Hey Folks!
Update v0.15.0.37 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 adds Kozakh's design contest
ship, the Babak, plus several improvements to tutorials, docking, airlocks, and more.
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.
Our ship design contest winner, Kozakh, now has their ship featured in game!
Encounter UI should no longer get stuck on-screen when an NPC replies to the player while choosing an option.
Repair sparks will no longer start fires in the first 3 hours of the game.
Hallway conduit tutorial now triggers when approaching from the west, as well.
Ostraka step for leaving the dorm is now clearer about being able to click walk through doors without manually opening them.
Cargo kiosk now has a ship selector drop-down, for when multiple ships are docked.
Airlocks can no longer be uninstalled/dismantled while in use, and they should be placeable on the ground normally again when loose.
Encumbrance status updates are suppressed now while sitting/on NAV.
Asteroids near Ceres that NPCs use will now use less save file space/memory when NPC finishes.
Fixed a bug that would cause the entire asteroid field near Ceres to drift away from Ceres over years.
Docking request process now consistent between single and multiple dock vessels.
Undocking request dialogue now includes a BACK button in case something stalls it, so player cannot get stuck.
Transit back from OKLG residences should be working now.
The game will no longer crash if the player moors to an already-docked ship that lost significant mass since it was spawned.
Nulls will no longer occur when using transit interrupts loading multiple docked ships in the background.
The game will no longer hang on loading a save if the player debug-jumped across regions earlier.
The Monocarrier ship had its spawn points moved and docking ports renamed to avoid docking errors.
Several other null fixes.
The big news this patch is our latest ship: the Babak Multipurpose Corvette, by Kozakh!
As the winner of our ship design contest, this vessel will now appear as part of the pirate fleet players encounter around Ceres. And watch yourself out there, it's a heavy-hitter!
Another important change in this patch is to the Encounter UI. There was a situation that could happen where an NPC replies to the player as the player is choosing a reply in the Encounter UI, erasing all the options. And because there were no options to choose, the UI wouldn't ever close.
This patch fixes that bug, so options don't get deleted. Plus it changes the UI to always close in cases where no options appear (in case there are others we didn't catch).
A few more changes to the tutorial were also added. Most importantly, we've zeroed-out the chance of setting fires via repair sparks during the first 3 hours of the game. Despite the already very low chances, there was still a chance, and players who got unlucky were rightly frustrated. So now, there's a grace period from the beginning of the game for a few hours.
We also noticed some players walking a different route after leaving the starting dorm, so we added a trigger for the hallway conduit tutorial from other directions. Plus, a few new players didn't realize they could click to walk through doors automatically, so we adjusted the tutorial wording when leaving the dorm to help.
We also noticed in some player save files that asteroids near Ceres were accumulating, taking up precious file space and memory. We found one of the causes of this: NPCs mooring to asteroids would cause those asteroids to procedurally generate, and then remain "inflated" once the NPC leaves.
We adjusted the code here to "deflate" the asteroid again, so it wouldn't take up as much space in memory. Plus, while we were there, we also fixed some issues that could cause the asteroids near Ceres to drift off from Ceres over time.
A whole bunch of docking and mooring bugs were also fixed here. Thanks to several bug reports and player saves, we were able to find even more edge cases where ships (un)docking caused errors in the game.
One of the more interesting bugs involved a player who, after docking to a derelict, uninstalled the docking ring they were attached to. Which, on its own wouldn't be necessarily much of a problem. But they also took it back to their own ship, so when it came time to undock, the derelict went to look for the docking ring with the associated ship on it, and couldn't find it, and got sad.
Or another one, where a bad spawn point on the Monocarrier ship resulted in NPCs spawning at 0,0, which happened to be just outside the primary airlock, and causing the ship to think nothing could fit there to dock. Fun!
All these and more were fixed. And a handful of other issues such as OKLG transit, cargo kiosks when players had more than one ship, or even the encumbrance message spam we got while sitting at NAV and using thrusters.
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