Dev Blog Starbound on the Discord Store

Discussion in 'Dev Blog' started by Katzeus, Oct 16, 2018.

  1. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Eh, he has a point.

    When you have lots of adult themed mods for a game, that game can eventually get a negative PR or light to it, especially if said mods get popular enough to get a spotlight, and this article does indeed make things worse. I really don't know why this article should show up on Steam News, I rather wish it hadn't, because honestly, everybody knows r34 is a thing and if you for some reason actually wanted terribly pixellated sexual stuff, you know how to find it.

    We don't need to publicize it for the rest of us who want nothing to do with that kind of junk. It just makes the game itself look terrible, and the people making the mods, I mean, really, do people REALLY get aroused by... what is it again, 32x16 pixel characters?

    It reminds me of those ridiculous adult Atari 2600 games that helped the video game crash of 83, but at least in their defense, that's all they had at the time (still a stupid reason, but meh, more excuse than people today have).
     
    Ziver7 likes this.
  2. Daikon Ocelot

    Daikon Ocelot Spaceman Spiff

    Sorry for my language. It might have offend someone. I just never thought if things like that are in the Steam news.
     
  3. spiraluna

    spiraluna Big Damn Hero

    Finally! Some positive news. Well, any news.

    I was going to be permanently done with Starbound if nothing new came by the end of the year.

    If their last 3 posts are anything to go by, see you at the next update in around 2 months from now.
     
  4. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Yeah, hopefully it is soon... because Terraria apparently is not updating until sometime in 2019... and a few other indie games I've had my eyes on still don't have release dates yet.
     
    spiraluna likes this.
  5. Ziver7

    Ziver7 Void-Bound Voyager

    "... ready very soon."

    We'll see. It's been well over a year since 1.3 released.
     
  6. Lintton

    Lintton Guest

    Its hard to be hype for this, since we do not know of anything big that will be coming in this update, and haven’t known for some time.
     
    Ickura and spiraluna like this.
  7. rdcl170

    rdcl170 Aquatic Astronaut

    Yea, lame. Discord... xbox.... yawn. You've already alienated your main player base.
    From what I can tell from chucklefish's blog posts/job listings, their current team is pretty much incapable of modifying or adding content to Starbound. I highly doubt we'll see much out of this "update" when it releases late next year LOL
     
    Ickura likes this.
  8. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Considering modmakers can add plenty of content, I don't see how they would be "incapable" of adding content to Starbound.

    Anybody who knows how to mess with some JSONs and knows how to use Aseprite can add content.
     
  9. MidgetLover

    MidgetLover Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    speaking of, more content means nothing if the base game isn't optimized further, mods can only go so far to improve performance
     
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  10. Daikon Ocelot

    Daikon Ocelot Spaceman Spiff

    What kind of update will we get in the future? Not the "Bounty Hunting" update I supposed, as they already said that they reject it.
     
  11. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Eventually, as stronger hardware is developed, it will eventually overpower even some of the worst optimized games.

    I remember when SB first came out, I used to get framerates in the high 30s, and now I get upwards of 50 with the occasional split second pause (mostly because of mods adding too many items to the recipes unlock and collections systems).
     
  12. spiraluna

    spiraluna Big Damn Hero

    That's a pretty sad state of affairs if you're relying on better hardware to overcome the performance issue of a 2 year old 2D may-as-well-be-pixel-art platformer.

    I've seen modders do even the most rudimentary optimisations (optimising PNGs) and have gotten meaningful performance benefits from my potato PC. Kinda wished simple stuff like that was just handled by Chucklefish to begin with.
     
    Boshed, Vrow, Ickura and 2 others like this.
  13. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Yeah, the stripping the extra data in the PNGs is simple and easy enough, they could at least do that and likely shrink the filesize of the game by a decent margin (which is less it has to load, too).

    Yeah, I get that, and I don't disagree with your sentiment.

    But, there's the inevitability that things will get better, even if it isn't a direct result of CF's actions. I used to play an MMO called Horizons (now called Istaria). It ran atrociously and for the longest time, the game kept changing hands, and nobody had access to the source code to really do much with the engine or its assets. When I first started playing, just getting to 30FPS was a struggle, you had to disable this, disable that, turn view distance way down, etc. The performance was absolutely terrible.

    When I stopped playing like 5 years ago or so... my PC would absolutely eat that game for breakfast, 60-90FPS easy under most circumstances, loading up in 10-15 seconds instead of 3 minutes+ etc.

    5 years from now we'll probably getting 60FPS+ in Starbound, easy.
     
  14. MidgetLover

    MidgetLover Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    to me this is partially a myth, there are old games that without a patch will use all your available resources and won't run any better, plus, in my eyes it's always a good practice as developer to try and patch things up they way it's meant to
     
  15. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    Well, you should always fix your game if there are issues with it, sure.

    And I've never run into a game that couldn't be brute-forced with hardware and I've played a Lot of games.

    In fact, Starbound Itself I've seen an improvement. When I first started playing Starbound, it was when it initially went on Early Access some....what was that, almost 5 years by now? That was back when I had the computer before the previous one, an AMD Athlon64 IIRC. The framerates were not that great, but then that was before I started loading up mods, I remember 30-40 FPS usually and I ran it on 1440x900.

    Well I replaced that computer with an AMD FX-6300 and that's about the time I started playing Frackin'Universe which added lots of stuff and I would see about 30-40FPS (because I started zooming out some) but this was 1360x768 (I got a bigger TV at the time but it was only 720p).

    This computer that I am using now to type this with is a Ryzen5 1500X and I am running Starbound at 1920x1080 with Frackin'Universe (AND windowed mode, not fullscreen) and last time I checked the FPS, I was getting 45+ in most situations. The only thing is that the game pauses for a split second when I pick items up because of all the collections and junk.

    So brute forcing it with Hardware *is* improving Starbound's performance. I bet if I uninstalled FU, I would get a full 60FPS fulltime.
     
  16. MidgetLover

    MidgetLover Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    the only downside of your statement, about brute-force with hardware is that gives developers even more reason to let things be and never get them fixed, sadly Bethesda is an example of this, targeting high end hardware when has been proven time and time that their games can even run on potatos (with varying degrees of visual quality mind you) when the community takes it to it's hand and fix the many neglected Papyrus routines and hidden meshes that are still taken into account into the rendering
     
  17. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    It's all about the bottom-line, really.

    Why take effort to fix something when they can make plenty of money just shoving it out the door?

    I mean, a lot of Triple As do this. Batman, anyone? They'll ship a horribly broken product and then fix it later with patches. Now, thankfully, Starbound.... while not optimized at least wasn't entirely broken on its 1.0 release. It was a little lacking in content and mostly looked to mods to keep enough mods going to add content, but otherwise it was pretty stable.

    Could always be worse, and that Batman game is a great example of lazy developers not wanting to put the time in to actually fix stuff.
     
  18. Tamorr

    Tamorr Supernova

    This talk about hardware reminds me of the time unreal was before its time. Late 90s early 2000. Where the hardware couldn't run it. What I don't remember is if they were referring to is the the game or the engine that can run today. unreal tournament possibly. Similar but not the same. things like this help push people to develop better and better hardware in all areas.

    Regardless, I still have my second computer since starbound started. The first one only ran it so much, but this one at least runs it ok without too many mods. So brute forcing the hardware makes quite a bit of sense to me. I plan on getting another soon so I can run games that this one can not even boot up effectively. Gets me looking at all the specs when shopping. I am quite glad for this lil update, since it means a possible controller support in the future.

    I like switching between keyboard/mouse and controller every so often. I can adapt to either depending on the game. Sure the game can use some more optimization, however hardware will eventually outclass them down the line. This all depends on how long certain things take to come out on either end.

    Seeing development of computers from a 486 to now, I came to see quite a lot of improvements in a lot of areas. I know one game that will not run on current systems that would run on a 16 bit system; 32 bit if run in 16 bit mode (referring to windows only have the one stage prior built in as secondary; which means not the original architecture and more of an emulator). Of course it would need a patch, but I don't think I am going to see that from the original devs of that game.

    It is nice though to see development progressing. I would probably be one to buy the xbox version, but that is me. I like playing different versions of games; in this case it would be vanilla on console and mods on the computer. :nuruhappy:
     
  19. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    @Tamorr : You can use DosBox to load up Windows 3.1 or Windows98SE if you want to play a 16-bit game (if it's programmed/made for Windows; if it's made for DOS then you don't need Windows, just run it from DosBox with something like D-Fend to help you set it up).

    A 64-bit OS cannot run 16Bit software, but you can always emulate a smaller PC to do that for you. In fact, anytime you buy a DOS game on GOG or Steam, it comes with DosBox packaged and preset with whatever settings would run the game best most of the time.

    I've actually done this, I've used DosBox, and installed Windows 3.1 to run a game I used to play a long time ago (a Rogue-like called Castle of the Winds).

    Pretty Sure Windows 3.1 (and even 98SE) are old enough that you could just download a copy and a CDKey and not have to worry about Microsoft knocking on your door, lol.
     
    Kawa and Tamorr like this.
  20. Tamorr

    Tamorr Supernova

    no not dos.... think it is a game "cyberstorm" but maybe wrong since I haven't a clue to where the disc is. It is a windows 16 bit game. But like I was saying by default that windows provides one can not run something in a 64 bit on the compatible mode as it only offers 32 bit. Unless they changed that recently. Yes thank you, glad there are third party or other ways to play. I have been meaning to get an account for GOG so i can get a few games to run without steam. Some I don't mind, but there are others at the moment I would rather be offline playing... Thanks again for the tip. :nuruhappy:
     

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