Hey Folks!
Ostranauts v0.12.1.13 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 issues, including item spawns, pathfinding, and trade. Plus it includes some minor performance improvements.
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 some performance improvements to reduce the frequency of lag spikes.
- Fixed a bug that could cause ship gas to suddenly go missing after buying an item and having it delivered to that ship's barter zone while it was not on-screen.
- Fixed a bug that could cause scrap and other items to spawn on player's ship when docking.
- Fixed a bug that could cause AI to fail in finding a path to an item or task if started from certain sides of that target.
- Fixed a bug which caused pathfinders to think they could reach spare parts when checking a task, but then fail to reach them when doing tasks.
- Fixed a bug that caused selected crew to do haul tasks even when AI Auto mode was disabled.
- Changed WearSuit pledge to allow player to use it, so player would don suit when on AI Auto doing tasks.
- Fixed a bug that could block clicks on the trade UI's barter zone toggle.
- Fixed a bug that would cause NPCs to disappear if using a ferry to reach a derelict with an NPC ship docked to it.
- Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs to t-pose if the user panned the camera over to them while paused.
- Fixed the heater on OKLG that wasn't working.
- Fixed missing floor tiles in the Light Tug ship design, which caused gas leaks.
- Changed the megatooltip (MTT) to show multiple unknown conditions in batches instead of individually.
One of our current priorities is to find the cause of the lag spikes some players experience, and to fix them. And this patch represents a first step towards that.
Most of the performance optimizations in this patch involve reducing the amount of garbage the game generates each frame. Basically, wasteful code leaves a mess in memory that the garbage collector has to clean-up periodically, and this is a big contributor to the lag spikes we see in-game.
In practice, it's only a minor improvement. But the process of performance optimization is like that, and will involve several minor improvements adding-up as we get back on track. We appreciate your patience as we sort this out!
We also found what was causing some player ships to suddenly lose gas after trading and then returning to their ship. It turns out that if the remote ship had a barter zone touching its edge, and a trade remotely placed an item there, it padded the ship out a bit, and caused errors when recalculating rooms. This case should hopefully be fixed now.
We also managed to figure out what was causing that mystery scrap and junk to spawn on some player ships. It basically came down to loot spawner code having the wrong settings, which allowed spawning on nearby ships as well as the current one.
We found several pathfinding issues that we were able to fix, particularly with respect to AI Auto/Manual modes. And the player's AI should now be able to put their helmet on automatically if a task takes them through the airlock.
Plus fixes for several other issues, including the broken heater on OKLG. Finally!
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