Is Starbound ready for 1.0 ? ( What do you think )

It's not ready coming from a server host's perspective. People who don't care much about running a server (or playing on one) might think the game is ready or close to it. In reality, the replayability comes from the online and playing with friends. We have been promised multiple things that we need desperately and still do not have.

*) Server moderation tools. We need the means to be able to properly ban people regardless of username. During my time hosting the last two stable updates, users with really, really long (like, 30 character names with spaces) could not be banned. We can't revert grief damage, we can't decide what planet players start on, we can't protect terrain and the list goes on. All this time and we still don't have server tools? That's insane. Relying on these taped-together, memory hog, buggy third-party wrappers is not cutting it.

*) Server-side files. We were told we'd be getting a change to the way client/server files are handled. It was discussed that when connecting to a server, if you modified your files ( "hacking" ) then you wouldn't be able to connect, or, in another form, you'd have your character stored on the server. This would prevent people from bringing hacked items onto the server. It was also discussed that a server could send files to a client when they connect which would allow us to use server mods.

*) Dungeon Master hasn't been touched on in a long time. What happened to this? It was meant to let server hosts create and manipulate entities and events to give their servers unique flavor not found anywhere else. Imagine your server has a spawn town. Players see a server-wide announcement that raiders are making their way toward the town. The DM has sent a wave of bandits toward spawn, bandits with particularly high stats. If the players fail to defeat the bandits, the DM will transform the spawn town into a raider camp and players will be unable to trade with the vendors until the next event which is meant to release control of the town to the players again. I did things like this without DM and it was extraordinarily difficult because I did not have any tools to do it. Dm would even allow staff to control different NPC entities and make them talk.

*) Multiplayer performance/large quantity of entities. Every single stable update, they say there are performance increases in the notes. There aren't. Not ones that do anything significant. I saw memory spikes and latency times caused by choked data every single day. My server was a beast with a 1gb/s connection and upon a fresh reboot, if players found a desert and moved soft sand in large quantities by making it fall down, the server would run low on memory and STAY low. It wasn't getting trashed correctly. This applied to anything. Water, raiders, players, projectiles. You name it. It took only a few minutes for the server to start lagging again because the game has terrible optimization which is *still* there. If 1.0 is a remedy to this, great, but I don't see how it could be when the fundamental code in the game handles its memory allocation so poorly. Even walking into a room with too many NPCs (10) will cause framerate problems. Using the opengl button to launch the game helps, but not entirely. How can people be expected to run servers correctly when the game can't handle it? If the server chokes when its memory is handled horribly, and then players' packets are being handled slower because the server is dragging its ass... that's going to cause high latency. At one point, I saw 3,000 ms latency.

Tiy said early, early on in this game's development that he didn't think the multiplayer was that big of a deal (I forget his exact wording). We need you guys to take it more seriously. Don't spit this game out as a singleplayer experience with a half-assed multiplayer thrown in on top like everybody else. Think about the vast cities, the alliances, the battles and memories that can be created with this game if it's treated right. I've been behind this game since day 1 and was one of the people trying to get it to launch when the alpha went out. I bought copies of this game for other people and brought news of Starbound to other communities on a daily basis. I hyped everyone within my social circles up as much as I could. Now can we please make this game be as great as I thought it was going to be or are we going to let the mistakes made with the game's multiplayer slide and give the devs a pass on that?

 

See, my take is that i believe they should work on the banning stuff like and and moderation tools along with the performance optimizations. I dont think they're gonna make alliances and battles and stuff like that, it'll probably have to be a mod. Developing a humongous (game changing) experience for only multiplayer would leave the single-player people out and would take a lot of development time to create

 

They said we would get a server update with more commands and better control, though I've not heard of anything since.

 

You're thinking of Director Mode, which is going to be worked on post-1.0.

 

Regardless, I like @Silverforte 's ideas, with some of them being vital towards server maintenance. One of the common fears some people have when inviting a player into their single player or multiplayer game is that they will attempt to steal or destroy their stuff with god modding while they are there. Having controls to at least mitigate these issues in muliplayer would be helpful in providing the experience the mods want on their server.

 

I think that yes, Starbound will be 100% ready for 1.0

Are there more things they could add like more multi-player features or future armor tiers? Yes, without a doubt. But that can all come post-1.0. Having the full story-arc in, and a solid, well developed progression and all the performance and polish they will be doing makes this a very justifiable 1.0 numbering.

There are other long-term early access games that were concerning with a 1.0 release such as Kerbal Space Program, as they were adding a lot of features at once (much like Starbound is), which indeed turned out to be a justified concern as they soon after released a 1.1 which fixed some bugs and changed how some mechanics worked which upset people's saves (they would have been better doing a 0.99 for a couple weeks before 1.0.) But I really don't think this is such a huge concern with Starbound mainly because they are constantly testing the release due to the unstable/nightly branch anyway.

We've all seen Starbound come a long way over the years and how incredibly hard the developers have worked, and having that ultimate 1.0 feeling, a reason to tell everyone about it all over again, see it being deservedly mentioned (and hopefully praised) in the press is something I think that is really due. It's a very different and unarguably much better game to what was the early access release and it's time the people who maybe looked at it and didn't like it for all it's faults, or even just the general public who didn't buy it due to poor EA reviews knows that.

I really think this game will be seen as another shining example (of which there are only few) of "early access done right."

 

Watching starbound be developed was like watching a car crash happen in real time. You see the guy leave his house, get in his car, start driving and everything looks fine. But then he starts to make stupid mistake before inevitably ending up in a ball of flame. Yeah. It's kind of like that.

Starbound right now is like watching a seventh grader write a high fantasy story. He makes these elaborate universes and character, but then has no idea how to advance the plot or make the story in general good. We have hundred of structures, an elaborate lore, well designed sprites, lots of weapon and armor tiers, and that well and all, but the problem is that the game has built all of this on a shitty foundation. The movement is fucking garbage, the progression is a bigger grind then Aion, the combat feels like I'm swiping at air, and the game in general doesn't feel like anything close to a finished product. But as for the OP's question, yeah starbound is ready for launch, because at this point there is nothing left for them to do.

 

game play-wise Starbound is ready for 1.0.

Server/engine wise maybe not so much.
The current remaining problem for multiplayer is the fact that to make a stable multiplayer server, you have to prevent people from building, activating liquid movement, avoid wireing, avoid chopping trees. etc.
There's still a lot of needing to tweak and stabilize to the servers don't go haywire if 20+ players play on a dedicated server "normally".
Also Server side characters and DM (director mode) mode would definable permit people to make game modes and keep the multiplayer alive (such as making hold the fort, survive.. wave etc without actually having to make am mod for it).

 

It is and isn't.
The game is fun, and I've put well over 200 hours into it but at the same time whenever I get to the "end-game" (even with colonies) I feel as if I am lacking things to do. It's almost like you don't WANT to reach the "end-game" so you can continue to enjoy yourself.

 

yeah maybe starbound would be ready for the new update maybe the problem is would your computer handle it? and people working on the mods have to update to the latest version.

 

I think the modding community is more than ready for it. Perhaps even some old ones will be resurrected once the 1.0 update is dropped.

 

OF COURSE!

 

I am excited although Starbound is not ready for 1.0 yet.