PULSAR: Lost Colony

PULSAR: Lost Colony is a science fiction space exploration video game being developed by independent developers Leafy Games, LLC. The video game appeared on Steam October 3, 2013, and was later funded successfully on Kickstarter on October 31, 2013. The game was released in an Alpha state on February 25, 2014.

PULSAR: Lost Colony is a game about space exploration, in which a galaxy is created with a ship of the player's choice. They may warp to several systems and upgrade/repair their ship when encountering a system with a trading post. Combat is also in this game, as the player can attack and board enemy ships. There are several classes to choose from in this game such as: Captain, Pilot, Engineer, Scientist, and Weapons Officer. The game has a single-player and multiplayer available, both modes are exactly the same as it is now. Multiplayer is mainly co-op as you can play with your friends and cooperatively destroy enemy ships,[8][9] beam down to planets, and board enemy ships.

This game includes four playable factions: The Colonial Union, W.D. Corporation, The Alliance of Gentlemen, and The Fluffy Biscuit Company. In the future, other factions will be added, including a "secret faction" known as the Polytechnic Federation. The developers plan to tie in the factions with the story.

The game also currently includes three playable races The Humans, The Sylvassi, and The Robots. Unlike The Sylvassi, and The Robots, The Humans require oxygen, and they have a special ability allowing them to be revived once per jump. The Sylvassi are immune to extreme cold and have a special ability to be able to go invisible for a short time, however they have a lower base health than The Humans and are extremely weak to high temperatures. The Robots have a still lower base health than The Sylvassi however they are immune to all hazardous environments except radioactive, and they can be repaired with a repair gun.

On July 2012, Leafy Games, LLC was created. Shortly after the founding of the indie studio they started their first project, PULSAR: Lost Colony, after several attempts at prototypes for a new game. They released their first development log or "devlog" on their Official YouTube Channel on August 2, 2013 titled "PULSAR: Lost Colony - Video Devlog #0" which marked their first public showcase of the game. Since then they have updated the game several times with new features. They have added features for each station for the roles of Captain, Engineer, Scientist, and Weapons Officer such as: commands delivered by the Captain to the players/bots, ship cores which must be monitored at all times by the Engineer, and viruses/scans delivered by the scientist, and new weapons/turrets have been added to ships. The developers have also added new ships to the game, and planets. The developers post a developer log on their channel, and only recently started scheduling them to every one to two weeks.

Game Play

Classes: Science

Scroll way down, spend 1 point on Scanner Mode Research Materials. Spend all your remaining points on Frequency Amplification. Immediately look to the upper right corner of your screen. The first ship listed is your ship.

Monitor Shield Strength: In upper right corner the narrow bar on top is shield strength. If it’s below 30%, go immediately to your Science Station and to the computer window. Under programs you need to activate the program called "Emergency Shield Boosting". If it indicates it is not ready, ask the ship engineer for fuel. Keeping the shield active and correctly configured is your most important role during combat. Modulated shields resist beams. Static shields resist bullets, explosions, and collisions. You should have shields on Modulate unless your pilot or captain specifically requests static because you will typically be under a beam attack.

Sensors help you find things like an enemy ship hiding in a nebula. If your EM Strength is below ten, ask your Engineer if Science is damaged or currently has its power cut. If your ship is persistently unable to find things, ask the captain to upgrade the EM Sensor using scrap. Sensors help you find things like a nearby cloaked ship, a wreck, etc...

The Sensor Dish station is where you fire probes. Left click will fire probes, which extend the range of detection. Holding Right click Sensor Locks a target, making it harder for them to hide from you. You can fire probes forever, however, just like firing a turret gun it will decloak you if you are in a ship with cloaking capability. Use the probes on things you encounter such as space mushrooms, crystals, blue looking light sources, or anything out of the ordinary and the probes will assist you in finding research items, the science you need to collect. You can also use the sensor dish to pick up scrap which is out of range from the ship proximity scrap collection function. Aim your sensor dish at the scrap which appears as blue glowing chunks of debris and Hold Right Click.

Sensor lock and sensor focus: Sensor lock strength indicator is critical as a strong sensor lock give you extra options. The extra options are icons that allow you to click on one of the sensor focus objectives. With a strong sensor lock you can choose to focus the sensor on the enemy ship engineering section as an example. You can have all of your ships weapons focus on what you choose. You could choose to focus on their weapons systems so they lose the ability to attack you.

Collecting Science: You collect research materials from planets and places which you will have in your inventory until you either place them into the ship atomizer or use them for a mission. Research you collect goes into the ship atomizer. Once you atomize the research you receive spendable Research Credit.

Off ship activity: The scientist needs to constantly provide health to injured players in a landing party and use the hand scanner/sensor to find research material, mission objectives, and enemies ahead. When healing crewmates, aim at their head. The healing weapon gets a boost if you aim at the players head. The medic gun shoots through walls, and can damage enemies although at a somewhat slow rate. When using the hand scanner know that red dots are enemies, light blue dots are science/research you need to collect, and green dots are ... Your hand scanner is also useful for detecting enemies that have boarded your ship when you are still onboard.

Configuration

Plugins

Do this I guess...

mono ~/games/PulsarMod/PulsarPluginBootstrapper.exe ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/PULSAR_LostColony_Data/Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll

Put plugins in this path:

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/PULSAR_LostColony_Data/Managed/Plugins

Save Game Files

When you manually save the game the file will end with the extension .plsave and is located at the path"

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/Saves

The game generates auto-save files in which the game will automatically save the game at regular configured intervals. The path is

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/Saves/Autosaves

Location of user defined keyboard configuration files: (*.bindings)

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony

Location of save game files (*.plsave)

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/Saves

Troubleshooting

log file locations in general

Location 1: Player log showing errors and game crash log location

~/.config/unity3d/Leafy Games, LLC/PULSAR_LostColony/

Files appear as Player.log and Player-crash.log or similar

Location 2: Unity analytics

~/.config/unity3d/Leafy Games, LLC/PULSAR_LostColony/Unity/ xxxxx

Location 3: player voice communication / Team Speak

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/logs/

VOX Audio Player Communication Failure

You have game sounds such as the environment, ship, gun fire, etc however you can not hear the other players when they speak.

The game uses a built in Teamspeak (ts3).

Sound device attachments:

lsof | grep snd

for Pulsar

lsof | grep PULSAR

Location of ts3 Team Speak log

ls ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/logs/

These logs are separate from the game binary log files and only relate to the voice communication component of the game. They are generated by the Team Speak engine. They are very useful in troubleshooting.

If you see audio devices appear as red in the game audio settings try testing from console

aplay -Dtee:\'plughw:0,0\',/tmp/alsatee.out,raw /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

SteamOS Pulsar looking for libsndfile.so.1.0.28 under newroot

You have enabled "compatibility mode" for Pulsar Lost Colony in the Steam Launcher. Right click on the launcher and uncheck "compatibility mode".

SteamOS uses switch_root in compatibility mode, which is useful if you manually wish to configure paths to devices or drivers.