Hey Folks!
We have a new devlog today! Plus an update (v0.14.3.14) is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly. This devlog covers the the last two months of updates including the pathfinding overhaul, ship AI, population fixes and more. You can watch here or on the Kitfox Youtube:
As for the patch, this is a hotfix to our "Across the System" update, which addresses a number of more general bugs and errors players have uncovered, ranging from ship teleportation and ignored collisions to null errors in the UI.
- Saves from v0.14.0.0 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.
- General Changes
- Ships should no longer teleport to strange places if the user is holding WASD keys while the NAV UI is loading.
- Ships without the captain on them now correctly detect collisions when player is flying them.
- Pathfinders should once again be able to cross from one ship to another when both origin and destination are outside the ship.
- The game should no longer refuse to drop a stackable item onto a container with both empty space and viable other stacks.
- The game should no longer throw errors when an item on the cursor is swapped for another item, and then that item is dropped onto a container containing compatible stacks.
- Crew members are now correctly removed from the player's company roster when they die on remote ships, avoiding null exception errors when using the hotkey to switch to other crew.
- HUD physiological stat bars no longer throw null exceptions if there is a problem with the person they represent.
- Using F5 or Autosave will no longer interrupt a save already in process, which could cause errors.
- A number of loose items which previously did not highlight with the highlight interactables hotkey should now correctly highlight.
- Fixes for several typos and redundant entries in the game data.
Two of the bigger fixes in this patch involve ship flight. In one case, the ship could be piloted while the NAV controls were loading, causing the ship to teleport across the System. And in another case, ships piloted by crew could ignore collisions as long as the captain wasn't around. Both of these should be patched now!
Another significant issue involved pathfinding across ships. If the crew was floating outside ship A, they would report that they could not reach the exterior of ship B. This turned out to be a logical error in detecting when a room is reachable from another room, and should also be fixed.
The next several errors were the result of missing items and crew. In some cases, swapping and dropping various items could lead to cases where an item was incorrectly placed or throws an error, often causing unusual behavior or soft locks. In other cases, crew would still remain in the player's company roster even if they died in a destroyed ship.
In all cases, the game would stumble over these missing or incorrect references, but should now be better guarded from them.
One player noticed that it was possible to F5 autosave while the game was already saving, which could cause errors. So we added some code to ensure user-triggered saves could safely interrupt a save in process, and to avoid autosaves from interrupting.
Lastly, we had a few typos in the game which caused incorrect highlighting or redundant data, so those were fixed.
As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know how things are working for you in the new patch
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC