Highlights: the frame rate and crew behavior. Foliage costs nothing now, the track units have levels of detail, and every need decides by its own rules. Plus you can scout wrecks with the periscope.
⚠ Saves from 0.7.1 still load — the save format is unchanged. And if no cruiser appeared in 0.7.1: that wasn't your save. A cleanup step at startup accidentally wiped out a whole group of systems (including save management). Fixed — the cruiser is back.
⭐ New
- Scout wrecks with the periscope. A bearing gives the exact direction and a fuzzy range — sharper the longer you hold on it, and much faster if you drive across
- The heat field survives saving — a heated or chilled cruiser no longer starts from zero after loading
- A wreck can carry several goods types instead of exactly one
⚙ Improved
- Full frame rate — the CPU limit is gone. In the finished build the GPU now sets the pace, not the processor (66 FPS on the test machine). Quality settings like view distance now actually take effect
- Foliage costs almost no performance now — drawn in batches instead of plant by plant; the ~14 FPS it used to eat are gone
- Every crew need has its own thresholds. Before, a single lowest value decided — a helmsman left his post because his hygiene was at zero, even though hygiene shouldn't have counted there
- A started errand is no longer interrupted. Someone on the way to eat is no longer pulled away by thirst and then by sleep — the circling is over
- An unmeetable need no longer stalls work (empty wash station → the crew keeps working)
- Relief at a post works — it was effectively dead
- The track units have levels of detail — close up real individual links, farther out a merged band, very far a stand-in body. In the periscope the links stay visible far longer
- The third range readout now factors in drive load like the other two
- The power-to-fuel factor comes from the drive's design rating instead of the instantaneous value (it used to swing with the throttle)
- "Stock" means the same everywhere — the economy was using slightly different terms
🔧 Fixed
- No cruiser was built — a cleanup step at startup deleted the group holding eleven systems and save management. Affected every start
- Your own ship's armor was transparent to projectiles — structural layers, craters, breaches and the penetration check were skipped for the player (not for enemies)
- The tracks dropped out entirely at times — the cruiser seemed to float on placeholders; and sometimes didn't collide (track units looked for in the wrong place)
- A one-third-second audio dropout the first time a sound file played
- The day-night slider cost GPU time every frame
- The crew's seat markers were invisible
- Stacks on the floor sat wrong once their reference object changed; on shutdown, parts were left in the wrong place
- An error occurred on every scene start
- The map's footer overlapped other readouts
- Five more silent defects of the same kind (parts not found at runtime), including quick-access slots never restored from the save
⚠ Known Issues
- Wrecks found in the world aren't saved — salvage progress doesn't survive a load: half-cleared → full again, salvaged → back, scouted → hidden again. (Destroyed cruisers are unaffected since 0.7.1.) Fix in progress
- A track unit behind a hull or hill is still drawn in full — only what leaves the frame is culled
- The remaining points from 0.7.1 still apply
🧪 Please test
Focus this time: the frame rate (does it run smoothly now?) and crew behavior (anyone still circling, anyone leaving their post for no reason?). And: build a cruiser — it should reliably be there again. Feedback in our Discord — tell us what's broken.