The latest patch for Indie sensation Starbound has been released, and it’s the one everyone’s been waiting for. This update promises to eliminate the need to wipe players or ships again, and tentatively adds that worlds should also be here to stay. However, your progress will need to be wiped one last time before the patch becomes active, but most players are probably used to that by now.
The technical patch notes are as follows.
- Absolutely massive changes to disk serialization, which will allow us to never need to wipe players or ships again, and hopefully never need to wipe worlds again.
- Related, we now have a proper versioning system for save files.
- Added difficulty levels and permadeath characters to the game.
- Packed assets into databases (speeds up startup significantly), and included asset packing and unpacking utilities with the distribution.
- This should also allow for easier distribution of mods, and easier construction and management of slimmed down distributions for dedicated servers (official server paks coming soon.)
- Fix some graphical glitches with the wire nodes.
- Fixed some pretty nasty deadlocking bugs with networking.
- Fixed some very strange memory leak bugs stemming from a gcc lambda capture bug.
- Fixed various crash bugs related to a number of different issues
- Speed up improvements with falling sand and other projectiles.
- More efficient databases storage layout.
- Documentation for lua functions have been written, and we’re going to release them soonish.
- Removed NaN floats from the code for performance reasons (reenabled -ffinite-math-only), we had been using them to signal that the float is disabled or in an invalid state, but we have a system for that now.
- Some internal changes that make maintaining code much happier for us, including better enum to string handling and much faster compiles.
- Other minor things
For the full patch notes, including the list of ‘fun changes’ to the game, be sure to check out the Starbound website.