Small Vending Machine & Performance Improvements

Thank You!

First of all, thank you all for the support. The terrain update was a massive undertaking for us and the response from the existing community, as well as all the new players, has been absolutely amazing.We immediately broke our all time concurrent player record and then repeated that for several more days in a row.Recent reviews rocketed up to overwhelmingly positive which is heartwarming to see.(if you haven't already, consider going and leaving a review, it helps a lot!)Thank you!

Small Vending Machine

At a fraction of the capacity, with 12 slots, the small vending machine serves as some useful compact storage for anything from food to ingots. It's just one by three small grids in size, so much smaller than the large version. This repeatedly came up as something we wanted during a play session, and now here it is.

Terrain Optimizations and Settings

We’ve heard from many of you that you’re experiencing lower than expected fps with the new update, especially on Vulcan. We’ve done some optimisations under the hood to help improve terrain performance as well as exposed some new settings to give you better control when tweaking your performance.

Terrain Tessellation

Tessellation is a process performed on the GPU. We use it to define small details in the terrain like rocks and cracks. The Terrain Tessellation setting controls how finely the mesh is subdivided, these small subdivisions are then pushed inwards or outwards using a heightmap texture that matches the terrain color texture.

Terrain Detail

In order to render terrain out to 1.5KM, as we get further from the camera we sample voxel data at increasing steps to form terrain LODS (levels of detail). The Terrain Detail setting controls the thresholds at which we switch to lower detail LODS. Lower detail LODS bias downwards and tend to be smoother; distant features appear “flattened” at the lower quality settings.

Minable Render Distance

The Minable Render Distance setting controls the distance at which mineable ores are drawn.

NOTE: if this is set higher than the “Terrain Detail” setting distant ores will appear to “float” over the terrain.

Shadows

The Shadows setting affects the number of Cascades (Shadow LODS) and the distance that shadows are drawn. At lower quality levels we only allow large objects to cast shadows.

Community Localization

A big thank you to the community members who have provided us with comprehensive translations for Chinese(MRhythm), French(CedricDx and Gosti_FR), and Russian(AlexusYT) languages.

They created a git repository that's maintained and allows us to easily pull their updates directly into the game.

A big thank you to everyone involved!

Game Serialization Improvements

On some large bases people were experiencing game lag during saving. This was due to saving locking some processes for the entirety of the save process, including zipping the save. Saves now only lock game threads while necessary and release them before compressing the serialized data.

Steep Terrain Glitch

There was a visual glitch with the terrain data on Vulcan causing extremely weird normals on steep mountains. This means that we have regenerated the terrain data for Vulcan but we have kept the old map in the game but hidden so that those with a current save on Vulcan will not have to update their terrain data, this will mean that they will still see the weird normals on existing saves.

Indirect Addressing Fix

There was an issue with causing indirect addressing that was fixed by community member on Discord provided the fix for. Send your thanks to Elmotrix!

Your support makes these updates possible

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2624/Stationeers_Complete_the_Set/

Change Log 0.2.5919.26060

• Fixed Jetpack sometimes not working when very close to ground. This could happen if the sphere cast started inside the terrain collider, added a sphere overlap to check for this case.
• Added Deprecated flag to Vulcan WorldSetting.
• Changed updated Dedicated Server help tip for valid worlds to hide tutorials and flag deprecated worlds.
• Updated icarus suit helmet animation to fix visor poking through mesh when open.
• Updated icarus suit helmet mesh with new mesh, fixing a few minor uv and vert issues.
• Added function to format all commands as a markdown table for the dedicated server guide. Commented out for now but leaving there in case we want to regenerate it.
• Reduced High minable render distance range a small amount.
• Added Small y offset to distant minables to help prevent "floating" effect.
• Changed scale in range of minables shader to be a fraction of the total render distance.
• Fixed Jetpack would loose thrust when flying over lava. It now also evaluates the lava height when determining thrust efficiency.
• Fixed un-localised slot tooltip for lander mkII.
• Fixed a typo for one of Jupiter's moons. name has been corrected from "Hamilia" to "Himalia"
• Added savetype 'manual' to possible types for loadlatest command.
• Fixed Deep Miner destroyed state was invisible, caused destroyed Deep Miners to block constructions.
• Fixed deep mining regions not showing up on the map motherboard for lunar, mars and mimas.
• Added StructureVendingMachineSmall to the vending machine kit
• Fixed Some Issues with the voxel data on Vulcan. This fix will only apply to new games created on Vulcan after this patch.
• Fixed Some cases where regions and start locations were being direct referenced when interacting with a WorldSettingData.
• Changed increased the distance of emissive terrain effects.
• Fixed Grammatical errors in Moon and Mimas descriptions
• Fixed Grammatical errors in Vulcan world description.
• Fixed saving on very large bases was pausing the game thread for a very long time. Have moved unpausing the game tick to immediately after the snapshot of the world data has been acquired. After this the serialization and zipping will continue in the background. This should get the game tick pause time down to sub one second.
• Added more logging to each save step.
• Removed unused replaysaveload class.
• Added a few more restricted characters to save names which where causing saves to fail.
• Fixed an issue with indirect addressing for IC10 scripts. Thanks @Elmotrix for the fix.
• Added missing blueprint for flaregun.
• Removed some related assets, blueprints, animators and audio from already deleted weapon prefabs.
• Fixed advanced composter not connecting to chutes correctly.
• Terrain settings pass. Reworked and added some settings to help performance scale better on low-mid range hardware.
• Reworked Terrain Tessellation Settings to more performant values. Added Extreme Setting and an off Setting.
• Added Minable Render Distance Setting. This effects the render range of minable ores.
• Added Terrain Detail Setting. This effects the Lod radius of the terrain meshes (at lower settings the near-to-mid distance terrain meshes will be less accurately rendered)
• Added missing isKinematic checks to a few places where rigidbody velocity is set.
• Removed references to missing scripts on a few cosmetic items.
• Added Hidden Setting "MaxConcurrentWorkers". By default this is set to processorCount-1. Some users are reporting crashes or errors on load due to the 100% all-core-work-load terrain initialisation. This setting can be used to help mitigate application CPU usage for those users effected.
• Fixed save folder names were being incorrectly trimmed if they contained dots.
• Updated French, Russian, and Simplified Chinese localization files. (Credit: CedricDx(FR), Gosti_FR(FR), AlexusYT(RU), and MRhythm(CN))