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Hi kwark,

Was just wondering if you got a chance to play the build and if everything was working okay for you!

I have good news: I had a little time yesterday afternoon and today. I got a Mac build working and made it available for download. Two caveats:

• I have not had much time to test so let me know if you run into any major bugs
• Version v0.10 and v0.12 have incompatible save formats. This is because v0.10 had hand made levels that shipped with the game. The new game has entirely procedurally-generated levels so you can have multiple save files with randomly-generated sectors. Also all of the ships and weapons are "new" (some of the art is the same but all the stats are updated) in v0.12.

I hope you enjoy the updates.

Regarding Mac popularity, here's just a fun stat. In all of 2018 people played Masteroid about 700 times. 24 of those gameplays were Mac versions and some of those were my own tests. In general Masteroid has a tiny player base and an even smaller Mac player base. But I'm glad that some people are enjoying it either way :)

Hi kwark, thanks for buying the game! I actually just got a used Mac Book Pro two weeks ago so I at least have the ability to create a Mac build again. I actually don't get asked about Mac much. Since launch, the game has only been downloaded for Mac a few times, which was a big part of the reason I stopped creating builds.

But I will create a 0.12 Mac build now that I have the ability :)

There were a LOT of changes between 0.10 and 0.12 that haven't been tested at all. It may be a few weeks before I have the time to get the Mac set up to build (this is non-trivial), build the newest version of the game, test it and publish it.

Thanks for buying the game and for your patience. I'll get you a build!

If you have any bug reports, questions or issues this is the place to report them!

Hi Nickva,

First of all thanks for buying the game and I’m sorry you’re experiencing this bug! It will likely be tomorrow night before I’m able to test and fix.

I’m thinking perhaps that the turret is visibly highlighted but not actually selected. Can you try clicking on the turret and the weapon again (even though they are highlighted) and see if that enables you to equip the weapon?

Either way I’ll try to repro and fix the issue, I’m just thinking that might be a workaround that allows you to play normally.

Thanks!

Justin

This is the place to report any bugs with Masteroid v0.12

This is the place to report any bugs with version 10!

Honestly it's a mess right now. The game used to fully support Xbox controllers on PC but it never supported non-Microsoft controllers. Controllers never worked on Mac.

Changes I made in March even broke Xbox controllers.  I did a lot of UI updates and added things like the ship's Boost ability that were never properly mapped to a controller and I completely forgot to test controller support. In April I have built a new targeting and special ability system that further breaks controllers. It will take some thought and research to get them working across platforms.

So, I am pulling controller support out entirely for the April build. That being said, it's still a priority. I just need to take a step back and figure out how to get it working correctly.

That is super helpful. I think I had the same bug earlier this week. If so, I already had it logged and hopefully fixed it last night!

Right before this bug happened did you kill a fleet leader? If it's the same bug, it was caused by not properly cleaning up the relationship between a fleet leader and wingman ships when the fleet leader dies.

I also fixed the bug that allows you to resell the same weapon for infinite cash last night. No more cheating :P

Thanks for the feedback and the bug reports. I'll look into that reselling the weapons bug right away!

I'd love to figure out what caused the crash. If the game crashes it dumps an error log here: [your user folder]/masteroid/error.log

If you could open that file with any text editor, like notepad, and paste it here I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks for playing!

Hi Excession,

I'm glad you're enjoying the game! There's some good ideas in here. I've thought of some of them, partially built a few and probably won't build a few. As a mostly one-person team, for each release I ask myself: What's the coolest thing that I can build, test, release and maintain in the least amount of time? This allows me to release pretty big content updates each month! But it also means that many of the features will never be as deep or flashy as a bigger team could build. 

Drag/Drop Equip, Schematics and Inventory: I really wanted to build an RPG-style inventory where you can drag items to your ship. However, that means that every weapon would a unique inventory icon. Every ship would need custom slots and art (because they all have different turret configurations). And the complexity of that code would be way harder to build, test and maintain. So I compromised with a UI that is easy to test for bugs, allows me to build more ships and weapons and is functional. Another consideration with this is that Masteroid actually can run on monitors as small as 1024x768. But that also means that really complex UI simply won't fit. That being said, I DO need to show some stats on weapon drain. All the info is technically there but you have to calculate it yourself right now.

Mission Indicator: Definitely going to build this. I just built missions in the last month so that's brand new. I want to add a button next to the Warp Menu button that shows your current mission.

Faction Status: Like missions, this changed a ton in the last month. I do have some triggered consequences in the game for low status but the chances of it happening are probably a bit too low. I plan to add a lot more missions, weapons, ships and events that are based on your faction standing!

Different Resources: Some of your ideas here are really great. I have thought about this a lot but haven't decided which way to go. I thought about making some weapons only available through blueprints that you have to gather materials for. Asteroids could drop totally different types or resources or mining any asteroid could have a chance to drop a more rare material required by blueprints. I'm probably going to build something like this but it's a pretty huge component and I have some other surprises happening first :)

Collect Weapons From Destroyed ships: I've thought about this a lot...if I implement it, it might be a liklihood to drop a blueprint that you have to have manufactured at a station.

Other Upgrades: I'm thinking about other slottable equipment types. For instance the player could buy a "Faction Targeting System" after a certain level that keeps you from accidentally hitting (or being shot by) friendly ships.

A lot of good ideas here. This month I'm focusing on making some combat improvements and enhancements. I'm also working on adding some interesting stuff to Sectors. I'll keep this stuff in mind and see where it fits in!

Thanks for playing,

Justin

You can thrust in the opposite direction to stop faster!

Also, I plan to increase the size of the docks in the next release, which will also make it a little easier.

I've already been working on v0.10 (April release). For April I'm trying to add more things for the player to do in space and make existing activities more fun and interesting. I already added the ability to set a specific ship as a target and your turret will automatically fire on that target. This reduces friendly fire but doesn't stop it.

I've thought of several ways to solve friendly fire but each one has a big impact on how the game is played. It could just be a checkbox on the Station Menu. Or ships could have non-weapon equipment slots where you could slot upgrades such as a faction targeting computer that won't damage a specific faction. Finally it could also be built into the weapon itself so that some weapons don't hit a specific faction.

The time required to build this really depends on how I decide to make it work. For instance, building a whole new equippable upgrades system is a lot of work. So, I'm not sure I'll have a solution in time for the April release but I've definitely been thinking about it!

I ended up getting a few minutes to test a build earlier than I thought. I have just posted a v0.9.1 build for Mac. Downloading this version should solve your problems.

Thanks for your patience!

Oh my bad! I didn't build a mac version of 0.9.1 because I didn't think it was affecting Macs. I can build and post that tonight.

In the meantime if your macbook supports vertical resolutions higher than 1050 you can try to manually set a higher resolution in this file:

[your user folder]/masteroid/settings.json

Worst case if you update that file and the game fails to start you can simply delete the settings.json file and the game will generate a new one with default settings.

To sell cargo you must dock at a space station. Follow the bot ships and copy what they do to dock. You have to come to a complete stop within the docking area.

If you have docked at stations but don't see the cargo option, it may be due to your monitor resolution. I just released an update yesterday allowing the game to support resolutions as low as 1024x768. Prior to that, vertical resolutions lower than 1050 were cropping out the cargo part of the station menu. If you are playing version 0.9.0, download the new version 0.9.1 for an improved station menu at low resolutions!

If these do not sound like your problem, please let me know your version number, platform (Mac or PC) and a screenshot if you can.

The station menu should look like this:

I don't see a way to private message you here. If you don't mind posting your email address here I can follow up via email. Otherwise you could DM me on twitter @profexorgeek

I probably can't do a ton about payment because I don't control most of how it works. I wonder if Stripe might work better than PayPal. Try the "pay with a credit card" option to use Stripe and see if it will let you use your debit card?

If not, let me know and I'll see what other options I have.

Haha, I really appreciate your thoughtfulness. I don't usually respond quite that fast but I happened to be literally working on the game when your bug came in. It only took me about two hours to do a little research and then get a fix and build up. 1366x768 is still a pretty common resolution so it was important to me to make the game work at that size. I hope you enjoy the game!

Yes! If I release on Steam (and I hope to) I'll issue keys to all Itch purchasers unless there's some Steam restriction that prevents me from doing so.

The new build is live. Please download version 0.9.1 and let me know if it fixes your problems. Thanks again for buying the game!

Okay, it's a tight squeeze but I reworked the menu to work down to a minimum resolution of 1024x768. I think I also fixed the crash. I'll work on creating a new build and let you know as soon as it's posted. Should be within an hour or two. This is what it looks like running at 1024x768:

I'm not sure I understood the question. I don't letterbox Masteroid, it runs at whatever resolution you specify. However, the menu doesn't scale below 1050 well. I will try to either letterbox lower than 1050 resolution or rework the menu. I was actually working on new features for v0.10 right now but I'm switching gears to fix this!

I replied at the same time on the other thread. If you can play at 1680x1050 you'll be able to see everything. If not, in the meantime I will see if I can rework the station menu to fit 768 pixels. It's hard to fit all of the information at that size!

Okay so the game is crashing because it can't get a list of resolutions from your graphics card. That may be tough to fix quickly so I'm glad you have a workaround.

As a side note, are you playing the game at 1366x768? If so I don't think you'll be able to see the whole station menu: the buttons to repair your ship and sell your cargo will be cut off. If your computer doesn't support a higher resolution I'll have to figure out how to make the station menu smaller so you can see all of the options. This may take me a day or two.

Thank you for your patience and for buying the game!

Hi Auburn,

I'm sorry to hear about your issue. Let's see if we can figure out what's going on! First, Modifying the resolution in the Masteroid.exe.config won't have an effect as the game doesn't use it. A couple of quick questions:

• Are you playing on PC or Mac?
• What type of graphics card do you have?

The game stores your save, errors and the game settings here:

[Your user folder]/masteroid

If a file called "error.log" exists, please paste the contents to me, that should tell me why your settings screen is crashing. The settings.json file in that folder is what actually controls your resolution. You can try manually changing that but I definitely want to figure out and fix the crash!

If you can get me some of that information I'm sure we can get it fixed right away!

New version released! This version has some major new features, which also means it could have some significant bugs. I try to test and eliminate bugs but if you find any, post them here!

Mac version is now posted too. I'll be closing this thread and creating a new one for the new release, v0.9!

Okay, Masteroid v0.9 is posted for PC and should fix your issue! The Mac build won't make it up until tomorrow.

This release added a bunch of new stuff, hopefully I caught any new bugs too! I'd love to hear your likes and dislikes when you get a chance to play. Thanks again for purchasing the game.

Hi War,

First of all, thanks for buying the game and reporting the bug. Ironically I just had another user report that bug via Twitter this morning and I just finished fixing it a few minutes ago! I'm planning to release the latest version, which will include this fix and a bunch of new features, later this week. All of the code is done but I need to do final testing before release. I'm hoping to have the new version up on Thursday night.

The bug is caused because my region uses a period as a decimal point. Your region must use a comma. The game is trying to load a file that has numbers like "1.5" in it but your region settings make this an invalid number. If you do not live in a country that uses a comma as the decimal separator please let me know! That would mean that I may not have fixed your bug.

Thanks for your patience, I'll have this release tested and posted ASAP!

This is the place to post any bugs, issues or complaints you have about the latest version of Masteroid. Screenshots and platform (PC or Mac) are very helpful!

The new build is posted! I'm closing this thread. Please post any new bugs to the v0.7 thread. Thanks for playing and I hope you enjoy the new release.

This is the place to report any issues you discover in v0.7. Please provide screenshots a if possible so I can fix bugs quickly! Note that this build does not have a Mac release. If you are a Mac player, please post here so I know you're out there and I'll focus on getting a Mac build out.

This bug took a while to get to but I believe I solved it today. I ended up doing a pretty major rewrite of how the game handles sound. The crashes were due to too many sounds being played simultaneously. The fix for this bug will be in the next release. The release is feature-complete and I'm testing it now. I hope to push it live for PC by tomorrow evening. The Mac release may be delayed as I'm experiencing some significant perf issues on Mac.

Thanks again for reporting the issue and happy playing!

I read this awhile ago but forgot to reply. Thanks for the info!

The next release addresses one of the major weaknesses in the game: horrible UI. Now that UI is overhauled, the game is close to having a pretty complete feature set and looking consistently professional. I hope to release it on Steam in a month or two.

Thanks again!