Hey Folks!
Update v1.0.1.3 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a feature patch to 1.0, which includes a Unity version upgrade, plus some fairly significant AI and performance changes. Due to the deeper nature of some of these changes, the patch has been in beta testing a bit longer than most as we ironed-out the wrinkles.
Saves from v1.0.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.
Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!
Performance should be a bit faster now, particularly during pathfinding.
Reduced memory leaks, particularly due to pathfinding.
Upgraded Unity version to fix a random crash bug in the renderer.
Random crashing bug identified with Intel 13th and 14th generation cpus using outdated BIOS drivers.
AIs Hauling items will now use nested containers more effectively.
AIs Feeding items to tasks will now attempt to gather other nearby items in need of Feeding to nearby tasks.
AIs without helmets Hauling items through airlock pressure differences should no longer immediately drop items after picking them up.
AIs Hauling items should no longer return to the area they gathered from and drop some of the items they were Hauling.
AIs should yoink items from other AIs and placeholders less often now.
AIs Hauling multiple items to zones will now attempt to drop larger items first, to avoid blocking their drops with smaller items.
AIs dropping items from dollies now correctly target the zone they are standing in, instead of the dolly position.
AIs Hauling items to multiple zones with item filters will now deposit them honoring those filters.
📢AIs switching into Work shift will interrupt repetitive recreational tasks now (e.g. exercise), to get them working faster.
📢Adding new tasks will now interrupt AIs on Work shift if they are currently doing long-duration recreational activities (e.g. exercise).
AI attempting to replace battery or O2 bottles no longer get stuck in a loop if the target charger/container is in certain orientations/corners.
ROSTER UI Zones button no longer blocks rows near the bottom of the screen.
📢Uploading an existing mod to Workshop will no longer overwrite the cloud-edited strNotes with local strNotes.
We realized our Store page's "Steam Workshop" tag was not showing, and so we corrected that.
If you haven't already, check out some of the great Workshop mods from our community!
E.g. EddieSM's Props, Aerofects, and Solar Panels, or Ithalan's Ships, NotFuji's new Items and Ships, or any of the other 174 mods from over 60 modders!
📢Options->Controls UI now shows which input devices are detected and which are receiving signals.
📢Clicking an input device in the Options->Controls UI now toggles that device on/off in the game.
Options->Controls UI no longer duplicates list when refreshing, and will refresh automatically when changing input selector.
Loose floors can now be dismantled.
Unmooring can now be performed from any ship in the cluster, not just the initiating ship.
Tooltips for Inventory Pin and Open All buttons once again close when their window is closed.
Installed Minsheng Mountain floor tiles are can no longer be plucked from the world via clicking in the inventory UI.
Placeholder progress (e.g. installing) is now remembered across a save/load cycle.
Ship's due for cleanup now have their timer reset when player undocks from them, even if player never entered them.
Scrollwheel sensitivity less hyper now in zones UI dropdowns and message log.
The hallway conduit tutorial outside the dorm will no longer trigger if completed before it's objective appeared.
Fixed a null exception that could occur in GasContainers when checking for toxins.
Fixed a null exception that could occur with docked ships left behind when switching regions.
One of the bigger pieces of this patch centers around improving the lag and memory leaks reported by players. And while this patch won't solve them all, it should help with some of the bigger culprits.
Using profiling tools, we found and fixed a number of memory leaks that would occur when doing pathfinding and tile lookups on ships. The tile lookups also had some more costly operations we could cache, which helps to reduce processing time across a wide range of game code.
We also spent some time trying to track down causes of the "random crashing" bugs we see reported occasionally.
One cause we were able to find appears to be a renderer crash that could occur in Unity 6000.3.10f1. A newer version, 6000.3.23f1 includes a fix for this issue, and so we upgraded the project to this new version.
Also, some of our more proactive players in Discord were able to track down a second cause to Intel 13th and 14th generation cpus with older BIOS drivers. When a few users started sharing info about their crashes in a thread, Blue Wizzard found multiple other communities talking about similar crashes in Unity games. And in 3 out of 3 cases where users updated their motherboard drivers, stability returned!
If you have an Intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, please verify your motherboard drivers are updated to avoid random crashes.
AI improvements were another large piece of this update. We reworked the way AIs compare nearby tasks for Hauling and Feeding items to jobs to make them more efficient. This includes better use of nested containers (e.g. dollies and crates with bags inside), better zone filtering and dropping, and pre-checking airlocks when attempting to batch tasks.
We also added some re-testing of carried items at key times to avoid walking back to the origin and dropping items where they were picked up, as well as yoinking items from the hands of other NPCs (or even installation jobs).
We also heard that players were having trouble with AIs continuing long-duration recreation tasks (e.g. exercise, sitting) when Work shift started, or would get stuck doing those when there were temporarily no other tasks to do. So we added code to both snap them out of those tasks when Work shift begins, and also any time new work tasks are added during Work shift.
While there's still more work to be done in both performance and AI, players should hopefully notice a marked improvement in both cases starting in this build.
We've also heard reports that the game can sometimes get confused about which input device is being used. So that Controls UI now includes both an indicator lamp for all detected input devices and current signals, as well as a way to disable them independently. This way, users with more unorthodox controllers (e.g. drawing pads, HOTAS, etc.) can turn those off in-game if they interfere with normal keyboard/mouse and gamepad inputs.
Plus a range of other, more miscellaneous fixes and improvements, and more on the way.
As always, thank you for playing, and for your help in making Ostranauts more fun for all!
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC