Dear Stormworkers,
Many players have let us know that multiplayer is a top priority for Stormworks, and this week we are releasing an important update for many players.
This update greatly optimizes the game simulation for multiplayer clients. This update will fix desync and input delay for many players.
For some players, an issue has occurred in the past when playing multiplayer, and their PC has been much slower than the server PC. Despite clients running less calculations than servers, if the server is a great deal faster, then sometimes the client cannot keep up and is left behind. This has had the effect of input delay that slowly increases as the server gets further and further ahead. As you can imagine, this was a huge issue if your PC could not keep up.
To resolve this, we have greatly optimized the simulation performance of clients. There is much less calculations being performed on clients (particularly physics) and this means clients have much less work to do.
In our testing, we have been able to push multiplayer much harder, including spawning more complex vehicles and lots of animals and zombies. However, we have not made changes to the servers, so the usual rules still apply - creating complex creations with lots of vehicles and objects can still slow the server down for everyone! So please keep this in mind.
This update is a huge step forward for multiplayer, but doesn't fix every issue and development does continue.
As well as these multiplayer fixes, we have many other fixes and improvements. Please see the patch notes below for details.
We hope these changes improve your multiplayer experience and look forward to your feedback!
Much love <3,
The Stormworks Developers
Patch Notes
v1.6.11
Changes that include a #NUMBER relate to fixes or features submitted by the Stormworks community via geometa.co.uk/support/stormworks which can be accessed via the 'Report Bug/Request Feature' button in-game.
Posting a submission to this tracker ensures we review your suggestion/report since we may not see reports submitted via other channels.
Feature - Multiplayer client physics optimization
Fix - Several gameplay managers ticking their state while simulation is paused
Fix - #15336 Arid map colour discrepancies, added lua functions to support rock and gravel map colours
Fix - #14792 Default cargo container timer displaying negative values
Rework - #14626 Visually revised the mating surfaces for steam train parts to clarify that they need to be the same size and also oriented correctly to connect
Balance - #14967 Increased despawn times for processed metals dynamic objects
Fix - #14996 setTileInventory lua documentation
Fix - #15088 #15570 Lua documentation content issues
Fix - #15210 Updated default resource storage vehicle
Fix - #15142 Updated missiles on default weapons AI destroyers
Fix - #15371 Default rescue scripts showing decimals for some numbers
Fix - #1554 Re-exported Warner docks map tile geometry
Fix - #15655 Observatory landmark vehicle guard rail updates
Fix - #15683 Removed newlines from dog whistle description
Fix - #15688 Fixed block damage not parsing correctly (and optimized empty value parsing)
Fix - Optimized trainline generation speed
Fix - #16044 Updated desalinator description
A high volume of reports on the issue tracker have made us aware of a multiplayer issue regarding the old style wheel components.
While we hope players are very happy with today's performance improvements we were unable to fix this issue for this release and hope to resolve it for a future update.