Hey Folks!
Ostranauts v0.12.1.6 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which fixes several save-related issues, as well as NPC spawning and other issues.
Saves from v0.12.0.0 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.
- Fixed a bug that caused saves to fail loading if the character had a single-word name, and was created before v0.12.1.5.
- Removed support for loading save games created in 2022 and earlier.
- Fixed a bug in the load game UI that would show the temporary zip extraction folder as a clickable option, which causes crashes when clicked.
- Fixed a bug that could allow the game to continue spawning more than the maximum number of NPC scavenger ships in a region.
- Fixed a bug that could cause extra living and dead NPCs to spawn on NPC scavenger ships and other non-derelicts.
- Changed ship broker price markup/discount to always be the same percentage, instead of changing each restock event.
- Fixed a bug that generated lots of log spam about images when loading characters.
The biggest deal here is the save file bug fixes.
It looks like our earlier fix for single-name characters caused it. Before the fix, the save game loader would find missing relationship info, and just skip it.
But now that single-name folks are starting to have save data, it actually tries to load their data, and stumbles when it comes across relationship info saved before the fix. Crashing before it finishes saving.
And to compound things, when it crashes on load like this, it leaves a copy of the save game in the Ostranauts folder, where it temporarily unzipped the save.
That temp unzip save shows up in the list of save games you can load, and players attempting to load it get a crash.
So this patch fixes that relationship loading issue, for one thing, and also hides that temporary folder so players don't accidentally try to load a bogus save file.
This also requires cutting off support for really old save formats, from before 2023, which we *think* should be safe now :)
We also finally found the cause of huge NPC ship spawn amounts. Or at least one of the causes.
It appears the code to repopulate space with NPC ships could get into a situation where the number of planned ships to spawn increased faster than it could spawn them, resulting in a runaway population of NPC scavenger ships.
We added some validation fixes to this code to prevent that from happening again.
Note, however, that this won't *delete* all the spawned ships. Just stops them from spawning if there are too many (> 16) around OKLG. If you want to prune a save file that has this problem, try making a copy of it first (just in case), and inside the zip file, you can try deleting a bunch of ships starting with "O-" (which are usually scavenger NPC ships).
Just be careful not to delete any ships starting with "OKLG," and your own ship's ID. And once you load that save, the NPC ship count should go down without any errors.
We also found a bug that caused NPC scavenger ships to spawn pirates, dead bodies, and other NPCs, which while hilarious, was probably also unloading those NPCs onto OKLG when that NPC ship docked.
This caused not only OKLG's extreme NPC count problems, but also players being ganked by pirates, and seeing lots of dead bodies on stations.
Again, this patch won't trim those NPCs out of OKLG. But at least they'll stop spawning (and future games should be cleaner).
The last two fixes address ship broker mark-up/discount amounts changing over time, and trimmed some extra log spam that might help with performance.
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