After being in Early Access since late last year, Trese Brothers Games pushed hard and fast on patches to improve Star Traders: Frontiers [Steam] and it's now officially out. Note: Copy provided to our Steam Curator.
Like their other games Templar Battleforce, Star Traders: 4X Empires and Heroes of Steel RPG it comes with Linux support.
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About the game:
Command your ship and crew as a space pirate, merchant, bounty hunter, and more in Star Traders: Frontiers – an epic space RPG from Trese Brothers Games. Venture forth into a massive open universe, rich with adventure and the lore of the Star Traders. Choose your path by assembling and commanding your custom crew and spaceship in a constantly evolving galaxy torn by internal strife, political intrigue, and alien threats. Will you fly as a pirate terrorizing shipping lanes, join the solar wars as a military captain, or track targets across the stars as a fearsome bounty hunter?
Here's what the developers said about the release:
Andrew Trese (Co-Founder, Trese Brothers Games):
We’re thrilled to deliver a fully-realized version of Star Traders: Frontiers to our Steam players. The past few months have been crazy exciting and busy – from daily bug fixing to adding heaps of new features and content. We wouldn’t be here without the community, which has been absolutely amazing.
Cory Trese (Co-Founder, Trese Brothers Games):
With Star Traders: Frontiers, we’ve returned to one of our favorite settings and put the player in command of a ship and crew. The story weaves together the relationships between captain and crew – and the adventures they embark on together. Each choice the player makes within the story dramatically impacts the universe and the lives of those who populate it. We set out to demonstrate exactly how Early Access should be done. We did it the Trese Brothers way – hammering out 87 updates, including huge new features and swathes of content, all without ever invalidating a saved game or pausing more than a few days between big updates. Throughout all this, we’ve also responded to every player thread on Steam. Yes, that might mean we’re crazy – but interacting with our community is extremely important to us.
We had some thoughts posted up from contributor BTRE back in November, obviously the game is quite different to then since it's had around 80 patches to improve it. There's so much to talk about, I simply don't know where to start and end with this one.
Firstly, it's rubbish with two monitors. You either have to play it in windowed mode or disable a monitor for fullscreen before you load the game, otherwise it will spread itself across both monitors. Frustrating as hell, but it's not the only game to have this problem. BTRE noted this back in November, so it's a shame this hasn't been solved many months later. They did at least solve the issue with tooltips not appearing in the Linux version, so that's good.
It's quite an engrossing game, one with quite a lot of detail and a lot of different game mechanics. There's a good amount of depth to it too, for example: Each crew member has their own statistics, they each level up with different abilities, they have different weapons and gear and so on. I spent a good half an hour just going over my crew list, it certainly sucks the time away from you.
What's interesting, is how they tied in their other games. You don't need to have played them, I just found it interesting that the Templar Knights from Templar Battleforce came up during a conversation with a character.
There's so much to talk about, even something as simple as flying from one location to another is full of surprises. You have an event log that fills up with details about what happens on board your ship like fights breaking out, failed navigation through an asteroid field, officers preventing accidents and so on. By the time you reach your destination, you might find you're in need of a few repairs.
If you like the idea of travelling the stars, upgrading your ship and making it your own, going on quests for various factions wrapped up in an ever-changing narrative then it might just be something for you. Honeslty, I'm a little overwhelmed by how big it is since there's no tutorial but I quite like it.
You can find it on Steam with 20% off until August 7th.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Since it finally left early access, I insta-bought it.
Now I only need to find some time to start my space career ^_^
Even if it's not my type of game (never played a Trese brothers game before), the developers earned every penny.
They are super friendly and keep a close contact with the community. <3
Thanks in advance.
Quoting: denyasisHow is it in terms of content volume / quality? Like is it more along the lines of FTL (limited, but very focused) or more expansive in scope (alla space rangers 2 or star sector)?Way more expansive than FTL. FTL is very linear compared to this, nothing alike.
Thanks in advance.
QuoteFor Linux, I would say one thing that really helped us was the Steam Scout runtime. Valve provides an absolutely brilliant kit of tools for running a standard Linux build server inside a chroot. It is self-updating, helps you link all your libraries correctly and gives you a very clear idea of what your Steam environment will look like.
I know not everyone is a huge fan of Steam, but they have done a lot of heavy lifting to support game developers who are working on Linux. Our cost to carry Linux support would have been a lot higher without Valve's help.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
We have an advantage in that our games are all built in C++, which is surprisingly portable. We feed the same game code files into XCode, Visual Studio and GCC. For us, supporting Linux and Mac OS X helped us improve performance in Windows and reduce bugs on all platforms. Multiple compilers (warnings:all) helped us find bugs faster. Our games are better on our biggest selling platforms because we support the others.
I will say that adding Linux support for our very first title was intimidating and I was worried about permutations. We made compromises that were difficult (initially the Linux port had lower quality mouse support vs. win32) and we suffered some in reviews for this, but generally Linux players were understanding that it was a process. We stuck with it and our Linux users are among some of the most detailed bug reporters we have on the team.
I won't post a bunch of grumbling about the incredibly high cost of Mac hardware, but if a developer told me they couldn't support OS X because the laptops were too spendy I'd probably nod my head and understand. When one of my Linux test boxes suffered a motherboard failure I just restored a backup into a VM and kept right on going while we waited for a replacement board.
Quoting: liamdaweWay more expansive than FTL. FTL is very linear compared to this, nothing alike.
Thanks! I think You helped me make up my mind!
Quoting: drmothThe developer described their Linux experience recently on reddit:
QuoteFor Linux, I would say one thing that really helped us was the Steam Scout runtime. Valve provides an absolutely brilliant kit of tools for running a standard Linux build server inside a chroot. It is self-updating, helps you link all your libraries correctly and gives you a very clear idea of what your Steam environment will look like.
I know not everyone is a huge fan of Steam, but they have done a lot of heavy lifting to support game developers who are working on Linux. Our cost to carry Linux support would have been a lot higher without Valve's help.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
We have an advantage in that our games are all built in C++, which is surprisingly portable. We feed the same game code files into XCode, Visual Studio and GCC. For us, supporting Linux and Mac OS X helped us improve performance in Windows and reduce bugs on all platforms. Multiple compilers (warnings:all) helped us find bugs faster. Our games are better on our biggest selling platforms because we support the others.
I will say that adding Linux support for our very first title was intimidating and I was worried about permutations. We made compromises that were difficult (initially the Linux port had lower quality mouse support vs. win32) and we suffered some in reviews for this, but generally Linux players were understanding that it was a process. We stuck with it and our Linux users are among some of the most detailed bug reporters we have on the team.
I won't post a bunch of grumbling about the incredibly high cost of Mac hardware, but if a developer told me they couldn't support OS X because the laptops were too spendy I'd probably nod my head and understand. When one of my Linux test boxes suffered a motherboard failure I just restored a backup into a VM and kept right on going while we waited for a replacement board.
Finally some devs who get it.
This should be redirected at all the devs not supporting linux because they are afraid of the "incredible" workload, which is just a myth.
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