12th June - Forest for the trees

Healthire submitted a new blog post:

12th June - Forest for the trees

Continue reading the Original Blog Post

 

Oh my Kluex it looks FABULOUS!

 

FYI, the last 2 gifs aren't working for me at the moment. Edit: They are working now, the first is "love" and the second is "flee!".

Tiy posted more fantastic parallax/environment screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/yJ2YD

Some other development news:

• Fun fact, they used Mario art while they were waiting for the new background to be complete
• Starbound is 10% off on Steam until June 22nd for the summer sale!
• The Floran mission is currently broken on the Nightly, since Nuru has to open the first gate and she stubbornly refuses to do so right now.
• They added at least 3 more backer hats. (11 total in the last week, all on the wiki now)
• They have added many new items, including a new stone chest, a new wooden chest, a small plaque that describes a hylotl art piece, and a "Traveler's Beacon" that looks amazing and "records geological data".
• For the veteran players: plantmatterstone is no more. (It finally got renamed to Plant Matter.)
• They have done a ton of work on NPC personalities and interactions, as partially shown in the blog today. NPCs now have many new animated "reactions". These are different than emotes though, for example players cannot perform these animations. (yet)
• Work on colonies also continues. I have updated the Tenant page to reflect the current Nightly build.
• Work on the new Lush (starter planet) microdungeons also continues, they are quite extensive now, and all made in Tiled.
  
• They added a cool Bird's Nest item that can drop an egg when it gets broken. (it is a pot item)

Edit: Kyren posted a nice breakdown about the size of Starbound's .pak file related to loading times. Stating why it is the size that it is and what they are doing to bring it down. (and optimize the game some more)

Edit2: Tatterdemalion added an update I forgot about related to the new Lush microdungeons:

I posted more details about those NPCs and what they say on the last page here.


More critters! Here is an updated screenshot and spawn location list:

• Lush (starter planets): Bird, Hedgehog, Snail, Tortoise, Mouse, Bunny
  
• Desert: Armadillo, Mouse
• Forest: Bird, Blip, Mouse, Snail, Sporeling, Squirrel, Owl
• Forest - Mushroom Patch: Sporeling
  
• Ocean: Gull
  
• Jungle: Bird, Frog
• Alien: Bounce Bag, Float Bag, Sack Bag, Snoogle (the pink one)
  
• Alien - Eyepatch minibiome: Eye Friend, Eye Pod
  
• Snow: Common Bunny, Reasonable*
  
• Tundra: Bunny, Reasonable*

* The critter in middle of the bottom row is called "Reasonable". Odd looks come with an odd name I guess.

There are 21 total critters now. 12 Earth-like and 9 Alien.

Edit: Added Blip and Sporeling on Friday, Desert Tortoise on Sunday

 

The last two gifs are also not working for me. It directs me to a page that says:

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<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>8EA7EF1A8907342C</RequestId>
<HostId>Zms44lnb913AzudulJzSziyAlTZ55IF3pEU76eJVePKqJht8TWKsxuUm/fJi61Mqo8Eq4QnPICs=</HostId>
</Error>​

 

oh boy, dat forest, and that girl running away in shock! Hahaa xD

 

The forest is freaking awesome!!!

 

This looks gorgeous, I would love to take a stroll through an alien forest of crooked trees

Also, I would love to see a swampy biome with thick fog with vine-y trees

 

The lack of hylotl quests and villages made him sad

 

The only thing i have against the forest look is the difference between background trees and actual functional trees, hope they can be unionised.

 

Now that's a forest. I can't wait to see other parallax improvements, like transitions to underground, caves and the like.

 

Any way to have the color pallet of the trees in the background match the pallet of the trees in the foreground (have brown auto replaced with purple)? This is of course a coding thing... but I've seen auto pallet changing stuff in other games (to save on art assets in those cases). The fact they don't look like the same tree would be less apparent if that was the case.

 

Hmm, I never noticed before that the parallax trees do not match the actual foreground trees. I'm going to have to work hard on un-noticing that.

 

Looking good. Once all the tiny details come together it's bound to make a significant differance compared to what we have seen before.

 

That background is gorgeous. But if its possibly they should (as blue & bradley allredy pointed out) match the tree's on the planet.

 

Mollygos did say they were working on it (ie not finished).

Looks great! Keep up the excellent work!

 

Forest for trees .... funny my favorite song from old game Wheel of time.
But to the point - just woow it looks like different game. seriously it added so much.
I never knew i wanted this

 

Amazing! Finally, those forests won't look like they'd be a single row of trees in real life.

 

The forest background looks amazing!