my animated objects(especially in mass quantities). I've never before done this to the entirety of Starbound assets. I'm surprised this much reduction is possible.

And this won't reduce quality at all. There is no downside. Files are smaller. They load faster.

Now it did take a while to shrink them all. I ran PNG Gauntlet in a XP VM, gave it 2 of my 8 CPU cores, and let it go. You only need to do that once though. After that, just make a script to shrink which PNG files which have been changed/added. Rather... add it to your script which packs the files. You'd barely notice the extra time. Yes you can run the whole show from command prompt/terminal/shell.

--edit/addition

To add a little perspective, that 90707.29 KB reduction works out to about 88.58MB
The total assets - after reduction(unpacked size) - are ~683MB
of those assets, music and sfx account for ~577MB
So the non-audio files account for ~106MB... after shaving ~89MB off by using PNG Gauntlet.
And that includes all the LUA scripts, JSON assets, etc in addition to the actual PNG files I shrunk.

For a game that makes heavy use of image assets, that's pretty substantial benefit.

Oh and yes I do play the current stable with the optimized and re-packed assets. Not a single problem to be had. I've been doing this with my mods for quite a while and strongly recommend everyone do the same.

At the very least, I can tell this hasn't been applied as of the current nightly build. Please make this happen for the next stable.

 

Looking forward to the update, but this is still an issue for me, so I will bring it up.

 

They know of the issue. It is in their best interest to resolve performance issues. Bringing it up for the billionth time doesn't help anyone.

 

While I love that new content is being added, I do hope that crew and pets are getting a second look, as right now they are borderline useless with their AI, bugs, and stats.

 

Vault hunting again? Alright, count me in

 

Agreed.

 

Tell me I can use the Terraformer to clean toxic planets.

 

Generally you can't mine such blocks in the vaults because missions/portals/outpost can't be mined. Is it weird that I am more exicted of gaining access to a new yet always existing block more than what the area gives?

I'll have to do this to my Starbound folder one day, maybe possibly with the next decent size update on Stable. My computer is good enough where I extremely rarely ever get lag or issues unless I do something stupid like blowing up the whole planet where I see other people complain that rain alone can cause massive slowdown issues for them. I guess my computer is better than most but with that said if playing with zoom out as far as possible I notice that I can travel faster than the planets can load sometimes and it just ruin the game for me so I been playing on the mid-zoom setting. If this is as good as I think it is then I might be able to play with max zoom out.

 

One thing that caught my attention is how many times the damage numbers popped up... Was that always a thing?