Starward Rogue:Post-1.0 Release Notes

Version 1.016

(This isn't done yet, we're still working on it.)

• More SFX work. New Incinerator, Twin Machineguns, Precision Railgun, Splitfire Cannon, Venomous Stinger, Riot Suppressor, NarcoStinger, BoomerangNeedler,TorpedoCannon, Deleter,HolyFire, HunterKiller, GravityCannon, Corona and Detonating Rose explosion SFX. Thanks to Goldenwolf for helping me with this!

• Improved handling of ricochets to avoid cases where shots just disappear on hitting a wall.
  • Thanks to ptarth for extensive testing and feedback on this.

• Turned the Hornet Nest SFX volume down a bit. Also did the same for the Guardian Gun, Fragment Cannon, Cluster Launcher, Phaser and the Translocator.
  • Thanks to Krysle Quinsen, Econael, and Crolley for the feedback!

• Fixed a bug where your familiars could auto-target bouncing mine emitters, which are invisible and can't be hit anyway.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo and Solar Marine for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where familiar-based weapons couldn't harm wake-on-shot enemies (like facerippers) at all, even after the enemy was awake.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman, Cinth, and Pepisolo for reporting.

• Increased Guardian Blaster width. Tweaked Raincannon colour. Tweaked Suppressor shot size and colour. Improved the Grapeshot. Now fires a burst of shots. It's now a limited ammo, but high power weapon. Tweaked Precision Railgun.

• Made it very unlikely to slide through a one-way tile next to a wall by running into the wall.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo and ptarth for reporting.

• Put in some code to hopefully prevent some issues with loading sounds in some cases.
  • Thanks to Econael, Amitiel, and samnainocard for reporting.

Version 1.015

(Released February 25th, 2016)

• New Enemy Aegis added. 4 variations
  • Thanks to community member Hearteater for creating these!

• Correct icon added for the Masochism consumable.
  • Thanks to ScrObot for reporting!

• Orbital familiar hijinks have been sorted out. They'll fight fairly for now.
  • Thanks to everyone who reported for reporting!

• Entities with ship_category="RandomFloatingChunksOfStuff" (i.e. antigravitate blockade shards) can no longer proc health-on-kill or item-on-kill modifiers.
  • Thanks to Ayrix and dfinlay for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the "kill final boss with all mechs" achievement (and similar one for super-final boss) considered the tutorial mech as in that group.
  • Thanks to pmkenny1234 for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where progress on the "kill final boss with all mechs" achievement (and similar one for super-final boss) was not being tracked properly.
  • Note: if you've gotten a kill-final/superfinal-boss-with-specific-mech achievement, and you load an old save, it will update the progress tracking for these kill-with-all achievements.
  • Thanks to pmkenny1234 for reporting.

• Starting work on the SFX overhaul (which will take a long time to complete, bit by bit). New Banshee, Anangu, Energy Shield Module, TurboBlaster, Translocator, Railgun, PhaserGun,SplinterCannon,HornetNest,GrenadeLauncher,ClusterLauncher,PoisonedKnife,GuardianGun SFX added. Thanks to Goldenwolf for helping me with this!

• 14 more new rooms added.
  • Thanks to community member Reath for creating these!

• A few of the weedier enemies in CMP_EnemyShips have been set to not seed later in the game. Facerippers, for example, seem too weak to be seeding on later floors.

• Set the few reticule based items to not seed until they are overhauled as they don't work very well on joypad.

• Lots of tweaks to the main gun upgrades. More main gun upgrade tweaks.

• Overhauled the Disruptor energy weapon, including new SFX. It is now a shorter range spread shot that disrupts enemy movement and fire rate. The longer you hold the burst, the stronger the disruption.

• Viper Difficulty Reduction
  • Slowed Homing Shots
  • Decreased Homing Shot Homing Range
  • Changed color patterns so that Red, BurningRed, and Purple are only on homing shots.Red Snakes = Bad Snakes!
  • Added Egg shot to produce the Snake Shots (previously was invisible)
  • Added do_not_do_rest_of_logic_on_early_death to egg shot. Kill the egg, and the baby snake dies.

Version 1.014

(Released February 19th, 2016)

• Flame tank mech has had it's main weapon rebalanced a bit

• Blade Module is now found only in the secret room, instead of the sacrifice room

• Tactical Nuke now does 650 damage and a guaranteed crit

• Basic Drone now costs 90 credits instead of 20

• STG-4377 damage has been lowered, and it's spread has been widened, and it no longer has infinite range

• Big Leaky Battery's energy drain effect is now slightly faster

• MajorCoinage now has a 40% chance of activating instead of 100%

• Charger's attack range has been reduced

• Labyrinth's chaser shot no longer dies on contact with the player

• Missiles now explode on the very first shot they hit (they should be better at deflection now)

• Combat Shield's energy cost slightly reduced

• Multiple exploits have been negated in the fight with Terminus
  • The teleporters in the room are now one-way, and you cannot wake the boss with bullets from that location, or even damage it from there; you must step out of the teleporter to wake it
  • In addition, Terminus is now completely invincible as long as either of it's two guardians are in the room. If you try to skip them by running through them to the teleporters, you'll permanently trap yourself in an unwinnable state. No cheating, now...

• Glassbreaker's sacrifice cost reduced by 1

• Incineration module damage increased to 100
  • It also has a damage cap though, which is also 100

• Consumable "Code: Overdrive" has had it's effective duration doubled

• Battalion enemy now does not spawn until floor 6

• The Corrosive Drone shots were intercepting other shots making it super OP. Fixed this so that they no longer intercept other shots.
  • Thanks for Pardinuz for reporting!

• Escape now closes the Credits window.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Now switching between a secret room and a room with door-closing enemies does not restore your shields.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Magnetic shot drift no longer happens in shop rooms, to avoid accidents with the shopkeeper.
  • Thanks to ventifer for reporting.

• Three varieties of new enemy Blademorph added. Thanks to community member Zharmad for creating these!

• Updated the repulsive hornet mine to a more high res shot image. Also did the same for the grenade launcher and gravity cannon shot. Added variant colour flea guard shots.

• Tweaked phase 1 Invader health and revenge spawner fire rate.

• Deadly Viper enemy recategorized as a Fearsome_7x7

• Shred Guardians recategorized as Wanderer_3x3

• Reactive Blast Module is now the Reactive Shock Module
  • Instead of creating an explosion, it now creates a short range shockwave to clear bullets around the player
  • It now also can appear in the Defensive Shop, with a credit cost of 65

• Added two more varieties of Krill Spitter

• Labyrinth's chaser shot can no longer be cancelled

• Enemy orbital familiars no longer render before you fully enter the room, since their orbiting offsets aren't set up until after you enter and that led to them rendering in weird places.
  • Thanks to dfinlay, Misery, ptarth, and dumpsterKEEPER for reporting.

• Fixed some annoying cosmetic things with Reaper. Fixed it so that the Hunter nets bounce off walls more reliably.

• Overhauled the Narcotics Drone to be more desirable. It now attacks of its own accord and its debuffs occur more frequently.

• Tweaked Narcotics Drone description. Reduced the Corrosive Drone Size.

• Added a description to the Masochism probation.
  • Thanks to ScrObot for reporting and Cinth for coming up with the description.

• Fixed the Keyprentice and Keymaster perks.
  • Fix provided by Cinth! Thanks!

• Added new drone Kamikaze Minibot. Available from all good retailers. -- Note, Kamikaze Drone had to be pulled due to a bug. If you still want to try it out, remove is_not_ready_to_seed="true" from the Kamikaze Minibot xml in Dayton_PowerUps.xml. It currently has issues going through teleporters. Sorry!

• Corrupting Power Incredibility no long kills players on pick-up.
  • Also fixed the issue with Corrupting Power not dropping if you picked up another incredibility.
  • Thanks to dfinlay for the report.

• Changed the room BGS_KickingTheHive so that there is less backtracking needed.
  • Thanks to Reath for reporting!

• Reduced the Drone size across the board a little.

• New Drone Autocannon Minibot added.

• Fixed the issue with the Sacrifice shops. No more unexpected deaths from this source!

• Fixed the broken Energy Shield module. A little more work is needed before it's completely polished, though.

Version 1.013

(Released February 10th, 2016)

• Added 14 new rooms courtesy of community member Reath. Thanks, Reath!

• New entity attribute:
  • pick_up_even_if_wastes_resources (bool)
    • if set, this item can be picked up even if it grants health/items that the player can't benefit from because they're at max
    • useful if that health/item grant is just a secondary effect and you want the primary effect to always be available
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• Now when you take a shield hit you glow blue instead of red.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• Now if there's both enemies and a power generator in the room, simply defeating the enemies will open the doors but will not cause the room to be considered "won" (which is what defines the normal trap-shutdown behavior, etc).
  • Thanks to Enrymion and Misery for suggesting.

• Viper enemy code has been improved, and modified to have better performance. Thanks, Ptarth for creating these changes!

• MetalGrinder now comes with an extra sneaky attack. Thanks for creating the changes Ptarth!

• New Enemy, Krill Spitter added courtesy of community member Ayrix. Thanks for creating the enemy Ayrix!

• Added EffectType.ChangeCurrentInventory
  • instantly changes the player's inventory of (related_item) by (magnitude) according to (math, default Add)
  • normally EntityModifierType.InventoryChangePerSecond takes care of any need for this, but when you want to add an exact amount (like with the probation rewards) this avoids that modifier's imprecision.
  • it's now used instead of InventoryChangePerSecond for those cases
  • Thanks to Maurog, Danjuro, zharmad, and LaGrange for inspiring this change.

• The cheap item shop rooms no longer contain glass shootables, but instead now have caltrops in those places. This way you don't accidentally shoot the shopkeeper, but it's also a visual clue as to the type of shop (each type of shop has its own little object sort as a visual clue).
  • Thanks to Cinth for suggesting.

• Risky Assassin no longer kills you when you pick it up with hull damage.
• Risky Assassin now also will remember where your Max HP is so if you decide to swap it out later, you aren't stuck with 1/1 HP.
  • Thanks to Cinth for creating this fix!

• Tweaked Bullet Drone, and overhauled Corrosive Drone to be more desirable.

• Changed the misleading description of the Berserker level up perk.
  • Thanks to Whiskeh and Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where there were very, very few bosses that could actually seed on floor 6, and some simply couldn't seed at all (being restricted to floor 7, which always has... something else), and others could only seed if you'd satisfied certain conditions. This led to no boss room on floor 6. A clever trick on part of the game, but we're nerfing that strategy.
  • Thanks to Samichama, zharmad, zekafonss, Cinth, and others for reporting.

• Put in some extra checks in mapgen to prevent giving you floors with no boss rooms.
  • This won't fix old runs, since the mapgen for all the floors in that run is already done there. But future runs will benefit from this.
  • Thanks to Samichama, zharmad, zekafonss, Cinth, and others for reporting.

• Halved the lifespan of the Shred Guardian blades so that they don't overstay their welcome.
  • Thanks to Discotech for the feedback!

• Overhauled Tag Team drone. It now pathfinds to the player so it doesn't get stuck, and its shots don't obscure your vision as much as it used to. It's easier to use as a DPS booster now.

• Added new enemy Anangu Initiate and variant Anangu Warrior. Thanks, Zharmad for creating these enemies!

• Added Hard Mode system for Reaper.

• Started looking through the secondary weapons systems for missing sound effects (and adding some if missing, of course). Also tweaked a few shot images, one was using excessive scaling so swapped it for a higher resolution image. (note to self: I'm up to Grapeshot in the item pickup xml)

• Updated the Abmoog Shield enemy to not look like the ram, which might be confusing for the player. Thanks for creating the change, Ptarth!

• Added a confirm-popup when starting a tutorial while you have an active non-tutorial run going in the same file (as it overwrites that active run).
  • Thanks to Kevin Tang for inspiring this change.

• Now when you buy a health-cost item it increases the cost of future health-cost items during that run by 2. Stacks.

• Now when zamboni-behavior enemies (like the blind lady enemies) are nudged by a one-way-arrow tile they treat it as a wall collision and so should reverse direction, etc.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for suggesting.

• Now when you gain max health via shard pickups it will give you a big central screen message to that effect (once you're out of battle, same as when you level up)
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

• Now when you pick up health/missiles/health-shards/keycards/credits there's a little floating text near you to that effect.
  • XP was already being announced in a similar way near either the thing killed (if you gained the XP that way) or near you (if it's from an XP pickup or a deposit box).
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

• Gain-health-on-kill and gain-item-on-kill modifiers no longer proc when killing enemy familiars and stuff from enemy spawners.
  • Thanks to Cloud51023 for reporting.

• Invader Boss upgraded to version 4.0! The boss now has multiple stages, and has been improved for all difficulties. Thanks, Ptarth for creating the changes!

• The in-game credits now properly thank the alpha testers, the community contributors, and note Erik as being involved in the game design.

• Beast Mode: Reduced to 20% attack power. It was previously 40% attack power.

• Anger Protocol: Reduced to 20% attack power. It was previously 25% attack power.

• Large and in Charge: Reduced to 20% attack power. It previously was 25% attack power.

• Changed flags on Harmony and Rocket Man to not show up with other power-ups in the pause menu. Probation items display their status on the primary screen and this was causing confusion.
  • Thanks to LaGrange for the report and Cinth for the fixes!

• The obstacle lasers are now more enthusiastic about doing their job, in terms of hit detection and frequency of checking, so that even if you sprint across them you will be much more likely to take damage.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Both versions of the Mirror boss are now more dangerous and more tanky, and now have their own unique Hard Mode patterns.

• Fixed a bug where gamepad/keyboard aiming of melee primary weapons didn't really work because it wasn't using the mouse version's rule of "always act like it has at least 30 range for angle computations".
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Improved the responsiveness of gamepad/keyboard firing to aim in the direction specified even for the first shot (which previously tended to go towards wherever you were facing before pressing the button).

Version 1.012

(Released February 2nd, 2016)

• Got rid of the diagonal wall smoothing from the prior version. Two or three days of working on that and it's just not tenable.
  • Thanks to Cinth and ghoti221 for reporting.

Version 1.011

(Released February 2nd, 2016)

• New enemies, Viper, Vicious Viper, and Deadly Viper integrated. Vicious starts seeding on floor 3. Deadly starts seeding on floor 5.
  • Thanks to Ptarth for creating these enemies!

• Player collision with angled walls is now a lot smoother.

• Starward Rogue has now been migrated to Unity 5.3.2, up from version 4.7 just a week or so ago. We are moving to Unity 5 with our next project, and thus we finally had a reason compelling enough to upgrade our unity 3D licenses. With that it thus made sense to also get Starward Rogue on the very latest and greatest.
  • Overall this doesn't make a whole lot of difference to the game itself, to be honest. But it may have some slightly better compatibility on linux and osx.

• One new benefit of being on unity 5 is that the game now is able to lock the cursor to the window when you are playing in windowed mode or on fullscreen in multiple monitors. This unfortunately only works on linux and windows for some reason (this is the stated support level in unity 3d), and on windows it's still possible to grab the title bar and the other resize bar bits. But it's still vastly better than before.
  • We have it set so that it doesn't lock your cursor until it detects a keypress inside the game itself, and it disables itself if you open the menu or hit the cancel button.

• The hitboxes for all the mechs are now half as large as they were before. This is more in line with most SHMUPs and Isaac and a number of other games, and allows for more precision play.

• Updated the Demesne enemy substantially in order to make it both use higher-performance shot logic as well as not use so incredibly many shots. It was definitely a big drain on performance in any room it was in.

• A completely new variant of Shred Guardian has been added, plus some balance fixes for the other variants.
  • Thanks to Ptarth for creating the new variant and providing the balance tweaks!

• Added a new settings option to the extras tab:
  • Debug: Check XML Validity
    • If this is on, then when XML files are read in it will check to see if there are any attributes that refer to nonexistent features. These generally indicate typos or other xml errors. This doubles the amount of time it takes to parse the xml, though, so it's off by default (it's still fast either way).
  • This solves some minor performance issues introduced in version 1.010 when this was added. However it's not related to the overall larger hitching.
  • A bug relating to this has also now been fixed that was wasting about 50MB of RAM, and this bug may have been the cause of the overall hitching we started seeing in 1.010.

Version 1.010

(Released January 30th, 2016)

• The way that the completion percentage is calculated has been massively updated to now include your perfections against bosses, your wins with incredibilities, and so on.

• The full 7-floor runs now unlock after 3 runs rather than 10.
  • We originally did it as 10 because another popular game in the genre does that. But lately we've been getting frustrated at how long it takes before players are even able to see that awesome content that comes after beating The Warden three times. For a youtuber or a twitch streamer it's really quite a time investment to even consider it.
  • Thanks to dfinlay for giving us the kick in the pants to actually make the shift, though. :)

• Fixed a scripting mistake on Cheapskate.
  • Thanks to sherpajack for reporting.

• Added an attribute to entity nodes: frequency_in_enemy_seeding (int, default 100)
  • this is actually an alias to frequency_in_item_pools, which now also impacts normal enemy seeding frequencies, but this name would make more sense in the xml for enemies

• Fixed a bug where the "win run having held incredibility X since Floor 1" achievements weren't working because they were requiring you to pick the item up on Floor Zero... um, yea, sorry.
  • Thanks to Soupinator for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the statistics window wouldn't respond to the Cancel or OpenMenu keybinds, and thus couldn't be closed via controller.
  • Thanks to Reath for reporting.

• Now if you somehow get stuck completely outside the room's boundary rectangle it will gradually bump you into it, to avoid it being a bricked run.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where in the rare cases that floor generation just couldn't come up with something after a hundred tries, you could get a partial run generated but not the whole thing. Now in those cases it just rerolls the whole dungeon, and keeps jolly well doing so until it finishes one properly.

• Fixed a bug where floorgen would sometimes allow mismatched door connections, which could leave you stuck in a wall if you went through one. Now it throws those floors back.

• Now when you use a mysterious circuit you didn't know about yet it displays a message in the upper-left with the name and description of the now-known circuit.

• Setting a bullet pattern loop's iterations to zero just has it never execute its body now, instead of acting like iterations="1".
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Halved the frequency at which Tiny Transport seeds.
• Further reduced the frequency at which Tiny Transport seeds. They should be pretty rare now. Slightly reduced the amount of drops each one can give. Credit Tiny Transport now drops 3 credits per drop in order to balance the usefulness of its drops compared to the other two varieties of ship.
  • Thanks to Dfindlay and Amitiel for the feedback.

• Now when the game is loading xml content, it checks afterward to see if there's any data (specifically, attributes) it didn't use, and if it finds any it fusses in a short message in the upper-right message log and dumps the details to UnrequestedXMLAttributes.txt
  • Bear in mind that the message log doesn't show on the title screen, but does show on the file select screen.
  • Thanks to ptarth, zharmad, Misery, and many others for inspiring this change.

• The text shown near the top for active probations has been cleaned up to not have stray zeroes and weird descriptions and so on.

• Some updates have been made to the input handling to fix an issue where the custom dead zones were apparently not being properly applied to the left and right thumbsticks in all cases, particularly on linux -- but in general possibly on most cases where xinput is not being used.
  • Thanks to HerrGnatz and PoloBaquerizoH for reporting.

• Added a new Shred Guardian courtesy of community member ptarth.

• Fat Bullets is now Precision Ammo - Bullets are 25% smaller but also deal 20% more damage.

• Enormous Bullets is now Contaminated Ammo - Bullets poison enemies for 50 damage over 2 seconds.

Version 1.009

(Released January 28th, 2016)

• Expanded the new "does not block sight even though it blocks pathing" thing to a bunch more room features; the enemies may not actually be able to _hit_ you while you're hiding behind that laser emitter, but they can try. And have a much better chance than if you were actually behind a solid wall.

• Added new attribute to the bullet pattern "loop" node: take_pants_off_head (bool)
  • This suppresses, for this loop tag, the longstanding (all the way back to TLF) bug where on iterations after the first it would often skip the first action in the loop.
  • For the less sarcastic content contributors, you can use an alias for this new attribute: suppress_loop_bug
  • This defaults to false because many of the existing loop tags would cause infinite-loop behavior if the bug were fixed for them.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, and others for reporting.

• Added stats for how many runs until you unlock 7-floor runs, and for which incredibilities you've won a run while holding.

• Energized Glass Hull is now disabled (likely to be removed unless it it re-worked).
  • New Incredibility - Corrupting Power : Gain a high amount of max energy and you will regenerate energy over time... but at what cost? ;)

• A new "metal grinder" deadly pursuer enemy has been added to the game.
  • Credit to community member ptarth for yet another awesome creation.

• A new "Tiny Transport" enemy has been added to the game.
  • Tiny Transport. These are kind of like the health and potion gnomes from Golden Axe; the more hits you can get in on them before they explode, the more drops you get.

• A number of OSX controller incompatibilities (and linux ones as well) should now be solved. We had not noticed that were were a preponderance of preprocessor compiler directives in the InControl code, rather than using Application.platform. Given we compile on windows, this created a problem. We've shifted everything over to be compile-computer-agnostic, so presumably those issues (they were actually missing bindings) should be fixed.
  • Please do let us know if this doesn't do it, though. We haven't actually had a chance to test it out in the situations that were an issue before. It's been a... trying... day.
  • Thanks to Sounds, Sounds of Silence, beatnikbedlam, lessster, and RuySan for reporting.

Version 1.008

(Released January 27th, 2016)

• Kill tracking for multi-stage entities now only happens when the final stage dies, and it tracks under the first stage's name.
  • This avoids a problem where you got "credit" for killing a boss when you'd only killed the first stage, even if you then died before winning the fight.
  • Thanks to Danjuro for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the difficulty of the tutorial was being set according to the last run of the test chamber (which is basically just for devs and modders), and since the tutorial is the first thing that runs when you start a new file it could result in all your new files being set to Misery difficulty without you realizing it.
  • This may have only impacted a certain developer who was wondering why he was suddenly so bad at this game.

• The game is now way more aggressive about using different room scripts for rooms of the same general type, until it runs out of "new" ones and then it just starts over.

• The energy bar in the lower-left now shows your actual current and max amount of energy.
  • Thanks to Ljas for suggesting.

• Now any inventory item type (missiles, energy, etc) that has a maximum cannot have that maximum modified below 1. Otherwise when it hit zero it just becomes "no max" and doesn't work right.
  • Thanks to Nargasse for reporting.

• The minimap now doesn't show icons for missiles or credits left in a room if you're at max capacity for those items.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where weapons with shots_per_salvo > 1 and placed in a system offset would not properly offset the secondary shots.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• There's now a short "Victory!" display after you win a run, followed by a fade to black, rather than dumping you straight to the menu when the last floor boss dies.
  • You are invincible during this time.
  • Thanks to Ljas and zharmad for inspiring this change

• Keyprentice is now on level 3 instead of level 9, and it now only gives you 5 keys instead of 10.
  • Keymaster is now on level 8 instead of level 10, and now only gives you 20 keys instead of 50.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• When we updated the game to the new version of Unity, apparently it switched our fullscreen mode into windowed borderless instead of true fullscreen mode, which performs worse. It now runs in true fullscreen mode again.
  • Thanks to Soupinator for reporting.
  • Also thanks to his workaround for v1.007: "Current workaround: use -force-opengl in the command line, since fullscreen is only broken in the Direct3D renderer, but this makes the graphics a bit fuzzy."

• In an effort to make sure you actually see the various items we worked so hard to make, and to make getting loot more exciting:
  • Your base chance to get loot after winning a room is the same, but each time you fail the roll it goes up for next time until it succeeds.
  • When room-win loot would give you a consumable item (as opposed to a minor item), at various intervals it will instead give you a main-weapon, energy-weapon, or power-up item. Those intervals are randomized but controlled to ensure some rate of each.
  • When seeding from many of the significant item pools, the game's now fairly aggressive about not seeding the same thing more than once when there are still things that haven't been seeded. When it runs out of choices under this rule it starts over for that (group of) pools.
  • When you open an unlocked chest, you have a small chance of getting loot from the locked-chest pool. If this roll fails the chance goes up for next time until it succeeds.
  • The game is now much more aggressive at making sure it seeds all of the available reward/shop rooms before it goes back to ones it's already seeded in that run.
  • Thanks to Misery, Wingflier, evilution, zharmad, Matruchus, and others for inspiring these changes.

• The max-health reduction from losing a condemned room or from buying an item with health are now applied after the difficulty-based health multipliers, so they don't cause greater-than-expected losses on lower difficulties.
  • Thanks to Jacic for reporting.

• XP yield from depositing credits at a console is now multiplied by floor number, as with other XP gain.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for suggesting.

• Added a button to the test chamber screen that tries to open the Starward Rogue wiki in your browser.

• Now when you have the steam overlay active, the game pauses in the same way as when the escape menu is open.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for reporting.

• Now when a room script is flipped on either the x axis or the y axis (but not both), any entities with passive_rotation_speed in the room act as if that value's sign were flipped.
  • Thanks to Tornis and Pepisolo for reporting.

• The visuals for caltrops and floating debris have been updated to be a lot more visible, since some folks were having trouble seeing them.

• The normal enemy health bar is now at the top where the boss health bar is (if both are shown, the non-boss one goes lower).
  • This also means the normal enemy health bar doesn't block other tooltip info from showing, and vice versa.
  • Thanks to Castruccio and zharmad for inspiring this change.

• Brute now only grants a 10% bonus to attack power, not a 20% bonus. That was getting to be a bit overpowered.

• The costs of items in the health sacrifice shops are now much more substantial, since the overall amounts of health players have these days is a lot higher and thus these were way too cheap to get.
  • Anything that cost 3 before now costs 7, things that cost 2 before now cost 5, and things that cost 1 before now cost 3.

• Sideshot no longer seeds until you are two floors down.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The term "reload time" has uniformly been changed to be "fire rate." Before both terms were used, which was confusing.
  • Thanks to Tornis for suggesting.

• In recent builds, Terror Bubbles were just sitting there on Normal difficulty and down, because they had no weapons on those difficulties. Fixed!
  • Thanks to Cinth and Nova225 for reporting.

• The impassable glass blocks that you can shoot through now no longer block line of sight.
  • Note: this won't help with rooms you've already entered, because the data is set up when the block is spawned.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and Misery for reporting.

• Now if you've picked up an incredibility, and you pick up another, the first is dropped on the ground.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The fire left by your mech when you have a hotrod system is now much larger, thus looking more interesting.

• The game now uses a scaled radial dead zone of 0.25 for all analog input thumbsticks, which means that they should all "just work" now.
  • This is the same as they had prior to us moving to the more recent InControl asset, which was using 0.2 instead and was using an inferior algorithm.
  • This in particular should patch up the XBox 360 controllers that are a little worn. If any of them still have trouble, then there are now sliders inside the main Game tab of the settings window that allow you to adjust these to the needs of your particular controller.
  • Thanks to [ES.GR] Ziltoid Le Muet (Cpl), Sounds, lessster, Invader Xom, Rhakyr, Castruccio, beatnikbedlam, and Apathetic for reporting.

Version 1.007

(Released January 26th, 2016)

• Fixed a bug where bouncing mines had a different damage type (Ballistic) than stationary mines (Explosive), and thus stuff that gave immunity to explosive damage didn't protect you from bouncing mines.
  • Thanks to waylon531 for reporting.

• Now when you press E to level up, if there are any more of those big central screen messages still showing they're cleared so they don't get in the way of the level up display.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for inspiring this change.

• Made the glass pots no longer shootable by enemies.

• There will no longer ever be more than one Sideshot seeded per room, thanks to a new never_seed_more_than_one_per_room flag on it.
  • This flag is ignored on Misery difficulty, so you can run into really brutal groups of enemies there still.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• The game now properly uses aliases for some of the common center-gamepad buttons so that they all map the same way across gamepads. Aka the Menu button on the XBox One controller is the same as Start on the 360. And the View button on the XB1 is the same as the Back on the 360. That way you don't have to change your default mappings around to get those to work. Start and Select also map to those, respectively, for usage on PS3 controllers and similar.
  • In the past this was set up for the 360, but with the prior version we inadvertently set this up for the XB1 so that the 360 then required a remapping to a control icon that looked identical. No longer!

• In windows, the game now uses XInput rather than the default wrappered unity input. This fixes a few lingering issues with the triggers on the xbox one controller in windows only (they were fine in other OSes as of last version).

• The game now allows you to back out of most windows using the menu button as well as the cancel button. This has been requested for a while, actually, and isn't related to the new input interface.

• Fixed up the way that the hitting escape/B/cancel to get out of the game at the main menu was not working properly in the prior version.

• Fixed a number of bugs relating to the virtual gamepad cursor in the escape menu selecting the wrong thing.

Version 1.006

(Released January 26th, 2016)

• Added new toggle to extras tab of settings window: Always Use OS Cursor
  • If this is on, the game never uses the gamepad "virtual cursor" even if the gamepad is in use.
  • Thanks to Saphirahk and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Now if the revealed minimap is so big that it overruns its borders on the escape menu, it is scaled down to at least roughly fit within it.
  • Thanks to Tolc for reporting.

• New "Gemini siblings" enemies from community member zharmad!

• Fixed a bug where shopkeeper kills were not checked for achievements because it never did the room-win logic for shops.
  • Thanks to Matruchus for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where one of the three code-branches that checks for waking the shopkeeper was checking the thing doing the damage rather than the shopkeeper for the waking-immunity to stuff not directly fired by the player.
  • Thanks to Reinhark, Cinth, and Matruchus for reporting.

• Fixed a null exception that could occur shortly after loading a save.
  • Thanks to Danjuro for reporting.

• Changed the logic of using keycards to unlock all doors in the room on the other side, rather than just the door facing you.
  • Otherwise a shop/item-room/etc that was locked could take two keys to get "through" to the other side, and if there was literally only one available and that was between you and the boss, well...
  • Also changed mapgen logic so that the next-to-start item room which often spawns cannot be locked, as that can cut off other areas of the map.
  • Thanks to SourKiwi for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the cryofreeze and other aoe effects would try to affect invincible stuff like caltrops.
  • In the case of cryofreeze, this could mean a lot of unnecessary sound effects.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the "if you destroy a health shard block in a room adjacent to an unknown secret room, reveal that secret room instead of spawning the health shard" logic was instead checking for _known_ secret rooms. Cute.
  • Also, now when you enter a room bordering an unknown secret room, and the room you're entering has no heath-shard blocks (that normally reveal the secret when you blow them up, if there is one to reveal), it tries to convert a normal bombable block to one of those.
    • If it fails to do that, it just reveals the secret room(s).
  • Thanks to nas1m, Watashiwa, and many others for reporting the frustration with secret rooms not being revealed.

• Now when the game is seeding pickups that go in your main gun, energy, missile, or attachment slots it will never pick what you've already got equipped at the time of the seeding.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• New enemy "Demesne" added
  • This is another "Fearsome" type of foe... be careful around this guy!

• Fixed a potential null exception bug when starting up the game.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Backfire now always uses BOTH of it's phases instead of randomly skipping to the second one.
  • It also now has more HP in both phases

• Now the game tracks when you pick up multiples of the same powerup (for instance, level up perks that may be picked multiple times) and displays x2, x3, etc to show that.
  • This won't show that for powerups picked up multiple times in older saves because it wasn't tracked.
  • Thanks to Kevin Feederline, FroBrodine, and waylon531 for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue accidentally introduced in version 1.005 where you could only pick up perks of each type one time, which would lead to blank perk selection screens on later levels.
  • Thanks to Reinhark for reporting.

• ItemGainChanceOnEnemyKill and ItemGainOnEnemyKill modifiers now only proc against Ship entities; so not shots or obstacles.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Keyboard / Gamepad Controls Updates

• Updated the game engine to Unity 4.7 instead of 4.6.7.
  • We generally try to avoid doing engine updates unless there are benefits or bugfixes that actually impact us. Past experience has taught us that new engine bugs appear unannounced, and we prefer to avoid those when possible by staying on known-stable versions until we need to not.
  • That said, this new version seems to be stable, and also is required in order to support the new InControl plugin.

• We have completely gutted the underlying gamepad support and rebuilt it from the ground up with the InControl asset store plugin as the underlying basis for it.
  • This solves the XBox One controller compatibility issues, as well as making default bindings for the playstation 4 controller and many other main controllers now automatically kick into place.

• The "Fire Up" and "Fire Up (Alt)" keybinds (and their down, left, and right counterparts) now cause your energy and missile weapons to target that direction too, even if normally they would target the mouse cursor.
  • Thanks to dfinlay for inspiring this change.

• There is a new Debug: Show Gamepad Raw Inputs option in the extras tab of the settings menu.
  • If this is on, then any detected raw input from your gamepads will be shown on the left side of the screen. Useful for debugging but not much else.

• The confirm popup now supports gamepad left-right (on either the dpad or the analog stick) to switch between the buttons, and the execute button to simulate a click on the highlighted button.
  • Thanks to Cyprene for inspiring this change.

• Note: these changes have caused us to need to reset all of the existing key bindings to their defaults. If you had custom mappings you will need to remap those. Apologies!

Version 1.005

(Released January 25th, 2016)

• Now when you use the in-game delete function on a file slot, it actually replaces that file with a very small file (just containing the text "deleted") which the game treats as an empty slot.
  • This way, steam cloud will not "helpfully" immediately repopulate the save file.
  • Thanks to ProfessorPaul1290 for reporting.

• Now if you get a corrupt save message you have the option (again, removed late in alpha) to keep or delete.
  • If you delete, it actually copies it to a backup location and overwrites the slot with a small file that the game will treat as empty but the steam cloud will not automatically copy back over.

• The perk screen now continues showing the previous HUD (for stat info).
  • Thanks to robdon for suggesting.

• The knockback_resistance stat now also applies to weapon kickback.

• The RedShift mech now has full immunity to both kickback and knockback.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for inspiring this change.

• set disappears_if_room_left to true on the antigravitate blockage shards
  • Thanks to Apathetic for inspiring this change.

• The boss "Backfire" is now active!
  • This has been completely redone from the ground up from what it used to be in the alpha. Be ready to deal with it's minions!

• The Warden no longer falls asleep during phase 4 of it's attack

• Fixed a bug where the recently added "missiles destroy shootables without them morphing into their more-damaged states" logic was causing the pathfinding-block on shootable-A and shootable-B objects to not be cleared when they died (because it was only being cleared when the C stage died, and that was being skipped).

• Fixed a bug where OnRoomSwitch effects could fire when switching from an old run to a new run.

• Fixed a bug where OnRoomSwitch effects that reduced hull health on the player would not actually do any damage due to the "invincible until leaves the doorway" logic.

• The Medical Emergency pickup now only does its damage when you enter a room for the first time, not every time you switch rooms.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for inspiring this change.

• The Impatience level-up perk now won't show up on the perk menu if you are already on the last floor of the run.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for suggesting.

• The minimap icon for major item rooms and health storage rooms now disappears if you've entered the room and there are no pickups on the floor.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug with QuadEE/ZMC_GlassPipes. It was possible to get a Pearl trapped inside of Glass Unbreakable blocks, which made it not shoot or be killable, making the room unexitable.

• Pearls now wake on being shot.
  • Thanks to Apathetic, Cinth, Paladinlord10, and Watashiwa for reporting.

Version 1.004

(Released January 23rd, 2016)

• The minimap on the escape menu now has mouseover tooltips on the individual rooms.
  • The tooltip also lists any items on the ground in that room, if you've been there before.

• Fixed a bug where a familiar that was supposed to only be for that room would respawn if you spawned it, left before it died, and deployed another familiar.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Put in further logic to prevent shopkeepers from being aggroed (or damaged) from sleep by anything other than a player-directed shot.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where chests and other animated "special objects" spawned after room completion were not having their animators set up and thus were invisible (until opened, in the chest case).
  • Thanks to Apathetic for reporting.

• Enemy Spawners now explode when the room is cleared.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The width of columns on the Statistics screen has been broadened to accommodate some of the item names being longer than they were when that screen was set up.
  • This also prevents the close button from overlapping the next page button.
  • Thanks to robdon for reporting.

• Added a "Fire Main Gun" key bind, replacing the hardcoded "hold down left mouse to fire main gun" logic.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the 5-familiar achievement was counting some familiars twice (or after they died).
  • Thanks to Apathetic for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where occasionally a direct-fire shot would be fired as if it were "leading" the target.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the logic for resetting your position after dying in the tutorial was not reopening the doors, and thus causing you to be stuck there on the threshold of the door, if you entered through one.
  • Thanks to Arnos for reporting.

• The game is now set to internally use the en-US format, so that hopefully those using other languages on the linux platform won't have to use the workaround of launching the game with the LC_ALL=C %command% or LANG=en_US %command launch option on.
  • Thanks to lessster for reporting.

• Now the boss intro only has the boss go halfway across the screen, and then scale up to dominate the screen before fading out.
  • Thanks to Omgaar for inspiring this change.

• The default Steam controller recommendation should is now 'Gamepad' instead of "Gamepad with high precision camera/aiming"
  • Thanks to death2cupbots for reporting.

Version 1.003

(Released January 22nd, 2016)

• Fixed a rather serious bug in the last version that was causing the player to not be able to move upon entering rooms. Err... yeah, not sure how that slipped past us. Real sorry about that. We are very tired and clearly should not be making major changes right now. Thanks for understanding!
  • Thanks to Isaac, Cyprene, waylon531, Apathetic, and tupelocase for reporting.

• The banshee now is more aggressive with its counterattacks again. Not so much as pre-1.0, but still a lot more than in 1.0.

Version 1.002

(Released January 22nd, 2016)

• Fixed a bug where you could fire your weapons during just-entered-room invincibility.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox and others for reporting.

• The text list of powerups at the bottom right of the escape menu is now a row/grid of icons with mouseovers for the names/descriptions.
  • Thanks to Apathetic and donblas for inspiring this change.

• A new music track has been composed for the game! FTB 629

Version 1.001

(Released January 22nd, 2016)

• The game will no longer seed secret rooms "from" shop, item, miniboss, secret, starting, or condemned rooms to avoid doors that look like they go to nowhere, or cannot be revealed.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where secret rooms were requiring a 2x2 free space on the grid instead of 1x1.

• Extended the destroy-enemy-shots-on-room-clear logic to continue clearing enemy shots from the room afterward instead of just once, as there are a few things that can continue to emit shots.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Updated the changelog to point to this new page.

• Fixed up a mouse input issue that was a recent consequence of a perhaps-foolish major fix to some really unusual gamepads last night, which then broke mouse support for some folks with trackpads. The new system should work for everyone, as it is more unified and gets rid of some of the legacy input code that has been weighing down the button clicking for some time now.
  • Basically unity has an "input" way of handling clicks and such, and a "gui" way of doing it. We used to do a hybrid of both. Now it's all the "input" type, which is better for a lot of reasons.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Previous Release Notes

Starward Rogue:Early Alpha Release Notes

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Starward Rogue Main Page