The Dawn Star Build #2

[Farbs]

Build #2!
You can see that I've renamed the game "The Dawn Star", which seemed like a good idea. I just found out that there's already a game called dawnstar though, which somehow I missed during my initial googling. Damn. So now I need a new name. Any suggestions?

Play the game at www.captainforever.com/thedawnstar.php

Changes in this build:

• Backgrounds!
• A new series of sectors to explore
• More responsive mouse control
• Fixed audio damping not affecting the voice synth
• Fixed VMEDS retaining station themes after undock
• Had to remove lowres fullscreen options
• Added core GPU renderer

[Perez]

I think the new backgrounds are fantastic, but does it affect the performance by chance?

[Admiral Kirana]

Well, I'm running the game on my crappy laptop better than I was before, so that might be a slight pointer for you, Perez.

Just a quick heads up, the mission.txt fluff is mostly obsolete now - it still talks about the Jameson project instead of using your new title and the mission looks to relate to the old big-sector builds. The cabin temperature settings in the F3 menu was a neat touch, not sure what it does though.

So I'm guessing that the ship's name is going to just be the Dawn Star from here on out? I was kinda hoping that we could customize our ship names further down the line (not that Dawn Star isn't a bad name for a ship, it just doesn't really fit in with the other ships' names)

(oh, yeah, and the backgrounds are really pretty. great work on 'em!)

[Farbs]

I'm not seeing any performance differences locally, but this is the sort of thing that's likely to affect different machines very differently. Eventually I expect most of us will see significantly improved performance, since most of the rendering work will be shifted from the CPU (which also has to do physics and audio synthesis and gameplay logic) to the GPU. I don't expect that this game will be particularly taxing on most GPUs, since it'll be 2D and mostly involve batches of hires models pre-rendered down into simple sprites, but if your GPU is particularly underpowered it might be an issue. If so I'm very sorry about that.

Regarding the in-game text files -> Yeah, they're now horribly out of date. They were one of the reasons I created a pre-release build last year, since updating those takes quite a while and I didn't want to be tied down by them. That part of the game will probably be scrapped, or at least substantially re-written, as part of the work on the new player experience. As a result I didn't want to burn time updating it beforehand. But yeah, you're right, it is horribly out of date.

Ha! I'd forgotten about the F3 menu. I was experimenting with that interface since it's where you can manually save and load your game... but I didn't finish implementing the actual save/load stuff, and then I forgot to turn that page back off again.

Custom ship names are currently a medium priority, but given the demand I might bump that up a bit. There's currently no way in the game to create text fields, and there are no string serializers for saving and loading your ship name, so there's a bit of foundation work to do first.

Anyway, thanks for all the feedback! It makes building the game a lot more rewarding, knowing that people are actually going to play and talk to me about it.

[Ozzatron]

Whoa, I randomly poke my head in here for the first time in months and... yeah, just wow. I actually haven't played this yet (as I am currently fatfingering this post with an touchscreen keyboard) but it sounds significantly cooler.

About the new name, by the way. One, what already exists with the name "dawnstar"? And two, you could go with "Periapsis" (although there's no orbiting in this space game!)

Bah, I'd try to think of more names, but a lot of them are "Captain _____" and I doubt that's what you're going for.

::edit:: I can't spell on a screen. Also, "Solar Drift" or "Super Captain Forever" XD

[Vaconcovat]

I see build #3 is out?

[Farbs]

Welcome back Ozzatron! Yeah, it's great to be working on this again. Dedicating one day a week to talking about the game & releasing a build is working well too - without that I'd probably still just be bumbling around in secret like before. I'm pouring a lot of that day into boring things like press kits at the moment, but once they're done I should have more time for actual content, like more detailed blog posts etc.

Vaconcovat - yep! I haven't added a thread for it yet, am going to go do that now.

[Captain Michaela Nul'dolaer]

Hey Farbs, what if you released the different builds as different versions of the Dawn Star? That would be interesting...