In this episode, we recap the latest news of Star Atlas from the past week.
We are looking for guests to be on our podcast. The podcast is a discussion of the past week’s news about Star Atlas. If you are interested in being on the podcast, please contact us.
We are launching a Star Atlas merch store. Please check it out at Intergalactic Gear.
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Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald. Welcome to my Startless Week in Review podcast. This is podcast number 59. Any articles or videos mentioned can be found on my website at intergalacticherald. com. Please look for News Recap 108. So just a quick summary of things I’ll go over today.
[00:00:19] One is some of the Solana issues. Actually a lot of Solana issues. I’m going through the rundown here. So same thing about Starbase a few things about blockchain some thoughts on this surge practice and just a couple of things from me on kind of, again, what’s, what I’m up to in I’m playing star Atlas right now.
[00:00:37] So before I get into that, just a couple of quick things. One, I’m always looking for a podcast guests. So if you’re interested in either looking at the we can review, or you want to talk about if you’re a starless builder, you want to talk about your project or another content creator, definitely be interested to expand this so you don’t always have to listen to just me talking.
[00:00:56] So please go to intergalacticherald. com. Look for the contact page and go ahead and fill that out. And then I do have two of my Stardust projects that I’m also working on. One is a merch store called Intergalactic Gear. If you go there right now you’ll see that there’s predominantly the merch survey.
[00:01:12] But, I’m close to officially announcing my first product. Okay. It’s a coffee mug, but anyways, it was more of getting everything in proof of concept, all the technical things, payment, processing manufacturing, shipping, taxes just so many things. So I’m still just trying to wrap up the last little bit before I’m willing to announce that, but technically it is available for purchase, but again, it’s, it’s just It’s functional.
[00:01:36] It’s not all optimized yet. And then the other thing is my what I’m calling my non guild guild called Intergalactic Coalition. And that’s again that’s available at intergalacticcoalition. com. This is my idea for a starless gamer community. Different than Discord so have more things like threaded discussions more asynchronous where you can get alerts for topics you want to follow and comment back.
[00:01:59] So it will be a paid platform, partly to offset the cost of the software. It’s not free like Discord, so They charge for features and totally understand that. So, if you’re interested in maybe joining a bunch of starless gamers who are not interested in joining guilds but nevertheless kind of want to hang out and chat and, you know, have things like that, please go to intergalacticcoalition.
[00:02:18] com, fill out that interest survey. Once I get enough people that are interested, I’ll start working to develop that platform and community out. So. Okay, let’s go ahead and get into some of the things that caught my attention this past week. Beyond the Horizon released a great video on the Solana issues.
[00:02:36] So one thing that I immediately learned that I kind of commented on my last one was this concept of the RPC. And again, I’ve kind of semi familiar with that because that’s how servers talk to each other or client servers in a typical Network configurations. I used to be an it manager. So I knew windows server was an RPC server.
[00:02:55] Anyways, what I didn’t realize and beyond the rise and actually explained very well that that is one of the types of Solana nodes that are out there. So I’d heard of validators before, but I didn’t realize that the RPC things that people talk about in the starless discord are actually part of Solana.
[00:03:10] So I thought they might have been another third party or something. So again, that’s great education helps me understand more. Again, I’m not a blockchain expert by any stretch. The other thing you mentioned in this video, I thought was very interesting that the Solana transactions per second, I thought, again, this was really fast, have actually dropped quite a bit from 50, 000 to a thousand.
[00:03:31] So yeah, that explains a lot of the congestion and things like that. So Anyways, it was a great explainer video on why the congestion even went into the end, some of the possible fixes. Again, if you’re looking for a very well, intro, but also technical I highly recommend that. And again, if you go to intergalacticcarol.
[00:03:46] com, look for News Recap 108 you’ll see a link to his YouTube video there. Then I think a few days later, Siggy, one of the content creators who predominantly focuses on Twitter slash X also retweeted a excellent, excellent explanation from a. Another person. And again, this is where now I’m not sure who that person is, but I did read that and it gets more information, definitely very technical, but again, learning more.
[00:04:13] And that other person was mentioning that there’s some changes that Solana had made recently on the networking layer. Now, what is a network layer? He goes into it in his tweet thread. So I’ll kind of tell you to go read there, but basically sounds like the Solana team changed some things and that’s kind of hard.
[00:04:31] Anyways, the best takeaway, I guess, from all of this is that Solana is where there’s a problem. I think I read somewhere later, one of the newsletters that I get that This was a good problem. I think it was a phrase. It was a good problem to have because it shows that salon is it is a success and getting more popular.
[00:04:47] And this isn’t something the team was totally surprised by, but it wasn’t on their immediate fix. And again, I think there was not necessarily a lot of, well, we didn’t know this was gonna come and things like that. But Solana seems to like, yeah, yeah, you know, we do. And I think even the Solana. The founder of Solana Point mentioned something like, you know, a single bug is great because you know exactly what to fix.
[00:05:10] It’s the overall things like this that make it harder. But again, there was talk and I did read some other articles that came through my news kind of general blockchain news. Yeah, Solana’s working on some things. They hope Bring some stuff out. So this may just be the thing we have to be patient and get through.
[00:05:27] So but anyways, again, I want to highlight it was really great seeing some StarLess community members kind of step up and provide some non StarLess content, but related to, you know, obviously Solana. So again great to Beyond the Horizon and SIGGY for putting that out. So, um, one thing to point out in the weekly Star Atlas newsletter from AFIA which again is always great, again, go to my website, you can find links to that, do subscribe to theirs they put out a great set of kind of specific details each week on focusing on star Atlas, but one thing that was really fascinating to find out is that we know there was a star Atlas star based delay coming out for by a day.
[00:06:04] But what was interesting to learn in hindsight that apparently part of it was because they had to actually upload the on chain programs. Not sure what that exactly means, but kind of know that some of the things that we do are on the block chain and we’re enacting, that’s why we have to do transactions.
[00:06:21] But anyways, that the starless team needed upload. 5, 000 transactions and it just wasn’t working. So I was thinking I’m like here I am in, you know, faction fleet clicking to Restock my thing and I don’t know I assume if you’re restocking four resources, that’s four transactions I get I i’m not a transact.
[00:06:41] I’m not a solana blockchain expert. I don’t know but let’s just say there’s four per And I got 10 shifts. Okay, four times 10. So 40. Yeah, okay 10 clicks in my ledger. No problem You They don’t work. Okay, I try again. But, again, if there was 5, 000 transactions that needed to upload the on chain programs for Star Atlas, and they don’t go through, and one doesn’t go through, or two doesn’t go through, like, how does it even, like, fail?
[00:07:07] But, who knows? Anyway, sounds like they at least got it up the next day. So, that, again, puts some context around why, you know, there was a delay. So, in addition to that, We’re, as gamers, struggling to do different things within our, the Star Atlas environment even the team is having problems. So, again, there’s a lot going on.
[00:07:26] So, like I said, there’s lots of Solana issues here. So middle of the week Star Atlas had their traditional Atlas brew. So they did as it sounds like their format usually is kind of some news and updates and then they go into a topic. And this one was on the continuation of talking about the roadmap.
[00:07:41] And I’ll admit I was recording this, I only got halfway through it and well, this is the best time to record. So I’ll finish fessing in the brew later on the roadmap. But again kind of talked about the roadmap before. But one of the interesting things they mentioned kind of in the news section that the because the star base came out, there were lots of comments made in the foundation room.
[00:08:00] So I’m not reviewing it. They said it. But they did say that the team is definitely listening to all that feedback and forget who said what, but anyways, the point is they’re listening and kind of got the feeling again, just asking for the community’s patience that, you know, they designed a specific economy and it’s literally less than.
[00:08:20] Five days or 10 days since it came out, maybe it’s a week and they’re not going to make, you know, immediately wholesale changes, but again, they’re listening and this is part of developing a thing. So again, kind of be patient. And I think that’s actually a really good point to bring up. And I’m glad they commented on what was in the foundation room on the Atlas Bureau, because one there, they, they started with steam, are developing Game design?
[00:08:49] Well yeah, what was it? Going back to my interview with Jose, that there are kind of three levers. Everybody talks about the levers of Star Allies. And again, the three were game design, economy, and lore. Obviously, not lore. We’re pretty much focused on economy, but you could say in some senses this is game design.
[00:09:04] You know, the idea that we’re upkeeping and upgrading the star bases, that feels more like a design thing than an economy. Though, again, there’s obviously an economy thing. But We know the Sage manual has been out for a while. It is being followed, not exactly, but a lot of people do say, hey, remember that was in the Sage gameplay manual or game design manual.
[00:09:24] So I think again, there’s something to keep in mind there that they’ve been working on these ideas. Sure. They release it, quote unquote, to the public and they get all this feedback. Maybe some was positive, some was negative. Maybe some people are gaming, quote unquote, gaming the system, taking advantage of the system.
[00:09:38] And. Again, unless there’s an egregious bug or an egregious oops, we totally Type that in Ron or something. It’s only the first week. And so it is good. The team’s listening, but also I feel like they do get to kind of be patient and see how things play out. So we’ll see. They alluded to, there may have been like, to be honest, don’t remember maybe cause I think they always say they’ll announce something on a Thursday change and I guess, well, if it’s in discord, they announced it.
[00:10:06] I may have read it, but again, I’m still not playing star base yet. So probably didn’t register that, but anyways, that was pretty cool. So a couple other things that popped up one almost missed it. And I guess I need to follow people on Medium better, but anyways a group or a person, again, I’ve seen a couple of things from them, but I’m not exactly sure Gallia Crafters posted a a Medium article about the star based game loops.
[00:10:30] Now they published a few weeks or months back, a really great how to get started for like 20 bucks. I mean, awesome. Title for a piece of content. So give them credit there I’m kind of talking about the different star base game loops the upkeep upgrading and Then the star basis. So it was actually the first time I have seen someone kind of break down the different things So that was actually really great.
[00:10:52] And again, if you’re you know, well following me I haven’t heard that stuff like kind of people talking about how the different mechanics. I mean, we knew there was upkeep. We knew there was upgrading, but to kind of get into a little more depth. So really wanted to call out that article, I think was really great.
[00:11:07] Again, from Galia crafters. And then the other thing I almost missed on Twitter there was a post. A video by actual CEO, Michael Wagner, I think actually it was on Dominic’s, the community manager or senior community, sorry, I don’t know everybody’s titles, you know who you are, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to not give people credit, but anyways a video and it was basically Michael Wagner going through like a how to tutorial of both the showroom and the sage.
[00:11:38] Based on a few of the words, I kind of think it might have been a recorded presentation for one of the conferences he’s attending. I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t really clear. I’m not sure why I wasn’t on the MainStar Atlas YouTube channel. But regardless, it was great. We’ve seen the content before, but I don’t know.
[00:11:53] It was still just kind of cool to get start, finish. And basically he was doing one of the guy talking in the window showing the screen. I mean so it was great. So highly recommend that. I realized I after I watched, I should make sure to put a link to it through on my my guide page. But one of the most interesting things that came out because it actually asked sort of question I came up with the last podcast is why is everything on the blockchain?
[00:12:18] And Michael Wigner answered it directly. Hey, people wonder why it’s all on there. And he brought up this term. I think I’ve heard it once before, but it sure hasn’t become sort of a phrase that we talk about a lot. Cod composability. I had to re listen to it. So I’m pretty sure that was a word he used, but he only said it once.
[00:12:36] So I, again, I think so. And it almost feels like a made up word. Cause I know back in my IT day, we had lots of abilities, I mean, reliability is a real thing, but we were inventing the, you know, adaptability. I don’t know. We just had abilities were anyway, it doesn’t matter. Going off on a tangent doesn’t make any sense anyways, but what, I guess the key of this was so that other people can build for the game sort of like tools and then he went off and talked about kind of the different automation tools and their strategy or their philosophy about, but again, let’s, we’ve talked about automation tools and my, my thoughts on that before, but let’s just go back to this composability and how it relates to why star Atlas is on the blockchain.
[00:13:20] And it kind of finally clicked. So if a traditional game designer builds a game, we’re definitely going to call it closed loop. One of the phrases in software development is open source. So everybody can see the code. You know, you can actually look at the code, you can recompile it, you can do it yourself, but.
[00:13:38] I would be shocked if, you know, Fortnite or Call of Duty or whatever have those. Now we know people in the past, at least on the PC gaming side, have done mods you know, famous Quake mods and, and Half Life mods and things like that. So there was ways to get into it, but it was always hacks and, and the game designers just kind of allowed it and it worked great.
[00:13:58] But what I think this composability concept is, is that by the fact that again, all the program of star Atlas are on chain, again, that was back to that thing about the 5, 000 transaction that other people can then run those. So I thought it started realizing, is this kind of like the concept of a API and application program interface?
[00:14:18] And if you’ve been in software for a while, I thought, Oh, does that company have an API? And again, it allows for things to be tied together because one company releases kind of basically a way to access that. Program through software calls or programming calls. Again, I don’t really know what I’m saying, but, but I realized they’re using the blockchain in this case, Solana as sort of that open thing.
[00:14:43] So we’ve seen tools like the sly tool for helping with automation. So that’s actually at interacting with the program. So that tool causes actions to occur in. Star Atlas programs. Now again, this isn’t just reporting where you’re just looking at the blockchain and it could be Star Atlas or it could be anything.
[00:15:03] This is actually saying, Hey, here’s how you do it. So I guess I can now get the point. Why is everything like a move command or a doc command on the blockchain? It’s so that other people, other programmers have access to all of that. Now you could debate, is that a good idea? Is that a bad idea? good idea or bad idea related to how to develop a game.
[00:15:27] But that’s not the point. The point is they’ve decided to build it that way. And my point on the last podcast was, well, why’d they do it? Well, they did it for this composability
[00:15:41] philosophy, for lack of a better term. So, fair enough. Accept it. The internal thing that also seemed to make sense, and again, I’m kind of trying to relate all these things, I hope they are, but I’m not sure, is that we have heard of the how, the fact that the multiple products, so the showroom, the BrowserGameSage, the mobile app, all access the same assets on blockchain.
[00:16:02] I was like, okay, that’s cool because the assets are there. But I think it’s more than that. It’s not just the assets. It’s actually again, if you’re mining in a browser game and eventually the showroom UE5 has that function there, you would actually see yourself mining in UE5 too. Because again, the process, not just the asset, but the actual game process is, could be in both places.
[00:16:26] So again, You can get argue right or wrong. That’s not my point. My point is, ah, they’ve done it so they can do these things and other third parties can also act it. Cool. So again, still a great training video, great overview of Star Atlas, but is that one thing that kind of stood out to me that I think really yeah, made a lot more sense.
[00:16:46] So cool. So moving on just a couple remaining things beyond the rise and put out a surge practice video. So The Surge is this new gameplay style within the UE showroom that’s much more no, not first person shooter PvE, player versus, no, PvP, player versus player. So again, the idea is the three factions are all fighting and gathering res, or gathering something and then they win the thing.
[00:17:09] So he actually put out a really great kind of practice video going around talking about different things. And as I commented on his YouTube channel this really looks like a game. I know the first one that came out was really laggy, but again, it was, they were working through, but, you know, seeing that and him talking about different strategies and different things, it’s like, I mean, this is, this is a game.
[00:17:28] This is a game. So it’s kind of cool. So I’m getting much more excited about, you know, these kinds of things as they’re building up to the release, which so it, and I think there was a video can’t remember if I actually linked to it. Yeah. Don’t remember that one. But anyways, this upcoming April 20th, so a week from now, they are going to do the official SAGE, again, I keep calling it a test, and maybe these words don’t matter, but a public access where they’re trying to get at least a couple thousand people in there, and they’re going to get rewards in the form of Atlas and some crew packs, so.
[00:18:01] One cool thing it’s on a Saturday, so awesome. I’m not sure they released the time yet or these things, but again, you know, you’re building up to that. So yeah, it was great to see Beyond Horizon put out that surge practice video, kind of building momentum for what’s coming up this upcoming week.
[00:18:15] So I know normally this is a look at the past, but I thought I would put that out partly because it segues last topic, which is kind of where I’m at right now. So personally, my faction fleet and faction claim transactions out of the blue started performing again. I mean, I think everything succeeded on the first try.
[00:18:35] So again, I’m not sure if this is Solana got better, the team’s fixes came there, but it feels much better. So, and Now, so that makes me kind of think, well, maybe I should try a star based if the transactions are working a little better. So we’ll see if I have time this weekend, but on the other hand, now I’m thinking, well, maybe I should play around in the showroom and figure out the sage game there.
[00:18:55] So for once I have to say, I’m a little bit kind of like, Hey, there’s something there. This looks interesting when we get into it. So we’ll see where the my time availability this weekend comes. But I was thinking that. Possibly next weekend actually carving out the morning and we, well, again, I don’t know what time it is, but I’m just going to assume morning because all the other ones have been 10 a.
[00:19:13] m., but for that. So yeah, so kind of feel like I need to start finding a little bit of time on the weekends to try to do a couple of these things, especially if, again, we get the transaction issues resolved on Solana. So, anyway, so that’s just sort of where I’m at right now. So I’ll go ahead and wrap up.
[00:19:32] Again, if you’re interested in being a podcast guest, love to have someone on, whether you’re a community member, a startlist builder, content creator, team member, perhaps, please go to intergalacticherald. com, look for my contact page, just fill that out, and we can talk about that. And then just a reminder, my two projects If one’s intergalacticgear.
[00:19:51] com, that’s my very, very close to launching Star Atlas merch store but I’d really appreciate anybody filling out the merch survey that’s there, give me some ideas on some other products I can start looking to build and make. source for the store. And then lastly, if you’re a Star Atlas gamer, not interested in joining Guild, but yet still want to hang out with Star Atlas gamers, please go to intergalacticcoalition.
[00:20:12] com, fill out my interest survey. And again, love to create a community for just, just us. So anyways that’s pretty much it. Hope you have a great week ahead. This is Matt with the Intergalactic Herald.