Hey Folks!
Update v0.15.0.30 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which fixes some reactor temperature issues, suddenly exploding ships, ship weapons, and other bugs.
Saves from v0.15.0.0 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.
Ships oriented almost-but-not-exactly 180 degrees away from the nearest celestial object will no longer instantly accelerate out of the universe and explode.
Reactor laser arrays will no longer produce 100x the heat they were supposed to.
Reactor laser arrays will now correctly power on/off when the reactor cycles.
Ship weapon auto-fire should hit more often now when target has a high VCRS.
Ship weapons destroyed on targets will now stop firing.
Non-torchship AI pilots around Ceres should get stuck calculating targets less often now.
Pressing unused buttons on the Weapons MFD will no longer show the COMMS main menu on-screen.
One of the more bizarre (and violent!) bugs we discovered recently involved ships suddenly exploding for no reason. In one player provided save file, setting the game speed to exactly 16x and hitting unpause would cause all ships on-screen to explode at 8:30 and 11 seconds. Reliably.
No ships were nearby to crash into. They were not moving more than a few m/s. Nothing on-board was volatile or in danger of exploding. And playing at any speed other than 16x was fine.
As it turns out, there was a precision error in some math we used to calculate the angle between two vectors. When their slowly-rotating ship was pointed almost (but not exactly!) 180 degrees away from the nearest celestial object, a calculated value we passed to an arccosine function [i]appeared[/i] to be -1, but arccosine saw it as < -1. Which is not allowed, and so it shrugged and returned "not a number."
This, in turn, caused the game to instantly accelerate the ship from 0 to infinity, ejecting it from the universe, and tearing apart every atom on the ship from G-forces.
And there you have it, folks. MATH KILLS.
In other hilarious(ly deadly) physics news, our recent fixes to the power system during fast-forward also fixed some reactor modules, so they now turn on and draw power like other appliances.
Unfortunately for any humans aboard, this also means their heating effects finally started working. And the laser arrays, in particular, began heating the reactor room faster than any reasonable number of coolers could counteract.
But only sometimes. As restarting the reactor often caused the lasers (and only lasers) to turn off again, permanently.
This patch adjusts those lasers to be more in-line with other reactor parts, and also to make them more consistently turn on and off with the reactor.
Combat pilots should hopefully appreciate this next fix. Players have long reported that their ship weapons failed to hit targets when the target had appreciable VCRS crossing the weapon's arc of fire.
As it turns out, the targeting code for these weapons had a units conversion error, incorrectly predicting future positions of the projectile and target.
And there you have it, folks. MATH KI- er, doesn't kill?
Also, when a target's weapons are destroyed, they should now honor their destroyed status and stop firing back at you.
Lastly, we fixed some AI pilot logic that was causing non-torch pilots around Ceres to treat every trip as an opportunity to achieve torch speeds with their puny RCS ships, and get stuck in a loop trying to find a destination they could reach with the little RCS fuel they had at those speeds.
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 if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC