วีดีโอ

It is a bit comatose right now, isn't it. 😅

Well no updates have come to the "live" branch of the game, but the warp on the test side does make getting around quicker... Although it doesn't matter much on that version of the game since you can spawn items. There isn't much progress while the 0-3 developers wait (probably put on other tasks) until Steam addresses an issue with their peer-to-peer system that makes any multiplayer sometimes not connect players.

For the moment, maybe. There is development going on, the 2-3 guys (down from I think over 50 before launch) are running into more problems than anticipated. There have been patches to the test universe almost weekly, sometimes multiple times a week. But from a what you can do now point of view, there's not much new since the last major post-launch patch and not a whole lot of players to do it with.

It feels like I'm obligated to optimize (or at the very least compact) some of that code with all those IFs:b EDIT: the curse of yolol

Here's at the very least an alternative way of updating the internal states. btnN=1-:inSZ+:trans blnkN=:trans*(1+9*:inSZ) How to get to that becomes a bit easier to see when one notices that trans dictates whether blnkN is on or off and inSZ dictates the strength. And for btnN it is a question of inversion. An inversion because only one field is 0, so from inSZ AND NOT trans to NOT(inSZ AND NOT trans) which is the equivalent of NOT inSZ OR trans, which in yolol can be written as 1-inSZ + trans. To help see these interactions, one can write a logic table, where on the left one writes every logic bit and on the right the output. inSZ trans & blnkN btnN 0 0 & 0 1 0 1 & 1 1 1 0 & 0 0 1 1 & 10 1

Thank you. That is for sure the more efficient way of going about it. I probably would have done something similar if I wrote the code now. This is actually quite an old program of mine, maybe since right after launch... That being said, for beginners, a bunch of If statements make more sense than all that math, simple as that math may seem. Hopefully those that want to add this to another chip or just want it to be faster will see your comments.

@@XenoCow It's not necessarily the more efficient way, as it introduces more updates to the network (and too many of those and there's lag). It's what I wrote, an alternative. Maybe better, maybe worse. Though for beginners seeing how much something can be compressed is also a good experience.

@@JerbilKonai I should have been clearer. I meant YOLOL chip line space efficient and faster. I get that. But on the other hand, I get the feeling many players, or at least the ones we are currently lacking in the game, may not want to become programmers just to get something working. Just manually adding something to a ship is challenge enough for plenty of people. That's not to say I won't ever show complex YOLOL (as that breakdown of the camera, the decoder in particular demonstrates), but the ByteSized series is intended for any player of any skill level to understand. I would like to get into the nitty gritty of YOLOL some time. I have some of a script written for a short series that teaches people how to program using YOLOL, we'll see if I ever get around to it. 😅

That sounds very useful! I think for my purposes, having the whole YOLOL programs written by the python programs helped me to understand some of the weird ways, like the alternating offsets of the rangefinders as well as just the many times I needed to edit tons of chips at a time. The player-made work-arounds and hacks are part of my favorite part of what this game allows. Most games, especially MMOs, don't have many ways players can actually innovate around the constraints.

That could potentially be done. The main reason it's done sequentially now is because the strings that hold the characters to be printed are 127 characters long (or can be up to) whereas the encoded chunks are only 13 characters long. That being said... I just looked back through the code and realized that they don't share the strings between them. I must have just kept doing it that way since at the beginning of the project I thought I could put as much as I wanted onto a string so all the decoders would have shared the three strings. Thanks for pointing that out. That shouldn't be a difficult change.

I just made the change so that all the decoders run in parallel. It is so much faster now! Taking a picture now takes between 35-126 seconds down from of 3-12 minutes. Thank you very much for pointing out that flaw for me!

Thank you very much. I don't think I'll be taking on any projects this big again for a while.

258 chips is quite a lot... It probably took 2-3 days of time, but spread over many months. I even made early version way back in 2021 in the closed alpha but that didn't go anywhere.

Thank you very much! I think it shows how I was learning the software and getting more comfortable as the song gets more complex as it goes on.

It is unfortunately niche. I think between coming out when there were a few other big name space games, plus an overblown hypetrain in combination with a rushed release due to the financial issues/over-optimism on the devs part has been a recipe for low player numbers. The handful of programmers working on it now should be more sustainable for the company so that we might at least get to a beta 1.0 kind of state which should have enough to do to promote some more players.

Yeah, I'm sure there's even more potential locked in even what we have now. Here's hoping we get all sorts of other new and exciting devices to put the language to use.

Yeah it has, I have addressed that in more recent videos. That is very true. At the moment, it is more like a shared single-player sandbox than an MMO... There are occasional player-run events like the recent EosCon that bring players together, though.

Exactly. It's a bit strange, but it does the job.

( * > *)

I did! It took me quite a bit of work, though.

It is admittedly a little fish like with the eyes. 🐠

Thank you. Yeah, I'm happy to take a picture for you. Just tell me where sometime on the weekend or late evening Oceanic time and we can work something out.

Don't give me any ideas... I mean, the actual network would be possible, I think training it would have to be done outside the game if you wanted it trained before the end of the universe.

@@XenoCow Yes I will! Instead of a sensor wall you could have only a few sensors doing a scanning motion.

That's possible, but man would that be slower. You would be able to get higher resolution images, or wider angle... but now you have to do a bunch of triginometry to map those points from the scanning range finder onto a flat plane of the image. It's doable, but would take a good deal of thinking and tinkering to get working. You would save some complexity by not having so many addresses maybe.

I don't think I have heard of them before. The only cult-like groups I can think of were those Dark Star guys or maybe Collective. I don't think the normal PvPers quite count.

Yeah, Starbase is still in that kind of state where not many features are officially supported yet. It's a double edge sword. One one side it motivates people to make all sorts of crazy inventions for themselves using what they can (YOLOL, the in-game programming language is actually quite powerful, but the devices are still limited). Navigation near the starting stations, for instance was player driven since there was no map. With the introduction of the map in the test universe, there won't be as much need for that particular solution, though. But on your point of the devs, I am still waiting to make a final judgement of Frozenbyte. It's not like KSH has been without its own faults (Did they ever fix ladders switching the jetpack on/off?). I too hope dearly that Frozenbyte can pull through, this game engine is too cool to let go the way of the dodo.

but still cool

It is pretty much, just fewer vacuum tubes and tape reels. 😅

Yeah, It could be made faster if you have many chips per range finder. I just didn't want to spend a fortune and an eternity filling in the code into all of those. I also don't know if the game would be able to run over 1000 chips at once... All those range finders already lag the game a little. If you just wanted an image like the one on the viewfinder, it would totally be doable, though!

Yeah, I am actually surprised that I am the first one to do this. Maybe others attempted it and didn't share, or they decided not to due to the amount of work. As for a radar, I think that would totally be possible. As you could see in the rangefinder, if you only need an on/off signal, then it can work in just about real-time.

Thank you. I doubt I am the first to think of it. Just the first to be crazy enough to spend the time to do it. ;)

Thank you kindly!

Yeah, it's much easier to look at when it's not so sunny. I probably should have turned the ship around... but then you wouldn't be able to easily see what I was trying to take a picture of. Trade-offs. Thank you. :)

Thank you! I do do a good deal of programming in my normal day-to-day life, yeah. In actual hours... probably around 25-40 hours. It was split over 2-3 months so it's hard to say.

Ha ha. Thank you very much. I'm glad it's finally finished.

@@XenoCow I haven't played it in over a year, I thought the game was dead, but your video made me want to go back and play Starbase.... xoxox

Oh no, ha ha! Be sure to look into the new "Test Universe" version of the game (check your steam library) if you want to poke around with any of the new features like warp, the map, or siege.

Thank you. I'm glad you like it. Yeah, I hadn't played a whole lot during the lull of the delay time. It is a good time, albeit a little early, to get back into the game. There is at least some more optimism for the future of the game right now.

Thank you, and you haven't even seen exactly how it works yet. ;)

The endo rangefinder hitbox seems to be a block or maybe a pill shape... so there's not a lot to see, but go check out my post on the forum here to see the results: forum.starbasegame.com/threads/xenocows-starbase-videos.1380/page-2#post-26045

@@XenoCow still neat

I'll have to get some kind of group picture of a bunch of endos at some point. 😅

I clearly was unaware of how complicated this would be. I actually tried this before in closed alpha but the limit on the number of illuminated screens (I used text panels as display pixels) didn't let me see quite as much as I wanted to. If I do end up making that breakdown I mentioned, then you'll see just how complicated this really is... programs to write programs... Thank you, that's a big compliment!

@@XenoCow Well to be precise i think you win on both yolol and rangefinders here. My yolol is quite simple one liners for most of my chips aswell, and I still haven't figured out those new text displays lol.

One liners are probably the only way you were able to get your turrets to be responsive enough. I didn't have to spend as much time as you likely did to get things squished down into as few lines as possible. The text displays aren't too bad once you mess around with them a little, although I wish we had a "color display" or "premium display" so that each character could be individually colored (even better if it could just be a color block instead of this multi-layer nonsense I have to do now to fill a pixel).

That's great to hear! I'm sure your playthrough will be helpful for those that are either also new or curious what the early game is like from a beginner's direction. If there are any particular tutorials you'd like to see, feel free to suggest them here or even just send me a message in-game or something. :)

Maybe, I don't really know how influential I am with the devs, I don't think they've ever even commented on any of the suggestions I've made on the forums.😅 In any case, are you thinking about just for capital ships? The current plan for nations is that normal ships will be able to pass through borders while just being "detected" but unallied capital ships will be unable to enter except during sieges. I do think it would be interesting to have some sort of passport system that can be used to let players through with some confidence that they are safe to enter while also giving opportunities for blackmarket passport trading.

It was either that or football fields per beer (although beers are more common as a unit in Canadian).

Yep, I got to learn all about how much a pain in the butt exact angles are in the ship designer to make that one. No worries about questions about simple things, I don't mind at all. If you press U on the generator fuel chamber, there should be a field named "FuelChamberStoredHeat." Rename that field to something easy to read like "GenHeat" and rename the "PanelValue" field to the same thing on your progress bar. You can also change the "PanelMaxValue" field to be 1500 instead of 100 so that the bar fills properly. I hope this helps!

@@XenoCow Thanks a lot!

I was very confused for a moment there until I clicked on the timestamp... It's not just any doo doo, it's people doo doo! ha ha!

It's about darn time, isn't it?

Kilometer? I hardly know 'er!

ha HA! I have still yet to watch that one. I should get around to it.

Remember kids, Alien Technology's greatest weakness is a Windows95 virus! 😀

You are very right. Thank you for catching that and my apologies for making that mistake.

@@XenoCow All good great video . Helped alot

That's very fair. Personally, I don't really use the term "dead game" myself and was mostly poking some fun at those that accused the game of being a "dead game." If I was pressed to define it, for myself, I would say a game is dead when nobody (zero people) plays it anymore. So, for example, Club Penguin is a dead game since it can no longer be played, and thus is not played, by anyone. There are fan versions, but they are not the original. Similarly, although Super Mario Bros. is very old and has not been patched, I would not consider it a dead game since it still has many players. I would describe the more common version of "dead game" to mean a game with a low player base and/or one with limited future prospects of becoming more popular or being updated. I think that people often have their own levels of trust in the future prospects of games and how many players is a "low" number. Others seem to think that a game that had some number of players and now has fewer while not yet having all the promised features is a "dead game."

Yeah, it's a very strange feeling. The game world now feels very small whereas before it felt impossibly huge.

@@XenoCow its still impossibly huge, this helps a lot though, there is no point in an mmo if its mathematically impossible to come across others. warp could help or make it worse idk. even at the games peak, with lots of players, i think it took way to long to find natural pvp, I remember contracting a squad of mercenaries to protect my miner, only to realize the SZ was so big i didn't need them. the sheer size of the SZ ensured that some of the most fun aspects of the game would not be on display at launch, the game would have had much better player retention if the safe zones were all like they are at arma, which sounds brutal, but if it were combined with functional player stations, it would be acceptable, and good motive to leave spawn.

@@titaniumtemplar3560 Yeah, I'm not necessarily opposed to Warp as a tool to bring players together and letting people actually play the game instead of wandering aimlessly. I'll wait to see how it actually plays out before forming a full opinion on it.

Dusty on Discord pointed your comment out to me and says that there is an option in the settings to change that. (I didn't know either) So maybe take a look around there for a solution. :)

options menu and problem solved

Yeah, looks like it was not actually patched in until today.

:0

Unfortunately, you can't color the armor. That might get added later (there have been some concept art images shared that show exactly that). So, for now you just have to pick from the selection of armor and the colors they are.