itch.io

ok, this should be fixed. Somehow I uploaded a broken version. Just download it again. Thanks for reporting it!

hm, so it seems this is a general new issue with the version that I re-uploaded after updating the original one to Unreal. I have to investigate this.

I removed your other post. One is enough.

I will put all important information on my homepage now to have it all in one place. Here are reports now:

Monthly Report – starbasesim.com

Did a lot of multiplayer sessions at beginning of September, which are always great fun! But that slowed down in the second half when focusing on getting the first bigger update done, which will be released on Epic Games Store with a first version of Massey's and ship static firing.

There was one new builder this month via the new way with Ko-Fi commissions, but they didn't give me a name.

Total contributions for September are 386 bucks. This includes the first 1.5 days of Epic Games Store Revenue at end of August, which totaled to €142.44. So for EGS, I count the values from the month before the reporting one, as it looks like I get the final amount paid out at the end of the next month always. Then it's easier for me to use this value. I'll share more about the store next in the next report when the results for the first full month are in.

Thank you all for your contributions!

Now let's have a quick look back at the third year of StarbaseSim development:

• Almost the full first half of the third year was spent on implementing flying in multiplayer with new controllers.
• You can fly as many rockets as you want now with a pretty decent attitude and position controller.
• Overhauled the booster and ship with awesome highly detailed models by @ChameleonCir.
• Put the game on Epic Games Store, making it much easier to use multiplayer and keeping it updated.
• Did the first Unreal Engine update from 5.2 to 5.4. Probably won't make these updates too often...

In numbers:

• hit 1800 followers on X @StarbaseSim
• 884 subs on Youtube @ashtorak
• 33 paying members on Patron (110 total),  €172 per month
• still just around $30 per month on ko-fi, but a first commission in September brought it to $56 this month at least

The following Itch numbers are totals for all three years:

• views: 47.5k
• downloads: 16.1k
• payments: 106
• gross revenue: $1035

Itch numbers may be falling off a bit now since a lot of payments go via other channels, especially now with Epic Games Store. Also, there weren't much updates of the Itch version due to slow development overall with the controller stuff and everything.

In general, in the third year growth was much lower overall. Of course, there haven't been released a whole lot of fancy updates and there is still missing half of the launch site. So, it's not too surprising. I am surprised though how slow everything went with the development in Unreal Engine. Not just because the multiplayer things. Even overhauling the booster and ship models took very long. Hard to imagine that in last year's report I was fabulating  about going to the Moon maybe. Couldn't be further from it now!

Also since I'm broke again. Last year I wrote that I was applying for social welfare and I finally got it in November. But the whole process was super annoying and so I didn't continue with it. Instead, I am looking into getting into a normal engineering day job again now. Also to be able to work on some hardware again and not sit on the PC working on the game the whole day, every day, to the point that I didn't even get to see much of what was going on at Starbase anymore apart from the weekly RGV stream and some stuff that was shared on Discord.

Putting the game on the Epic Games Store was partially also in the hope that maybe it would do very well, so I could continue working full time on it, but with spending a bit less time. That didn't turn out to be the case. Looking at whole of September, it will be something like €600 revenue on EGS and if you add on top the other contributions, maybe it would barely be enough to survive. But keeping the revenue up like this after the EGS launch, would require to continue working 24/7, producing updates and promoting the game. I don't want to do that anymore. I want to play around more with the fun things again, and I can do that in my free time after the day job is done.

So, going forward, we will have less frequent updates and less content in them. But maybe they are going to be more fun, at least for me.

Also, I should mention that another reason why development was slow at the end of the third year was because I got a little bit of social life suddenly in June...the kind that will also require a bit more of a stable income now ;)

So, overall the year was as busy as expected. I guess, the next one will be the same. It will just be a bit easier on the mind for me, when I'm not poor anymore :D

Do you have any special antivirus software installed  on the PC? Then open that and see, if it has blocked StarbaseSim from opening. It should tell you somewhere, but depends on the software of course. 

Else search for "defender" and it should bring you up the windows anti virus stuff where you can find a report of its activities to see if it blocked it. Normally, that one shouldn't block it though.

There might be also other reasons for that message appearing. But I'd have to do some more googling myself first. Main reasons seem to be missing or corrupt files or antivirus blocking it though.

Make sure that you copied all files. Does the same folder run on PC? Else it can also be that antivirus software is preventing it from running. Check this also.

I'll add some known issues here. You can also post bug reports below. But please keep in mind that a lot of stuff is unfinished, especially with the position controllers. Regarding these you don't even need to report anything right now. Else, report it only if you think it's a big issue.

New Known Issues as of 2024-10-28:

- When looking at Massey's flame trench everything turns into bright yellow/orange color. This seems to happen only on a few older systems with integrated graphics typically. Need to do more investigation into this, if a lot of people encounter it. There will be a patch with a workaround later this week.

- "Run Script" tool tip is old or wrong, just check the readme files in the install folder

- Massey's plumes bounding box gets very apparent when pluming a lot. Might be improved with patch

- when driving to Massey's, close to its entrance there is an area where the SPMT wheels suddenly start to bump around heavily when you are driving with it lowered - fix in next patch

Old:

- The North/East position controller gets stuck sometimes. Switch it off and on again to reset it.

- Multiplayer replication doesn't have any prediction on most objects. So the faster things move, the more they start to lag. There seem to be also other issues with replication, where sometimes the server has to move something so that the client gets synch'd again, for example the chopsticks.

- When you lower the booster into the OLM, it suddenly gets pulled towards it. I think this happens only when you have the pushers set to "center", so that they are still pushing. If you turn them off, then it should be fine.

- OLM clamps are a little scuffed right now and can bug out, especially in multiplayer.

- While there is a Gamepad section in the main menu settings, the key binds are not set up yet, so you can just use defaults and walk around. Also, it might only work, if you use it via the Steam Gamepad thingy.

- The atmosphere is fake and earth is flat. If you fly far to the side it will look like you are high up, but the altitude will show the actual value. If you come a bit below zero, the actor will be destroyed.

- there are reports of the booster randomly disappearing out of nowhere in mid flight with the boom message showing up on the panel. Not sure what's happening here yet.

- The full stack can randomly explode when flying. This seems to be a bigger problem, the lower the FPS. So make sure, you don't have too low FPS if it happens a lot to you. Not sure, if this is still happening?

- trying to lift the hot stage ring is slightly bugged right now, but when you are very careful you can actually lift it on top of the booster

- when you instantly fill up the booster to max prop on the OLM it can induce some wiggle on the ship, if there is one on top, possibly bringing it to a full out dance - fix is to slowly fill up the booster in two or more steps

After I finally got the latest update done with the new booster model, the rest of August went into preparing and launching the game on Epic Games Store. This was maybe not the best decision. At least, so far, in the first full day it has been only 12 sales and 17 in total since launch. Considering that it probably won't be at that level every day after the initial hype died down, this is far from sustainable. Of course, I didn't even generate much hype, so maybe we should wait a few days to see how it looks then.

The problem is, that I had to get it out as soon as possible, in the hope to make some money, as my savings are basically zero now. So either this works right now or I have to get an actual job and reduce the amount of time spent on this substantially.

This also led to having it rushed out within a week and an overlooked bug that prevented the use of multiplayer, that I had to patch day one, that could have been easily prevented with a little more time and testing beforehand. On the other hand, I didn't expect the Epic Games Store to be so bad. Not just on the end user side, but also on the developer side. The main issue is, that every build and thus small patch has to be reviewed by Epic first before it can go live, which can take a whole day easily. So quick fixes to the live version are impossible like this. That's not good, because sometimes there are just things overlooked during testing, sometimes big things.

So not too happy with the Epic Games Store overall so far. But let's see what happens over the next days.

There are two new builders this month: Welcome Lewis K and Midnight Blue!

Total contributions for August are 414 bucks. This includes the first 1.5 days of Epic Games Store Revenue at end of August, which totaled to €173.84. So the other contributions went down considerably compared to July due to two less producers.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

There also have been quite a few changes to how supporting is organized now. This Ko-Fi post gives more details.

Is this the Unity version? Maybe some setting that makes problems on start up for some reason. Try deleting "settings.ini" in StarbaseSim folder.

If that doesn't do anything. Try deleting the folder in the registry: https://itch.io/t/2673129/how-to-reset-key-binds-and-other-settings-that-are-not...

Please follow the advice in my post.

If you want help, I need more info. I assume this is the Unity version? The most likely reason for a crash at game start there is that the GPU doesn't have enough RAM / is too old.

"only want to add the new ship model" - famous last words! This actually took most of the time this month due to a complicated materials setup in the Blender model with thousands of uv maps (slightly exaggerated, but still way too many for my needs). The other time I was busy with setting up starbasesim.com and the process of putting the game up on Epic Games Store, which has been prepared for when this current update is done. Which is really very soon now. Just finalizing the ship model now...

Apart from that there were some private things going on, that kept me even more busy, so that I even forgot about the report yesterday!

What's even worse, I totally forgot to check, if also on Ko-Fi someone reached builder level!

So we can welcome a total of eight new builders this month: Welcome Apmub, Kyler Caulfield, RAF and the rest anonymous for the time being!

On top of that, we have a new producer: Taniel from https://www.youtube.com/@tanielsspacestation2908

Total contributions for July are 302 bucks.  

At least contributions still go up a bit. But not enough to do this full time. So there will be some changes coming soon. Also we are already at 87 builders in total. I will change this system also probably when we reach 100 to make tracking easier for me and I will increase the threshold amount, maybe double it or so.

Still battling with the Unreal Engine upgrade from 5.2 to 5.4. There have been quite some changes apparently, also in regards to how physics work. It looks like the collision doesn't bug out anymore when booster or ship hit complex colliders of static objects, which is really great. On the other hand, constraints don't work exactly the same as before anymore so I had to adjust them all. Then there were totally weird bugs like one connection in a blueprint going missing after restarting the editor or packaging a project, where I had to duplicate the blueprint and redo all the references to fix it. That was annoying!

Anyway, it looks mostly good now. Just cleaning out a few more small bugs, hopefully small, and then we should be good to go. I really only want to add the new ship model and get this version out without adding much more features for the moment. Just to see that the 5.4 version is working also in the wilds. Oh, and then I also want to get it up and running on the Epic Games Store, at least for supporters initially. So that it's easier to use multiplayer and prepare it for a future release as a normal game.

New Itch release will happen after this update or when we reach 1000 subs on Youtube, whatever is first.

There is one new builder this month: Welcome Prehistoricman !

Total contributions for June are 254 bucks.  

oh, I totally missed approving this comment. Not sure why I even had to in the first place.

But anyway, I don't do any donations from the StarbaseSim contributions currently as written in the first post. There is just not enough and I'm broke :D

Pretty average month. Got the Flying Stage 3 Update finally done with the new booster model. I love the new booster and will do more in this direction for a while instead of controls programming :D

There is one new builder: Welcome Ian!

Total bucks for May are 250. 

While the Ko-Fi goal for the hard disks hasn't been met yet, it's close and I already bought the following disks as I need the SSD for the Unreal Engine upgrade. Here is what  I got:

My biggest single investment so far! I need it since the Unreal source alone is over 200 GB and then the StarbaseSim project is growing every day as well. When you do a few builds you add a lot more to it. With some assets and other often used stuff, the 1 TB SSD that I had until now filled up fast. So 2 TB should be good for a little longer and then I can upgrade again if necessary. Doesn't hurt to get a fresh SSD every couple of years anyway. The HDD is just for data storage and backups and should be good for a very long time.

That means I'm now migrating to UE5.4. I want to see, if I can use the new multiplayer physics and prediction stuff. There might be also other improvements and features that could come in handy. Of course, compiling everything without errors and trying out the new things will take a while and has some risk. With 5.3 there were some issues, so I didn't pull through with it. But they weren't that big, so I'm optimistic that it will work this time.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

I hate to break it to you, but I don't think this is the best place to be looking for something like this :D

Turns out that the Arducopter library for quadcopter operation doesn't translate to rockets that well or at least not as easy as I thought. So almost full April was spent on getting this running and have at least basic position control working. There is still much left to do, but I don't want to spend another month on this area right now. It's time to make some more visible progress also in other areas. After all, it will take some time until SpaceX are going to try their first catch attempt. We can wait until then to further improve landing.

Anyway, total for this month was 325 bucks - new best month again!

There has been just one new builder, which is anonymous for the time being.

I didn't invest into anything, apart from the usual Patreon subscriptions to modelers and info people, as I just worked on the controller most of the time.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

The first month with Unreal version on Itch is in! Here's how it went:

There have been a total of 1102 downloads for the Windows version and a whopping 57 for Linux. So still half a percent of Linux users, as before. What's nice to see is, that the base level of views and downloads is much higher than before. Of course, there was the 3rd Starship test flight at 14th of March, which helped keeping interest elevated. Funny though that you can't see any spike from the flight this time. Probably due to the release of the Unreal version two weeks earlier. Anyway, it's good to see some stable interest with 500-ish downloads in the initial rush and then another 500 in the following month.

There were six payments directly on Itch for a total of ~50 $. Not too great, but compared to what I get usually on Itch, it's pretty much as expected. Of course, there are also 20 Patrons and 6 kofis (monthly Ko-Fi contributors) as well as a couple of one time kofis, and a direct PayPal contribution of 3x 15 €.

Adding everything up, we get a total of 287 bucks - best month so far! In $ it could be a 300+ maybe even. I should probably start with some more serious accounting at some point :D

We also got a lot of new builders: 7 in total and with name Logge1986, Borbarad_2, Taniel and Connor Scott - welcome! If this continues, I might have to increase the builder threshold again as well!

Looking onwards, there should be a new smaller update released in April for supporters. They already know more about it. Else, follow the Twitter/Youtube to stay informed. 

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

I just noticed that there is still a (new) problem with the ship toggles as I missed to re-connect something after deleting some prints. Fully fixed version will be up in a bit.

I also noticed that it crashes when you click on credits or changelog button in main menu. But I'll fix that in a future version.

I've just uploaded a fixed version. If you could check it out and report if you find any more issues or not, that would be cool. Then I'll wait before I tweet about it.

Wasn't a big issue, just the function from a plugin not working on Linux for some reason. It gets all the engine toggle widgets, so you don't have to put them one by one in an array. That's an odd thing that there is no builtin function for this.

I've added it to https://itch.io/t/3550144/known-issues-bug-reports#post-9469718

Since it's quite a big issue, I'll post about the fix on twitter, when it's ready.

Changelog:

2024-03-11

- removed a line that logged some debug data spamming the log file

I guess I should add changelogs for patches here again. In the future also updates will have changelogs attached again to the devlog:

2024-03-09

- added first version of time dilation (there are still some issues with it, like mouse clicks not registering properly when game is very slow)

- fixed booster transport stand clamps not extending again after retracting

- fixed ship can't be spawned directly on booster, if you try to place it manually

- fixed observer jumping back to player after despawning something

- fixed attitude Z error discontinuity around zero leading to a twitch in the controller output (however, when setpoint is close to +/- 180 there still can be a bit of twitching)

- attitude Z is now displayed from -180 to 180 

- tuned some controller settings for better control during boost back with booster (this will also have some impact to controller behaviour in other circumstances)

I'll try to collect a few FAQ here. You can also ask questions here in the replies.

Where can I report bugs, find known issues, give suggestions, find changelog and a roadmap?

will be all here now -> https://starbasesim.com/tracking 

What's the deal with multiplayer?

It's working pretty good now with the integration via Epic Games Store. Just some bugs that won't be fixed any time soon probably. Multiplayer is more of an add-on, nice to have, but not a major part of the game.

Can i use the Keyboard to move the Booster and Ship? 

Yes. Just read the hint in the main settings tab of the control panel which shows up by default right after you loaded in ;)

Wen Mac version?

As soon as I get a Mac, because with Unreal Engine you need a Mac yourself to make a build, which was not necessary with Unity. I can't buy one right now though, so unless I get one gifted, it won't happen anytime soon.

But can't you still play it on Mac in a virtual machine?

Probably, but I don't know much about Macs. So if anyone could help us out here with a guide, you are very welcome! If it's possible.

What about Linux?

Regular Linux versions will be back when it's on Steam.

Wen save game feature?

It doesn't have high priority right now, but is on the list. Maybe I'll even make a Ko-Fi goal for it some day.

Wen booster bidet a.k.a. pancake a.k.a. steel plate a.k.a. water deluge system a.k.a. upside down shower head a.k.a. what other name did I miss?

It's on the list with features to be added: https://starbasesim.com/tracking/roadmap_page.php?version_id=5

Why is feature X not on the future features list?

Firstly, the list hasn't been updated in a while, but will be soon™. Secondly, I might not have thought (much) about it yet. In this case, thx for the suggestion! :)

Wen mobile version?

Right after the console version is done.

Wen console version?

No idea. Maybe when I have loads of money or I am bored and everything else is done. Currently it's not something I'm very interested in.

Wen next update?

I try to finish an update every 1 to 2 months. But sometimes it takes longer.

Wen next update for free Itch single player version?

soon, when I reach 1000 subs on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1Z3Gs5nW_3ONkxUOOsWI0g/

Well, February progress wasn't much faster either, but at least we got a mostly playable version out, even if there is still a lot missing.

There have been two new builders, one of them Chaos_Demon - welcome! 

Total contributions were 154 $

Not much more to say right now as the Unreal version has just been released here on Itch for the first time today. So it was very busy and there will be more to tell in the March report.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

That are currently planned to be added:

- tank farm

- QDs

- propellant simulation and VFX

- lifts

- Starbase props and buildings

- maybe more that I can't think of right now

Won't be added (any time soon):

- VR

I'll add some known issues here. You can also post bug reports below. But please keep in mind that a lot of stuff is unfinished, especially with the controllers. Regarding these you don't need to report anything right now. Else, report it only if you think it's a big issue.

Known Issues as of 2024-04-30:

- OLM clamps are a little scuffed right now and can bug out, especially in multiplayer

- FTS sound effect is not properly set up yet

- control panel ship keyboard input routing button is same as booster so when you use a keybind it triggers same function on both devices (fix ready)

- flap drag calculation is a bit too much oversimplified (fix tbd)

- When attitude Z target and actual are around +/-180 there is a discontinuity leading to a slight twitch in the controller output.

- Booster: when you have all gimbal engines at full throttle and propellant mass is very low the controller might start to oscillate a bit (you can prevent it by lowering throttle).

- While there is a Gamepad section in the main menu settings, the key binds are not set up yet, so you can just use defaults and walk around. Also, it might only work, if you use it via the Steam Gamepad thingy.

- The atmosphere is fake and earth is flat. If you fly far to the side it will look like you are high up, but the altitude will show the actual value. If you come a bit below zero, the actor will be destroyed.

- there are reports of the booster randomly disappearing out of nowhere in mid flight with the boom message showing up on the panel. Not sure what's happening here yet.

- trying to lift the hot stage ring is slightly bugged right now, but when you are very careful you can actually lift it on top of the booster

- LINUX: crash when clicking on credits or changelog button

There is a browser version, but it's old: http://ak85.de/ss

there is a panel on top of it

Progress on the the latest game update was super slow in January with moving a lot of stuff to C++ in Unreal Engine and figuring out how this even works and all. But it's close to getting finished, even though it won't have much new content, but I will be very happy when this is done and working! :)

Anyway, there are three new builders, one of them being CaptinD2 - thank you!

Total contributions are pretty decent again with 256 $ and there are the first monthly contributors on Ko-Fi. I might have to increase the minimum amount though. Because there is a Stripe transaction for every 3 $ amount, which has 15% fees just for Stripe only! 

There have been a few contributions on Itch again as well, most of all a 100 $ one by @steveMmattison - the biggest single contribution so far.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

In other news, when I add these contributions to the Ko-Fi goal later, we will have reached it! I'll write more about that there and on Twitter.

A busy year comes to an end with the best month in terms of total contributions with 275 $!

Also, in December we finally got the first part of the flying stuff for Unreal engine in an acceptable state. But there is a lot more to do in this regard as the controls will also be improved along the way compared to Unity.

There are five new Builders! Also because I missed some earlier apparently. Anyway, thanks and welcome to Iwo, Kendall and the other three new Builders!

There even has been a new Itch contribution of 5.55 $ :O - thanks to the one lone contributor! :D

Download numbers were quite decent as well and that with still no updates since April:

An Unreal version will land soon here though with the Ko-Fi goal already at 78%. I updated it already a few days ago this time.

I also started to invest in the Unreal version and bought some explosion effects from the market place for 5 bucks. It's not really much better than the Unity one and I could have re-built that one in UE, but it was quite cheap, so I could save some time there.

Now on to 2024! I have the feeling it will be even more busy. At least I'm more comfortable with Unreal Engine now :)

I'm getting around 50 KiB/s right now, central Europe, no change in last 3 hours. Tried downloading a zip directly and now trying to download the app. No difference.

Finally got the first stage of the flying update for the Unreal version done. Tons of bugs though. But one more patch and it should be good mostly.

We also saw the second test flight of Starship in November (on a side note: I always find it funny how some say it was a success and others no, it was a failure, while in reality it was just a partial success (or partial failure^^)). You can see the date of the flight clearly in the download numbers:

Unfortunately this resulted in zero contributions on Itch. At least the other channels were similar as last time. So we got a total of 175 $ via KoFi and Patreon.

KoFi is nice, but I don't get any monthly contributions there. All have been one offs so far. Haven't been a lot in total though, so let's see how it develops.

Since I have been using Patreon for one year now, let's make a comparison. Here are the total contributions for the first year of Patreon and the same time period for Itch:

Patreon: 1310 € | after fees: 1082 €

Itch:             655 $ | after fees: 555 $

On both platforms there is about 10% platform fee and the rest is payment processing, which is in the same area also around 10% for both platforms. So no clear winner there. At least, if you pay the suggested fee on Itch. You can also choose to pay zero. But that's not how to do business^^

Multiplayer development has taken its toll again, so I couldn't even finish one update this month. I'm seriously considering throwing multiplayer out of the window again. While it's a nice-to-have feature, I haven't any immediate plans to build it out and make it very useful. So it feels like quite a waste of time right now. Maybe when booster and ship catching is in, I can add a second tower and then you can make a race to fastest stack, launch, catch, de-stack or relaunch^^ Should be easy to do at least.

Anyway, in October we got a total of $156. This includes some coffees via ko-fi. But only 1 $ via Itch. I guess, it shows that there haven't been any updates here. But we are getting closer on the ko-fi goal to bring the Unreal version over here as well. It should be above 1/3 already when I update it later.

No builders this month.

Pushed out more updates for the Unreal version in September, slowly bringing it up to par to the Unity one. It's been going much slower than hoped. But at least multiplayer is working fairly decently now and I get more confident with it every time.

There has been one new builder this month Skelly and last month I was so busy, that I totally forgot to mention OV_104_Atlantis as builder and producer.

There won't be new producers for the time being as I started a ko-fi and didn't make tiers there and might remove them also from Patreon completely. One reason for this is also because I want to have everyone mentioned in-game equally next to each other, which makes it easier to set up when putting it on some wall or so.

Total contributions this month were about $200. I won't do separate listings per platform anymore though as it is not very exact anyway with the different currencies and how and when it's converted and transferred to PayPal, Payoneer or now Stripe as well.

There was no payout in September. There are still no real investments apart from a few small Patreon subscriptions.

Thank you very much for all the contributions! :)

Now let's look back at the second year:

• The tank farm has been properly integrated and thus could be used by Zack in his videos, which created a huge wave of contributions. Special thanks go out to Zack and crew here! :)
• It was followed by the transport (SPMTs) and build site update.
• The latter already showed problems with floating point precision in Unity, so I started to investigate other game engines.
• Created the Unigine demo in about a month 
• Created the Unreal Engine demo in a bit more than a month
• Moved on with Unreal and pushed several bigger and smaller updates
• Unreal version now has part of build site with Megabay crane, SPMTs, basic Mechazilla for stacking of basic booster and ship
• and everything with multiplayer!
• Started a Patreon
• Started a ko-fi page as alternative to Patreon as I was not super happy with it

In numbers:

• hit 1000 followers on Twitter @StarbaseSim
• got 20 active Patrons (38 total), €127 per month
• and my first coffees on ko-fi :D

The following Itch numbers are totals (so including the first year):

• views: 26.7k
• downloads: 8.7k
• payments: 81
• gross revenue: $754

Almost 7x as much downloads and payments compared to last year with the proportion staying the same at almost one payment per 100 downloads. However, the Itch numbers are only partially comparable as there is Patreon now as well and for the last half year there were only updates on Patreon. If we get another 7x or maybe 10x even in the coming year, especially on Patreon, it would become actually sustainable. Let's hope I can survive until then! :D

Because after two years of full time game development, I'm finally broke now. As this was foreseeable, I already applied for so called "Bürgergeld" in May. It's a form of social welfare in Germany that is supposed to provide the basic means of living, supposedly without too much hassle and part of it you can also get on top of a small income. This seemed quite attractive at that point as it would allow to continue to focus full time on StarbaseSim - compared to doing part time stuff or taking on a credit and worrying about paying it back. On the other hand, I was also a little bit curious actually how the whole process works, because you hear lots of (horror) stories about it. So why not get some first hand experience? As it turns out, the wheels of bureaucracy grind very slowly...as expected. What I didn't expect was, that it is such a big hassle to provide all the documentation in the correct way. So there is still no money in sight from that direction after shuffling documents for more than 4 month. Maybe I have to do some part time stuff after all.

I'm wondering how much more payments would there have been, if it wouldn't have been free to download. The 8k number includes also patches though, so in the end it's far less unique people, who downloaded it.  So maybe just a couple of 100 people would have paid upfront? But I want to get it into as many hands as possible. So there will always be a free version. It might just be a bit older or without certain features like multiplayer. We will see, how it goes with the Epic Games Store version that will come sooner or later.

Else, the plan for next year is the same as before, follow the development of the real Starbase and Starship program, and maybe even jump ahead a little bit...like Moon or Mars base?

find more tutorials here from now on: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfR02qeoyBkYGj5jdWtiBiFObraPdlF3-

Hm, it's not the best GPU, but if you have enough free memory it should be able to run it, I think.

Make sure that no other programs are running that take away a lot of resources.

Can you send the log file as well, please?

Very busy with bringing stuff back to the Unreal version. First time I missed the first of the month for the report even!

Progress has been very slow unfortunately. I couldn't really copy paste much from the Unity version, and every time I gained a little something by it, I lost it right away when taking care of the multiplayer stuff. Sure, we have multiplayer now. It's fun and all, but I don't know, if it's been worth it.

At least a little bit of content for Twitter and Youtube fell off from the multiplayer test sessions in August, so it helped to increase the contributions a bit again. There were also two new builders, but both anonymous so far.

Contributions this month were: Itch 42 $ and Patreon 135 €.

I also made a payout again from Patreon over 127 € as it works within a day there . I needed it as I'm pretty much broke now. So there won't be any investments for some time probably or rather everything will be invested in myself to keep me going :D

I have basically two options now: Apply for social welfare and continue on a shoe string budget to be able to invest all time in this and hope it grows quickly now or get an actual job and work part time on this. I'm not really a part timer though and progress would probably come close to a stand still. So I might have to go with the first option, at least for a little bit.

Also, I applied for an Epic Mega Grant at end of May and now finally got a mail that they reviewed it, but didn't select it for a grant unfortunately. That would have been epic right now in the current situation, but I guess, my application was a bit too scuffed maybe. For example, I included a link to a test build of the Unreal version (which was pretty crappy at that time anyway), but later deleted the file when cleaning up my google drive without thinking about the application. So when they tried to open it now in August they just got a broken link. xD

Oh well, maybe I try to re-apply a bit later when the Unreal version is in a better state.

Finally, I want to give a shout out also to all the smaller contributors on Itch and Patreon, that I don't write individually to. Even though it's not too many people yet, I have to draw a line somewhere or it will get too much for me. If you are one of them, just know that I see every contribution with your name or email and everything is highly appreciated, thank you! :)

Thx! That's strange though, it seems to crash right away for some reason. 

Did you also reset / delete the registry settings?

1. open registry editor by typing "regedit" into the Windows search bar
2. in the editor go to this address: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Ashtorak\StarbaseSim (you can copy paste it into the address bar)
3. delete the StarbaseSim folder to reset all settings to default at game start (it will recreate the folder)

This screen shot was from another issue where I showed where the key binds are stored:

Maybe something in the registry settings changed somehow after resetting key binds as they are saved there by Unity.

I'll make a new pot here for the moment and add 23 € to it from July 2023. Maybe I put it into Ukraine stuff again anyway.

+13 from August

+17 from October

+18 from November