Greetings!  This is it! The very last of this Prelude series.  I hope you've enjoyed them.

So now let's talk about modding.

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During the assault on Earth by an alien armada, the game crashed to the bluescreen, (never happened to this machine before) with a critical_structure_corruption error. After i rebooted, attempted to load game and it crashes to the desktop. I even deleted the last few saves but it always has the same result. 44 hours of playtime...

Found a solution: disable steamcloud saving for this game; go to my documents/star control saves and delete autosaves and last save.

Greetings!

Wow! What a fantastic week! Like many of you, we weren't sure what the reception would be. How many people are into space adventure/RPG games? I've even seen debates on what exactly is an RPG?

Here's what we have planned for this week:

Translation (Перевод)

Russia is the #2 market for this game. With German a close #3. The translations came in a lot hotter than we expected due to the star and planet names.

We are hoping very much to have a package from Moscow waiting in our inbox with the final translations so that we can get those up. We will also be updating the other languages as people find issues. Humor...is not always easy to translate.

Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese are also supposed to get in but they might slip to the v1.01 update to get more QA time. Finnish and Norwegian are also currently in QA. 

Stability

Overall stability is looking pretty good. But we have definitely encountered a few really baffling things and we know some of you are into this sort of thing like we are so we'll keep you up to date on the detective work. But here are the biggies:

1. Some people have reported not being able to load and save games. That's obviously a huge issue. But it dies immediately upon trying to open that dialog. 

2. Crash on start up. This is, so far, 95% because people have altered their page file size to be smaller or fixed. Don't do that (I used to do it too). Windows 10 commits memory based on your core size if the game loads assets via that core. So yes, no matter what, if you play long enough even though the game might only be using 2G, it will commit 16Gigs. It's not leaking, the OS is caching it. So you an imagine what happens if you have a fixed page file.

3. Random locks/pauses. So far, this is largely due to CPU or GPU throttling (mainly GPU throttling). Your NVIDIA or AMD GPU can get very hot playing this game because the engine will use multiple CPU cores to send data to your GPU. You might need to make your GPU fans more aggressive.

For the update, we're going to put a tiny throttle to prevent this issue (don't worry it won't slow things down).

Usability and buglets

1. Fix for SUPER-ULTRA wide monitors. (32x9). You crazy people! We love ya, BEST FRIENDS!

2. Some of the alien meeting achievements aren't working right depending on timing. Fixed.

3. The game will let you know that you don't need to land on every crummy planet if you're landing on a bunch of crummy planets. #1 negative review source has been people landing on thousands of planets and thinking that's the way to make money. SC doesn't have a sand based (silicon) based economy.

4. Improved AI for the fleet controller module.

5. Updated UI for turning on and off the fleet controller module during battle.

6. Mappable E for interact.

7. Talk to MS (again) about whitelisting Star Control from Windows Defender so that it quits scanning all our files (for those experiencing load time pain).

8. Auto-Pilot will warn player that their destination is beyond their fuel range.

9. Typos. (removing them, not adding them).

10. Option to remove movie subtitles.

More to come!

Thank you everyone for your support! And as always, we would appreciate it a lot if you would review the game on Steam (good, bad, ugly). We read all the reviews and your posts.

Cheers!

Explore the galaxy, investigate unique worlds, contact new civilizations, and battle hostile aliens in Star Control: Origins! Take command of Earth's first interstellar starship in this exciting open universe space-adventure RPG and save the Earth at all costs and by any means necessary. Learn more.

In the previous Prelude, I mentioned that, early on, there was an expectation that a lot more time was going to be spent exploring planets than we ultimately chose to execute on.

Today, let's take a look at the menagerie of creatures we had considered back when we believed that the planets would be where players would spend most of their time.

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Chess is one of oldest strategy games of all time, and the most successful having been passed down across generations for two millennia. Depending on how you define esports, Chess could now be considered one via platforms such as chess.com, with computerization and AI having increased accessibility and the scope of what's possible within Chess as a product. The long-term thriving and proliferation of Chess is a consequence of incredibly elegant game design both regarding depth but also simplicity. Today I'll be analyzing Chess through the lens of my RTS perspective, praising its design and drawing lessons that RTS games can learn from its success. I'm not a Chess expert, but I have a great appreciation for it, growing up with it and still enjoy playing it casually. 

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The soundtrack features over 40 compositions from renowned composers Mason Fisher (Age of Wonders, Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor) and Riku Nuottajärvi (Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters) that encompass the spirit of Star Control: Origins perfectly. Learn more.

The best laid plans...

Let's talk about the environments of Star Control...

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Back in part 9, I touched briefly on the art style with the debate we had on having a "mobile" style UI vs. an immersive style UI. Today, I want to walk you through how the art style itself evolved during the five year development of Star Control: Origins.

Let's jump right in..

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Experience a massive living universe in Star Control: Origins! Check out our trailer featuring all-new gameplay footage of diverse aliens, unique planets, and exciting quests here.