Hey Folks!
Update v0.15.1.0 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which adds support for Steam Workshop, plus fixes for the gig system, station maps, and other issues.
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.
Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!
📢Steam Workshop support!
Gigs should work better now, and be completed more reliably. Particularly when multiple are active. (Note: Currently active gigs may not be fixed.)
Gig money transfers should now appear correctly in the message log.
There are now "short hop" gigs available around Ceres and Europa.
📢NAV station will now allow engaging torch autopilot while docked, so players can carry shuttlecraft on long trips.
Broken ship/zip block data within save files will now be skipped on loading, so the save file can still be loaded without them.
Ships docked indirectly to your ship will no longer collide with stations/ships when docked.
Flotilla station should stop letting characters spawn outside the hull now.
Port Mojave's HVAC system has been upgraded with better cooling.
The LEO spawned on VORB HAB should now be the correct jurisdiction.
LEOs should no longer repeatedly arrest players outside their jurisdictions, taking their money, but never processing them.
📢Characters walking outside on ground stations now use the walking animation and speed, instead of floating.
Wall light in the white setting now uses the correct sprite.
The debug Respawn Ship button has been improved to avoid spawning duplicate characters and retain ship metadata better.
Fixed an index out of range error that could happen when drawing ship lines in NAV.
By far the biggest change in this update is the addition of Steam Workshop support.
With the addition of Workshop support, it is now possible to browse and subscribe to mods on Steam, and get updates to them automatically. And with the new in-game MODS UI, you can do all this, plus control which mods are active.
And the new MODS UI still lets you control local mods as you did before, in case the mod you want is not yet on Workshop.
We're very excited to release this feature, as a number of players have been asking for an easier way to use mods. And we can't wait to see what other creations people make and share with it!
Apart from Workshop, we've also been working on a number of other issues.
One of the more significant updates in this patch is to the gig system. Previously, there were problems with gigs finishing if too many gigs were taken of a certain type. And in this patch, they've been expanded to better handle multiple open gigs.
This means it should be more reliable to take and finish gigs now. Though note that already-taken gigs may still have the old issues. If you are unable to complete an existing gig in your save, you may have to abandon it.
And speaking of gigs, Ceres stations now have their own short-range gigs so players stuck in port have a way to earn cash to get free again.
The NAV autopilot will now allow you to plot and engage trips with a shuttle attached. Since we added multi-docking, players have been taking advantage of larger ships with a smaller shuttle docked, and this was a limitation to them getting around.
Note that with this safety feature off, your ship could be damaged if you don't have a towing brace installed and secured before travel!
We found and fixed an issue discovered with loading saves, where a block of the zip file was unreadable, and it would cancel loading the rest of the save. If the game encounters this issue, it should now attempt to continue loading the rest of the save.
We reworked how the ship respawn code works in the debug UI, which lacked some handling of ship metadata. And this allowed us to reuse it to backwards-patch old saves with new station maps if we need to.
As a test of this, today's patch will attempt to respawn Flotilla and Port Mojave, fixing NPC spawn locations in the former, and runaway heat in the latter. Note that this will skip respawning the station if you load a save while on said station, but it should re-attempt it in a future load process.
Also, we finally found one of the main causes of officers arresting players repeatedly on VORB! It turns out that the officer spawned on VORB Hab was from OKLG instead of Venus. And the way we setup their arrest routines, the final step blocked attempts if they were out of their jurisdiction, but the opening step didn't care.
So they would start to arrest, take your money, say you're free to go, then immediately arrest you again.
Now, the arrest process has the same regional filter at both the beginning and end, so they should stop attempting arrests unless they are in the right region to finish.
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