Hey Folks!
Ostranauts v0.14.0.9 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix patch to our recently released "Across the System" update, which addresses sudden station NPC hypoxia, teleporting derelicts, police ships undocking strangely, and several UI issues.
These changes should be compatible with older 0.14 saves. Though if that save has already had errors (e.g. like dead NPCs), some of those errors may continue until a new game is started.
- Fixed a bug that caused some tooltips to become very, very small at high resolution.
- Fixed a bug that prevented changing keybinds when using the Options screen from the main menu.
- Fixed a bug that caused non-derelict NPC ships to undock suddenly when player interacted with its nav station.
- Fixed a bug that could cause derelicts to teleport far away after undocking.
- Fixed a bug that could cause ships to incorrectly dock, and their maps to overlap.
- Added null exception handling to CO.CatchUp if aTickers or aManUpdates was null.
- Fixed a bug which could cause all NPCs on a station or ship to suddenly die of hypoxia shortly after player arrives.
- Changed ticker backlog processing code to set ticker aside and process next, instead of exiting loop, so important tickers still process in time. E.g. oxygen
- Changed Privacy ticker to not tick while away, since it was clogging UpdateManual upon returning to a station.
Two of the changes are UI related. One bug prevented keybind changes via the main menu's options screen (in-game was fine), and the other caused tiny tooltips if the game resolution was too high. Both should be improved in this build.
We also fixed a few issues involving undocking.
First, players reported derelicts disappearing after undocking. And some eagle-eyed players noticed they weren't gone, just 100,000 km "west" of OKLG. This clue helped narrow down the problem to a bug in how we set the newly-undocked derelict's position relative to Ganymed 1036. We were using the wrong epoch (time/date) for the asteroid when we sampled its position.
Second, some players were getting whisked away in a disappearing police ship if they interacted with its nav station in any way. (Especially if the police were unconscious.) This turned out to be the ship's AI thinking the player was the officer finishing their job, and continuing with its patrol.
Both should now be fixed.
Another fix should stop NPCs from dropping dead en masse a few seconds after returning to a station after a long absence. This was a timer (a.k.a. ticker) "catch-up" process that was delaying them from breathing for too long, resulting in them collapsing after several seconds of being stuck processing old stats.
The fix changes the way this catch-up works so that it doesn't interrupt more important, immediate tickers. (And also removes the Privacy stat ticker from the list of tickers that needs to process while player is away, which was a major cause.)
Note that this fix doesn't revive dead NPCs. If you have any stations that fell prey to this, you can learn how to respawn that station (and fresh NPCs) at this link:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1022980/discussions/2/3803904095528444525/
This also doesn't fix other cases where the NPC may have died legitimately of hypoxia. That still happens, though hopefully less often after last week's patches!
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