Hey Folks!
Update v0.15.1.20 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which reworks gig and ferry timing, plus improves AI, NAV, and other features.
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!
Undocking from OKLG in a new game should more reliably pushback on the south side, avoiding maneuvering tutorial deaths.
Using the PASS ferry service will now advance the game clock/calendar for the trip duration.
PASS durations and gig durations have been rebalanced.
ROSTER UI helmet toggle will now save current setting when game is saved.
📢ROSTER UI now highlights the current hour by underlining it.
📢AI will now attempt to replace empty O2 bottles in worn EVA suits.
📢AI will now attempt to place helmet in EVA/Pressure suit clip point before other slots when removing it for comfort.
AI replacing batteries will no longer destroy them if there was a problem placing them
AI will no longer get confused and do nothing if an unworn EVA is in inventory without a battery.
NAV Course Plotting arrow buttons now allow you to offset arrival point of course.
Autopilot is now less likely to cancel suddenly when resuming from super fast-forward while at 16x.
Characters will be better able to detect if an item can fit inside a slot within a slot now.
AI pilots will no longer torch at ludicrous speed.
AI pilots will now dock at stations more reliably when player is docked there.
Interplanetary courier gigs now actually require the item be delivered to get paid.
Characters will no longer become permanently more lazy, arrogant, and content each save/load cycle.
Characters affected by creeping lazy-arrogant-content syndrome will have their attitudes adjusted in existing saves.
Pathfinding will no longer fail if the path touches a forbidden zone intended for someone else.
Mooring to a derelict without a permit now counts as illegal salvage.
NPCs have been given slightly more leeway in choosing which leisure activity they wish to pursue.
NPCs are now allowed to approach the currently controlled captain/crew if that captain/crew is scheduled for FREE shift.
NPCs have been disallowed from using tackle or other combat moves on others socially.
NPCs using kiosks repeatedly should grow tired of them sooner than before.
📢Social status bar tooltips will now indicate how to improve when they are in the red.
Autopause will trigger a bit more reliably when conversing with NPCs.
NPCs will wait more often when player is conversing with them.
Visiting a ship with crew instead of captain no longer causes missing save data errors/logs.
Log messages mentioning removed conditions now use correct color, grammar, and arrow direction.
Syncing with cloud will no longer attempt to do it twice per save, causing errors/delays.
Deleting a save no longer resets saves list scroll position.
Attempting to sync a save >100MB to Steam Cloud will warn user that this is not possible.
Cloud saving in process icon should now correctly disappear after save downloaded.
Another big batch of AI work in this patch! But before that, let's highlight a particularly nasty bug fix.
It turns out that our undocking code had a precision rounding error that would, maybe 1 in 150 or 100 times, cause the ship to undock from OKLG on the opposite side as usual. And since the tutorial is very specifically tailored to exiting from the normal side, this could mean one of the tutorial steps steers you directly into the asteroid moments after undocking.
Not fun! And we think this may have been the source of several reviews claiming the tutorial killed them. It just happened we never saw it when testing on our side until now, due to the rarity. Hopefully, that means new players have a bit more chance of survival!
AI also got some more attention this patch. For one thing, AIs can now also replace their empty EVA O2 bottles, similar to how battery replacement works. And some battery replacement edge cases have been cleaned up. We updated the ROSTER UI with this a toggle for this behavior, as well as a player requested indicator of the current time.
A number of player pointed out that the PASS system combined with gigs can create exploits (not to mention the courier gigs failing to check for delivery due to a bug). So we've reworked the PASS system to actually advance time while in transit, meaning every PASS voyage takes time now.
And because it's possible the player may have more than one crew, and not all are on the ferry, we had to add some special handling to alert the player if another crew's ferry arrived elsewhere. Not to mention some new tutorializing.
We also adjusted gig durations a bit in light of these new changes, which for the most part, make the slower PASS ferry less of a viable tool to use for gig transit.
Players using autopilot may be happy to hear we found and fixed a couple of bugs with torch flight. First of all, the TARGET CURSOR arrows in the LONG RANGE COURSE PLOT module are working again! These buttons allow you to offset the arrival point of a plotted course to, say, stop 500 km to the "west" of the target. This can be useful if the normal plot goes through an object, and offsetting it would go around.
And, after hearing reports that the autopilot would shutdown randomly during flights, we spent some time trying to find repro steps. And we found some!
It appears that it could happen if super fast-forward (SFFWD) started during a burn phase and ended during a coast phase, or vice versa, and then the game was unpaused while at 16x (or sometimes 8x). In these cases, it was due to the auto-FLOW slider not being fast enough to adjust to the new CYCLE setting after SFFWD, and resulting in an underflow to the reactor, shutting it down, and that would cancel autopilot.
This situation should be more resilient now.
Yet another hard-to-repro bug was finally fixed in this patch: the "creeping laziness syndrome" on crew members. This one turned out to be a save/load issue that gradually increased AIs' tolerance to achievement, esteem, and meaning distress. Eventually, after enough save/load cycles, the characters would become immune to those moods, and never act on them.
The bug has been fixed now, and characters exhibiting signs of this syndrome will be fixed the next time they are loaded in a save.
We loosened the reins a bit on NPCs, too, to see if they might be trusted with the ability to socialize more with the player and each other. And in the process, also found a few improvements we could make to their decision-making on choosing what to do about each feeling they are having.
And even AI pilots god a bit of love in this patch! We found and fixed a bug that would fail to give them throttle limits when torch flying, so no more accelerating at 21Gs across space. Plus, the bug that caused them to get confused near stations and hover there too long when player was docked should be better now.
Quite a lot going on in this one!
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