Trading Contact System
When revisiting the trader contact mechanic, we really wanted to create an engaging system that would encourage engineering, automation and problem solving. In addition to finding traders, we’ll leverage this in the future to find destinations for your rockets, answer distress signals, and invite visitors to your station. The process of contacting contacts has been split into a few concepts.
Contacts
Instead of dozens of contacts constantly spread around the sky, we’re moving to a more logic driven approach of having rules dictate when traders are available. As we transition from our older trader system, into the new one, we are providing the old traders as three separate tiers of contacts. These current contacts have increasing difficulties to contact and hang around for about 20 minutes before they leave and another one takes their place, so you’ll have to find the harder contacts if you want to check out many traders.
Detecting and Resolving
Contacts must be resolved by the dish before it can determine how accurately it is pointed at the contact. The time to resolve is determined by the dish's power output multiplied by the dish alignment, over the contact’s expected resolve wattage. If the contact is resolving too slowly, it likely indicates you are not close to the target at all, and you should try a very different angle since effective power levels scale exponentially with accuracy. Alternately, the contact might have a very high expected wattage, and your current dish just isnt big enough to resolve it in a reasonable time. The resolving process only uses 10% of the actual power your dish is set to.
Interrogating
Once you have resolved the contacts position, you’ll be able to press the interrogate button. Similar to resolving, you’ll need to land enough wattage on the contact, but fortunately the interrogation dialog will inform you of the current calculations. Unfortunately, Interrogation does have a hard minimum, and if the dish is not pointed well enough, or the power is too low, you won't be able to start the process. Interrogation also has a time requirement, with harder contacts taking significantly longer, so you’ll want to use high wattages to ensure you finish before the trader moves on. Once interrogation is complete, you can land the trader just as before.
Once we receive feedback we’ll review our plans for contacts in motion, contacts with more strict visibility requirements, resolving contacts while rotating dishes, and manual control of all dish operations.
Satellite Dishes
As part of the new trader contact system you will need to make use of the existing and new satellite dishes. There are two new dishes, small and large, making the existing one the medium dish. They all work in a similar way but each size of dish uses much more power than the previous one, this extra power is needed to effectively contact traders.
The new Small Satellite Dish looks and behaves similar to the existing Medium Dish but is smaller. The Large Satellite Dish is an extremely large fixed dish structure. Visually, instead of the dish rotating and tilting the sensor is on a gantry. Functionally it still works in the same way as the other dishes.
The time to rotate these dishes increases as you go up in size. The small dish is very fast while the large dish will take several minutes to rotate 180 degrees.
Your support makes this possible
Your support makes this possible
Over the last year, we’ve completely refactored the net code making multiplayer more stable, we’re continuing to improve the connectivity, and we’ve improved some big systems to allow us to bring you better content and new game loops. All this while transitioning to a weekly update cycle.
All the community support, feedback, and involvement have made this possible. So thank you!
If you like the progress we have made, please consider taking a moment to leave a positive review. This makes a huge difference to the project. We've been working hard for the last five years, and feel confident the game has substantially improved over this time. Many projects steer clear of the hard tasks, and we are proud to have taken them on.
Additionally, you can support us by purchasing DLC that we've made to allow those who enjoy the game to support us, and in return get something a little fun to use in-game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2089290/Stationeers_Human_Cosmetics_Pack/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1038400/Stationeers_Zrilian_Species_Pack/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1038500/Stationeers_HEM_Droid_Species_Pack/
Change Log v0.2.3759.18228
- RocketNet is now enabled
- RocketNet reads the LocalIpAddress from settings file and tries to host with that, if this fails it will fall back to it's original method where RakNet picks the host device
- Fixed spelling of Hangar
- Fixed bug where bodies pulled out of slots don't go to the correct exit position and can sometimes clip into the slots parent object
- Fixed ragdolls curling up into a ball after you pull them out of a slot
- Added New concept of "resolving" contacts through the Satellite Dish and Comms Motherboard, where the dish must be pointed at a contact for an amount of time, before full information is provided.
- Added When contacts "resolve", the comms motherboard shows the degrees off the dish is from the contact.
- Added To communicate with the traders, satellite dishes must now "interrogate" contacts with energy from the dish for a fixed amount of time.
- Added "Interrogation"/contact time scales linearly with dish power usage, and poor dish alignment negatively exponentially scales power.
- Changed Dishes to all have full sky FOVs, with scaling effectiveness when contacts are not centered, resulting in being able to generally know whats in the sky after "resolving" contacts.
- Added Contacts can now have different energy minimums, and sustainment periods required for "interrogation" to begin.
- Added Contacts can have an energy minimum to show/start "resolving".
- Reduced active contacts from 17 to 3.
- Several changes to comms/trader UI to support new contacting system.
- Added Large Hangar door a 3x1 modular Door.
- Added Buildstates and destroyed states to medium hangar Door.
- Fixed Spelling error with medium hangar door.
- Fixed A Pipe Atmosphere could have its gas deleted if pipes were removed from the network in quick succession. This could generally happen if using the authoring tool to delete pipes or in large bases when multiple players were working on the same pipe network.
- Fixed Suit storage could fill Emergency suits which would cause them to explode.
- Fixed bug around dismount direction on ladders being straight up. Has been returned to original behaviour of dismounting forwards
- Added Power Dial to Current SatelliteDish.
- Fixed Ignition values on Medium Hangar door.
- Refactored SatelliteDish animation system to prepare for new dish variants.
- Added Trader Contact tier system Close, Medium, Far. More distant traders will require higher power or more precise pointing to resolve and contact. Existing contacts in the save will default to medium.
- Changed default trader lifetime to 20minutes.
- Changed For new trader generations, one of each contact will appear at each distance tier.
- Changed SatelliteDish now consumes power based on its power dial setting when actively contacting or resolving.
- Removed Paint and microwares traders from new trader generation rolls.
- Fixed Error thrown by trading motherboard when number of contacts exceeded the expected max contacts.
- Removed some unused code for motherships
- Changed made vertical and horizontal properties on satellite dish virtual.
- Fixed Sometimes source prefabs could be removed from the scene when loading larger saves. These are now regenerated in a final validation step on load.
- Fixed Error when Centrifuge exports ores.
- Updated SatelliteDish Prefab to include power knob.
- Changed screencontacts button to not be active untill contact is resolved.
- Added more state handling to represent the current contact interrogation state presented in the commsterminal popup.
- Added small satellite dish
- Fixed several cases where interrogation would attempt to operate on a null contact
- General renaming of the contact process to interrogating
- Fixed trading terminal dialog allowing stale information to be used to try and contact the trader
- Fixed Root cause issue that caused Centrifuge to throw errors when exporting ores.
- Fixed Sometimes when mining game would throw errors and get stuck in mining animation.
- Fixed Game doesn't load due to ironOre source prefab getting destroyed on load.
- Refactor satellite dish contacts to not use dictionaries
- Added contacts reset their interrogation timer if they don't have a interrogating dish.
- Fixed another dish from stomping an in progress interrogation of a contact by a separate dish.
- Fixed contacts not being able to be interrogated without a landing pad
- Updated medium and small satellite dish kits
- Fixed issue where newly created satellite dishes would already have resolved all targets
- Added Large SatelliteDish. A massive fixed dish with a movable sensor that has a very high max wattage at the expense of very slow movement speed.
- Added Locks around all usages of DishScannedContacts as this collection is accessed from multiple threads.
- Added contacts reset their interrogation timer if they don't have a interrogating dish.
- Fixed another dish from stomping an in progress interrogation of a contact by a separate dish.
- Moved several trader UI related math operations onto their respective objects
- Fixed incorrect contact time estimations, and changed some text fields to better represent interrogation process state.
- Added if a contacts interrogating dish looses power or is turned off, interrogation will halt, and reset.
- Fixed StationContacts not serializing contacted status and contact wattage variables.
- Station Contact UI change first pass
- Updated Comms Motherboard UI
- added missing files from previous commit
- added older message based checks preventing trader from being called for various pad/vending machine/power reasons
- reduced all SatelliteDish rotate speeds
- fixed issue where resolve timers would process despite dish moving.
- Added time remaining counter to trader contact item
- Fixed Landing button being active while contact has not been made
- reverted unwanted scene changes
- Fixed build error caused by editor code
- Fixed missing tier icons
- Fixed small satellite returning the medium satellite kit on deconstruct
- Added and update recipes for satellite dishes
- Updated starting conditions for Vulcan and Venus to include requirements for trading
- Added the current dish name to the contact pop up
- Removed "trader requesting to land" prior to being able to call the trader to land
- Fixed "Satellite Dish" name to "Medium Satellite Dish"
- Made rotation tolerance smaller for satellite dish to remedy the dish not moving when framerate is very high
- Added new Satellite Icons
- Fixed resolving not correctly using the wattage if changed after dish rotation finished.
- Fixed resolving progressbar having unexpected behavior when changing some resolve parameters.
- Fixed GetWattageOnContact using maxWattage instead of wattage.
- Changed InitResolve timers to use unified helper functions for calculations.
- Changed all current contacts in game to have a minimum watts to resolve value of 0.
- Added Additional helper functions for common resolve time components.
- Changed random resolve offset to be generated when the resolving starts.
- Fixed errors in Dish Stationpedia entries
- Fixed issue where new contacts would be interpreted as already resolved
- Added the trading section to the Stationpedia
- Fixed comms motherboard from using dishes that were inoperable.
- Reduced power usage of dishes to 1/10th of set power while resolving, so only while interrogating is power fully used. idle dishes still use base draw.
- Disabled dishes will now loose their contact resolve data.
- reduced satellitedish idle power draw, as the main power usage occurs with use
- Added missing structures to trading page
- Fixed wrong icon for trading page
- Fixed screen contacts not properly clearing when no dishes are valid on the Motherboards.
- Changed dish SignalStrength logic type to return -1 when the best contact is currently still resolving.
- increased general dish strength when within 5 degrees
- missing file from previous commit
- Added build states to medium satellite dish
- Tweaked medium satellite wattage plus added animations back
- Fixed some contact item UI elements being left on when the parent object is disabled
- decreased water usage by 25% since food, water, and stress mechanic changes are still a few weeks away.
- decreased active Nitrolyzer power usage from 20k, to 6k.
- Added computer and comms motherboard to trading stationpedia page
- Updated Trading Stationpedia entry
- changed comms motherboard to use text instead of bar when Interrogating
- Fixed medium satellite dish's dish collider rotating incorrectly and being unaligned with the visual mesh
- Fixing problem with port being closed when a client leaves preventing other players from joining
- RocketNet now disconnects before clients send their disconnect message to host