Hey Folks!
Ostranauts v0.13.0.10 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.
This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which primarily fixes issues with stuck crew members and glitched stats on them.
Saves from v0.13.0.0 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 could cause crew stats to double-process a change, resulting in more than one stat threshold existing at once.
- Fixed a bug that could cause food to have no eat option, even when character was hungry.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to get stuck and ignore commands in AI Manual mode when they had an emergency, such as hypercapnia.
- Added code to fix saves from 0.13.0.8 and earlier which might have these duplicate stat thresholds.
- Fixed a bug that caused inanimate objects and wounds to start thinking for themselves and planning their next move.
While there are only a few main fixes in this patch, they address some issues that were pretty annoying to those who ran into them.
The first fix involves the way we calculate survival stats on people (and some things). As a particular stat goes up and down, it crosses thresholds that signify better or worse conditions. E.g. Satiety has a range from Hungry through Sated, Stuffed, and Sick Stomach, as its relevant stat goes up.
The bug would happen when the character received or lost a negative condition, such as nausea, that alters these thresholds. In some cases, adding or removing one of these conditions caused the threshold to change, and that threshold change would cascade into another threshold change before the first one finished. This could sometimes result in the "outer" threshold change to add an extra stat to the crew when it shouldn't.
One such example was satiety threshold of Hungry and Stuffed at the same time. To the player, it would appear that they have Hungry in the UI, but the game would deny them the ability to eat things because they also had Stuffed in the background.
This patch fixes the code to prevent this situation from happening. Furthermore, it attempts to repair any save file created before 0.13.0.8 where this has happened. In our testing (and testing by brave players with the bug), this patch seems to fix things.
The second fix is to a bug we introduced in the last patch. 0.13.0.7. In that patch, we gave survival "pledges" to the captain so that it could survive without player input when it was placed in Behavior AUTO mode. E.g. it would eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, and seek fresh atmo/don helmets when needed.
In order to ensure this didn't hijack the captain while the player was moving them around, we disabled these pledges when the AI was in MANUAL mode.
However, we forgot to add that same guard to those pledges' "emergency" modes. All AIs do a series of emergency checks before continuing whatever their current action is, so they can interrupt a long action if they are in danger, and deal with it.
But in this case, the emergency mode was triggering, and the pledge to address it was not, because the AI was in MANUAL mode. As a result, some players ran into situations where their captain or crew suddenly stopped responding to orders and would stand in place, paralyzed or repeating an animation. Usually when an emergency arose, such as hypercapnia.
This patch matches the emergency mode tests with the regular tests so they can act in concert again.
Lastly, this fixes a weird bug where inanimate objects and wounds would start to plan their next move after being in the game a while. It appears the code we added to make AIs plan their next move was not correctly guarded against inanimate objects and wounds, and in some cases, those objects would finish a turn the same way AI does, putting them into the queue for planning their next moves.
In practice, they couldn't really do much without other things the AIs have (like pathfinding). But still, they were probably eating up CPU cycles better spent elsewhere. So some users may experience better performance in this build, particularly in later game saves.
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