Hey Folks!
Update v1.0.0.17 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix to 1.0, which includes ultra widescreen support, reduced hard drive hit when saving, AI fixes for battery/O2 bottles, incoming missiles, and more.
Saves from v1.0.0.0 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!
📢The game UI now supports ultra widescreen format.
📢Saving the game now writes to zip in memory before hitting the hard drive, to save on writes.
📢The helmet overlay is now an option you can toggle on or off in settings.
📢Inventory windows now have a button to expand all containers inside.
Inventory windows pinned off-screen due to resolution changes should now clamp to on-screen when inventory reopens.
AIs replacing batteries and O2 bottles will no longer get stuck in a loop.
AIs will no longer spam their own queue with hundreds of attempts to retry an action if they fail.
AIs previously surrendered to or hired by player and later released no longer get stuck in a loop when prone.
Incoming missiles no longer teleport inside the ship.
Undocking from ships no longer points the wrong way if NAV and airlock are oriented differently.
The Toggle All button in the trade UI should once again work for barter zones.
Ceres plot wetwork passphrases are no longer a conversation option without taking the mission.
Plus several other null and index error fixes.
One of the bigger pieces in this patch, and part of the reason it was in testing longer, is the addition of ultrawidescreen (UWS) support. We've had several players request better UI handling in UWS, addressing everything from off-screen elements to "fat head" paper dolls. Starting in this version, we use a slightly different UI harness to better preserve aspect ratios where needed, but also allow more screen real-estate for the game as screen widens.
As part of that effort, we needed to do some reworking of how inventory windows are positioned. And so, we got some off-screen recovery handling fixes in this update that everyone can benefit from. Now, if you position a window that becomes off-screen due to a resolution change, it should snap back to on-screen the next time the inventory opens.
And since we were in that code anyway, we added a player-requested QoL feature to open all subcontainers with a single click.
Another UI change in this build is a much-requested ability to hide the helmet overlay. Some players have mentioned that this can range from merely annoying to nauseating, so we added an option to hide the helmet visor glare and frame, while keeping the important stats on-screen.
Another group of players has been concerned about excessive disk-writing when saving, due to the way we generate jsons before zipping them. This was a holdover from when we previously did no zipping of saves at all. And after some rework, we now write all jsons to a zip file in memory, and then write that zip to the disk.
We had a number of reports of AIs getting stuck in a loop when replacing batteries, so we found the situation in which that occurs, and were able to patch it. And we extended that to O2 bottles, in case it happens there.
We also saw reports of AIs spamming failed actions, causing the game to grind to a halt. This turned out to be two causes. First, a recent change to allow AIs to respond to a failed task sooner backfired, allowing them in some cases to retry immediately and repeatedly before waiting a beat. And separately, a non-player crew NPC (e.g. former prisoner) that had AUTOTASK disabled and was prone, was forbidden from standing up, and would attempt (and fail) to do actions over and over while prone.
Both of these should now be fixed.
Plus, we had a series of other fixes including incoming missile damage, undocking facing, trade UI, plots, and other null-type exceptions.
As always, thank you for playing, and for your help in making Ostranauts more fun for all!
Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC