Hey guys, these are the patch notes for the upcoming update! We'll set the update live on the beta branch during the next 16 hours.
PLEASE NOTE: The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors. Use at your own risk!
WARNING: The current version is INCOMPATIBLE with your latest save files. WE WILL ADD BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY to existing saves during the week to ensure that you can use your old saves. You will be able to use your old saves once the update is live on the default branch.
These are preliminary patchnotes and might not contain all changes that will have been made once the update will be live on the default branch.
Alliances
- Players can now found alliances
- Invite other players to join your alliance
- Alliances work like their own factions: They have money, resources and an inventory
- Players can be assigned ranks, defining permissions in the alliance
- All alliance members are visible to all other alliance members on the map
- Alliance members share all information on the galaxy map
- When flying an alliance ship, the player does everything he does in the name of his alliance
Co-Op Flying
- Alliance ships can now be flown by multiple players
- Added seat management for crafts to manage who is able to do what (steering, firing, etc)
Out-of-sector simulation
"We'll be adding some more means for better control of which sectors will actually get updated on multiplayer servers. For now, sectors with lots of stuff will have a higher priority."
- Sectors with player and alliance content are updated while the player is not inside the sector
- Default amount of updated sectors per player on multiplayer is 6 (the sector the player is in, plus 5)
- This value can be configured in the server.ini settings and will be a lot higher for singleplayer
- If a player has property in more than 6 sectors, this happens:
- Each sector will have a priority score
- The 5 sectors with the highest scores will be updated
- The score in the sectors is 3 for each player station, plus 1 for each player ship
Steam Workshop
- Steam Workshop integration for ship and station models is complete
- Saved ship plans can now be uploaded to the Steam Workshop
- Subscribe to ship plans on the Steam Workshop
Gameplay
- Added a new flight recorder block
- Flight recorders will mark the death location of the ship on the map
- Flight recorders will only work if they're *still on the ship* when the ship is destroyed
- Trading posts always have dedicated cargo storage
- Added licenses for stolen, dangerous and illegal cargo transportation
- Added multiple mirror planes in building mode
- Removed randomized building mode
- Implemented whole ship modification
- Scaling entire ships
- Upgrading the material of entire ships
- Rotating entire ships
- Added selective block modification
- All but one material or block type are faded out
- Added a search field on the galaxy map
- Turret factories sell a random, more expensive selection of the goods they require for building turrets
- New Turret: Pulse Cannon
- Pulse Cannons shoot ionized projectiles that have a very high chance of penetrating shields
- Added respawning of resource-asteroids in sectors with large asteroid fields (will only be in effect for new sectors)
Balancing
"We're currently working on making shields less powerful, and one of the means to do that will be adding more weapons that are strong against shields, such as pulse cannons. But we also felt that plasma cannons didn't have the impact on shields that they were supposed to have, so we upped their damage to shields."
- Doubled shield damage of plasma guns
Client
- Reduced darkness of window shadows
- Added a setting for limiting FPS
- Improved rendering performance in sectors with lots of wreckages
UI
- Improved performance of inventory grid displayers
- Added filtering for inventory grid displayers
- Added favoriting of inventory items with right mouse
- Added marking of inventory items as trash with right mouse
- Tooltips are only drawn when mouse is not obstructed by other windows
- Improved borders of inventory items
- Added loading screen tips for various new features
- Added a button to sell all trash immediately
- Added chat message channels for sector, group, everybody (default) and alliance
- Added display of relative or total costs to saved ships window
- Improved handling of multiline text boxes
- Added a key for toggling strategy mode (default: F9)
- Added an option to disable toggling of strategy mode by zooming
- Added various tips about new or old features to the loading screen help
- Gate connections now have a different color than wormholes on the map
- Added a message when changing control scheme
- Improved german translation
- Added a textbox to quickly transfer lots of cargo and crew
Server
"Most important changes here: Better performance on the server (memory and runtime) and improved savegame security."
- Crafts that were destroyed through database corruptions can be restored
- Players can be moved to other sectors, including ships (just rename the files if the names clash)
- Player & Alliance files are saved redundantly to avoid loss of data on file corruptions
- Improved performance when players log in
- Improved overall networking performance
- Improved overall memory performance using lazy initialization of collision data
- Improved performance of traders in sectors without players
- Added detailed output about script memory usage to /status command
- Sector content is now compressed before being sent, reducing traffic when changing sectors by 70%
- Server files are now compressed
- Implemented whitelisting of steam groups
- There's a separate file group-whitelist.txt in the server folder where you can add 64bit steam group ids that should be whitelisted
Scripting API
- Entity IDs are now 128bit UUIDs
- Script memory footprint reduced
- Scripts that are attached to the same object are loaded into the same lua VM, if possible, to reduce redundant data
- Added namespaces so scripts can be distinguished from each other and to avoid name collisions and functions getting overridden
- Scripts that have DIFFERENT namespaces will be loaded into the SAME lua VM, since name collisions aren't expected to happen
- Scripts that share the SAME namespace will be loaded into DIFFERENT lua VMs
- Scripts that have a namespace must have a comment '-- namespace NAMESPACE' where NAMESPACE is the script's namespace
- Scripts that have a namespace must have a namespace table with the same name as stated in the namespace comment
- Scripts that have a namespace comment must prefix all non-local functions and variables with their Namespace table (see scripts for more details on this)
- Scripts that have no namespace comment statement will always be loaded into different VMs (which is exactly the old model)
- It is STRONGLY recommended to modders that they rework their scripts to use namespaces to save memory performance!
- Lua VMs aren't set to invalid after a normal error, but still on fatal errors (exceptions)
- [Documentation] Fixed methods of inherited script classes not showing up in completion docs
- [Documentation] Fixed broken base classes when base gets a [client] or [server] extension
- CheckBox can be enabled and disabled
- CheckBox can be configured to have its box on the left or right side
- TextBox can have a background text
- Added a VanillaInventoryItem item that can be used for scripting inventory items
- Fixed an issue with infinite recursion in printTable()
- Added a PlanSelectionItem item that can be used in selection grids to display BlockPlans
- Added functions to access all plans that are saved locally or downloaded via the Steam Workshop
- Added Timer and Profiler classes
- Implemented API for async script calls [while theoretically functional, still highly experimental]
Misc
- Several small performance improvements all over the place
- Improved logging
- Reduced size of ship .xml files
- Player is placed in last craft upon login
Bugfixes
"As usual, user bug reports are marked with [UBR]. Thanks everybody for helping with the game!"
- [UBR] Fixed extreme loading times due to too many inventory items
- [UBR] Fixed a crash that occurred often during instanced rendering (asteroids and such)
- [UBR] Fixed overflow of resources and money
- Resources and money are now 64bit integers, meaning they can go up to 9.223.372.036.854.775.808
- Overflowing is no longer possible
- Fixed player being placed in his drone on use of /teleport command
- [UBR] Fixed space bar not working sometimes in loading screen
- [UBR] Fixed a hang when holo blocks decay due to missing repair crew
- Fixed a (rare) player duplication issue
- Fixed a crash when destroying/deleting a station
- Fixed a crash when loading corrupt scripting values file
- Fixed trading posts not having any cargo storage
- Fixed a crash when loading an object with a script where the script file disappeared
- [UBR] Fixed smuggler's market not working when too many stolen goods are on the ship
- [UBR] Fixed a crash in patrol AI
- [UBR] Fixed a crash in loading screen
- [UBR] Fixed a crash when exiting the game while in strategy mode
- [UBR] Fixed a crash when loading templates.xml
- Fixed ships by faction on map not being saved/loaded correctly
- [UBR] Fixed quick menu buttons being clickable through the building inventory
- [UBR] Fixed keyboard and mouse up events not being registered in loading screens
- [UBR] StructuralIntegrity effect is now always visible on the correct ship
- Fixed translation of EnergyConsumer names
- Fixed mining systems always showing asteroids for all players in a sector
Known Issues
"Some things that still need fixing, that didn't make it into the update. They will be fixed during next week."
- Alliance sectors not being shared correctly on the map
- Notifications for picking up items for alliances