Hey Folks!
Ostranauts v0.12.1.8 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 is aimed at helping reduce save file size in longer-term games.
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.
- Added code to prune expired items and people from game memory and save files on save game.
- Added code to skip loading COs from save file if no ships list them as on board.
- Fixed a bug that caused deleted people to re-manifest themselves when one of their friends moves to a new ship or station.
- Changed NPC transit flow to always prefer going from higher population districts to lower.
The most important change here is a fix to the way games are saved, which should overall reduce the size of save games as they get older. We had a bug which caused save files to retain data on deleted objects, so as the game progressed, the save file would grow to unusable size.
This build addresses that bug, and should tame that file size from here on when loading and saving a game.
This fix also addresses the issue players ran into when attempting to use the NPC pruning and station respawning tools described here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1022980/discussions/2/3803904095528444525/
Because the deleted items were retained in the save data, the prune only emptied the visible NPCs (which helped framerate in-game), but could potentially cause the save to stop loading due to memory limits.
If anyone was unable to load their save after using the Prune NPCs or Respawn Ship debug tools in 0.12.1.7, you should try that process again in 0.12.1.8. Loading a pre-debug-pruned save should work, and re-saving it should drop the save file size. And if you wish, re-running the Prune NPCs or Respawn Ship should similarly drop save file size more.
Finally, we added some more shaping code to the NPC transit system, so they would prefer to go to lower population areas. This should help the OKLG districts stay a bit more balanced with NPC counts.
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