Hey Folks!
Update v0.15.1.16 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which fixes strange AI behaviors, erroneous docking fees, and other problems.
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!
AIs will no longer be paralyzed with a desire to insult sworn enemies that are across the Solar System.
Docking a ship with a crew pilot in a different region than the player's captain will no longer incur fees in the wrong station.
All recurring docking fees on a ship now stop repeating once that ship undocks from anywhere.
Selecting more than one object (e.g. via dragging a box selection) will no longer deselect current crew and silently select the captain.
AIs will no longer teleport around in a game of interdimensional musical chairs.
AIs will no longer interact with any item that has use coordinates in a forbidden zone.
📢Dragging/pinning the quick action bar (QAB) will now save that position with the save file.
Derelicts will no longer chat like humans via COMMS while docking.
Attempting to dock from too far away will produce a more suitable reply now.
Warnings about viz block TF nulls and null COs on ship should stop spamming the log now.
Rotated items should once again have correct lighting/shading directions and colors.
📢Bartenders will take a break from counter wiping to attend to needs more often now.
NAV station should produce fewer null exceptions now when changing the line art for ships.
Another batch of AI and other fixes today!
One particularly subtle bug involved an error in AI range and line of sight checking. A player noticed their crew was standing on an asteroid, doing nothing but complaining of not being able to reach the fixer on K-Leg, halfway across the Solar System.
Looking into the situation more, it turns out that they really wanted to insult their sworn enemy, and were trying to use a special type of move that must be used without walking first. The target had to be within range, and within line of sight to trigger.
Both of those tests passed, technically. Except, the target was on a completely different map, and no longer loaded. So when the crew attempted to start, they immediately failed. And the process repeated.
Today's patch will make that test check for non-loaded targets before anything else, and should avoid this situation in the future. There aren't many interactions that fit that pattern, but there are a few.
Another, trickier to reproduce bug fixed in this patch involved docking fees from distant stations. We've long heard about this one, but have never been able to figure out the cause.
However, a player's save had a few clues which helped us find two causes that we could fix. Namely, if the player had their captain leave the ship, and then controlled crew to fly that ship to another region, docking/undocking in that new region could end up mixing the stations and their fees. We were able to shore-up the code around these fees to be more careful of captain/crew distinctions.
And for players with these recurring fees, any undocking event on a ship will now clear all recurring fees for that ship. So the first undock in any affected saves should stop more fees from piling-up.
A possibly related bug involved selecting more than one item at a time, typically with a mouse drag selection box. Doing this while crew was selected would deselect that crew and silently select the captain, which could also cause weirdness (e.g. strange docking fee locations, or controlling captain when they are not on-screen). This, too, is fixed now.
Recently, players have reported seeing AIs teleport around from chair-to-chair. And this one turns out to be an emergent AI behavior. AIs in Ostranauts will remember which actions they took corresponded to which emotional changes, to help them decide what to do in the future. Usually, this is limited to what we call "opener" moves, which are the beginning moves in a chain.
In this case, they were remembering one of the middle moves in the sit action. The one that teleports them from their using animation to their sitting one. They saw that this move corresponded to a mood boost they wanted, and decided to keep using that wherever they could. The fix for this was pretty easy, as we just fixed the erroneous "opener" flags on those moves, making them unavailable to AIs for free use.
Semi-related to this, AIs should now avoid using any item that would end up with them inside a forbidden zone, trapping them.
Some of our players have requested that the quick action bar could remember where they pin it across sessions, so we added this feature. Now, when the QAB is pinned somewhere, saving the game will remember that location, and loading a save will restore it's pinned status and position.
This patch also includes a range of other miscellaneous fixes, ranging from rendering to log spam, and even derelicts talking like humans.
From here until launch, our main goals are to address bugs and quality of life issues in existing features, and finish implementing the content planned for the 1.0 release. If there are major pain points or quality of life suggestions you want to be sure we're aware of, please let us know in the forums, on Discord, or on Reddit.
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