Ostranauts News

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.16 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which primarily aims to improve performance, but also includes some bug fixes.

Saves from v0.12.0.0 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 caused ships to recalculate rooms too often, affecting performance.
  
• Changed the sensitivity of lighting/line-of-sight redraws to improve performance.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused some UI canvases to unnecessarily check for user clicks when invisible, affecting performance.
  
• Changed the code for powered items to be more efficient, to improve performance.
  
• Changed the item damage update routine to be more efficient, improving performance.
  
• Changed the way the text near the cursor is updated, to improve performance.
  
• Changed line of sight code to use a cheaper physics raycast method to improve performance.
  
• Changed the way wounds access parent object info to improve performance.
  
• Fixed a null which could occur when opening the zones UI while inventory is open, then dragging selection around tiles produces a null.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused loose conduit near starting dorm to be unclickable due to inventory window intercepting clicks after an encounter screen interrupted it.
  
• Added code make the enter key submit the new save game name input field when pressed.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause AI to keep walking towards an NPC that has left the map.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause UI transitions to use scaled time instead of unscaled time.
  

As you can see, a major part of this update centers around performance improvements. We made a number of changes to the codebase to reduce unnecessary calculations, produce less memory garbage, and avoid updates on things the players wouldn't see.

The result should be a general improvement in framerate, and another slight reduction in the rate of lag spikes. The framerate improvement should help users who were starting to hit CPU limits on their machines (particularly in longer save games). And every improvement we make should space the lag spikes out further apart.

The rest of the changes were fixes to some bugs that were a bit harder to find.

One was a null exception that happened when trying to drag-select tiles with the zones and inventory windows open simultaneously. Another was a fix to clicks being ignored where the inventory UI should be if an encounter screen caused it to disappear. (Particularly noticeable when trying to install the first loose conduit after exiting the starting room.)

You'll also notice the fade-ins and other UI transitions now use real time instead of fast-forward/slo-mo. And we added support for the enter key in the save game text field, so you don't have to click "Submit" after typing the save's name.

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

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.15 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which includes some performance improvements, helmet and airlock fixes, and some other bug fixes.

Saves from v0.12.0.0 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 caused AI to put helmet on when considering a task in the void, even if they have no airlock permissions.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused AI to be gasping for an instant when donning a helmet.
  
• Changed AI to ignore helmets and airlock rules if player manually orders them outside.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs spawned in off-screen ships to have zero atmo in their helmets when that ship became on-screen.
  
• Added code to prevent multiple AIs from doing costly decision-making and pathfinding in the same frame. Instead, they will spread their cost over time.
  
• Added pathfinding optimization to pre-check origin and destination pressures against airlock permissions, to cut short any invalid attempts.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused accessing the fridge to use a point too far away, sometimes causing strange pathfinding/airlock issues.
  
• Changed AI to only tell player they will find a suit if they add the pledge to do it.
  
• Fixed the food carts on K-Leg to use correct art for each cart.
  
• Fixed a bug that added extra O2 to charged EVA helmets every time they were put on.
  
• Changed several sections of code to use cached values, for better performance.
  
• Added RoomA and RoomB to all door objects in game, for consistency.
  
• Changed debug overlay to show more user-friendly names for rooms.
  

A number of the changes in this patch involve AIs, helmets, and airlock rules. There were some inconsistencies in the way those rules were applied, which could result in AIs not wearing helmets when they should (and wearing them when they shouldn't), as well as AIs going and/or not going through airlocks when they should.

Overall, the AI behavior surrounding airlocks and helmets should be more consistent now. Namely, if the player manually orders a task outside the ship, the AI will just do it, regardless of helmet status and airlock permissions. And if the AI self-assigns a task from the PDA orders (or otherwise), it will decide about helmets and honor the airlock permissions.

We also fixed a few issues that contributed to NPCs walking around OKLG with voided helmets, causing them to die. Hopefully, you should only see NPCs with voided helmets now when encountering them on a derelict.

This patch also includes a few more performance improvements, aimed at reducing the laggy framerate and framerate spikes.

One big change is to spread out costly AI pathfinding and decision-making processes so they don't all pile-up in the same frame. Instead, after one AI uses those code paths, any others that want it must wait 0.1s and try again. So if 10 AIs are all deciding what they should do next, it'll take a minimum of 1.0s for them all to get a turn. Framerate might still slow a bit if that happened, but at least it won't be a single paused frame.

A second optimization we added was to pre-check paths against airlock rules, so we can skip any potentially-expensive pathfinding calculations on paths doomed from the start. Not all paths will benefit from this, but in large, crowded places like OKLG, we found this could reduce the time spent pathfinding significantly.

We also realized the food carts in OKLG have their art swapped! So we fixed that.

And finally, there were a handful of smaller, less notable optimization and AI fixes. As mentioned before, performance tuning is mostly slow, incremental improvements. Rarely do we find a silver bullet to fix it all at once. So we'll be continuing to work towards better performance in 0.12 builds alongside our work in developing 0.13 features and content.

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

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.13 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which fixes several issues, including item spawns, pathfinding, and trade. Plus it includes some minor performance improvements.

Saves from v0.12.0.0 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.

• Added some performance improvements to reduce the frequency of lag spikes.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause ship gas to suddenly go missing after buying an item and having it delivered to that ship's barter zone while it was not on-screen.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause scrap and other items to spawn on player's ship when docking.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause AI to fail in finding a path to an item or task if started from certain sides of that target.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused pathfinders to think they could reach spare parts when checking a task, but then fail to reach them when doing tasks.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused selected crew to do haul tasks even when AI Auto mode was disabled.
  
• Changed WearSuit pledge to allow player to use it, so player would don suit when on AI Auto doing tasks.
  
• Fixed a bug that could block clicks on the trade UI's barter zone toggle.
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause NPCs to disappear if using a ferry to reach a derelict with an NPC ship docked to it.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs to t-pose if the user panned the camera over to them while paused.
  
• Fixed the heater on OKLG that wasn't working.
  
• Fixed missing floor tiles in the Light Tug ship design, which caused gas leaks.
  
• Changed the megatooltip (MTT) to show multiple unknown conditions in batches instead of individually.
  

One of our current priorities is to find the cause of the lag spikes some players experience, and to fix them. And this patch represents a first step towards that.

Most of the performance optimizations in this patch involve reducing the amount of garbage the game generates each frame. Basically, wasteful code leaves a mess in memory that the garbage collector has to clean-up periodically, and this is a big contributor to the lag spikes we see in-game.

In practice, it's only a minor improvement. But the process of performance optimization is like that, and will involve several minor improvements adding-up as we get back on track. We appreciate your patience as we sort this out!

We also found what was causing some player ships to suddenly lose gas after trading and then returning to their ship. It turns out that if the remote ship had a barter zone touching its edge, and a trade remotely placed an item there, it padded the ship out a bit, and caused errors when recalculating rooms. This case should hopefully be fixed now.

We also managed to figure out what was causing that mystery scrap and junk to spawn on some player ships. It basically came down to loot spawner code having the wrong settings, which allowed spawning on nearby ships as well as the current one.

We found several pathfinding issues that we were able to fix, particularly with respect to AI Auto/Manual modes. And the player's AI should now be able to put their helmet on automatically if a task takes them through the airlock.

Plus fixes for several other issues, including the broken heater on OKLG. Finally!

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

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.10 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which fixes several crew-switching bugs, as well as issues with saves and debug tools.

Saves from v0.12.0.0 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 missing or broken items when cycling between crew on different ships.
  
• Fixed a bug that still showed previous crew's target actions when cycling to new crew member.
  
• Changed crew cycling hotkey to only work when not inside a control panel UI.
  
• Added an alert message in the trade UI for when a remote barter zone hasn't finished loading yet.
  
• Added more code to prevent collisions with invisible objects.
  
• Changed DebugRespawnShip to generate a new station, even if old one was missing.
  
• Fixed a null exception that could occur if toggling ship rating view switch while a stolen ship was docked.
  
• Fixed a null exception that could occur when loading a game saved on Mescaform/Commercial district with a stolen ship docked to OKLG.
  
• Removed logging for missing interactions, as it was causing too much spam.
  

A large portion of this patch's fixes involve crew cycling, which could introduce some strange bugs.

One such bug caused sub items and slotted items to be loaded improperly, and could result in missing items or body parts, and inventory UI containers suddenly disappearing or being inaccessible.

Another fix addresses the list of target actions one could see when cycling crew. It would often continue to show the actions for the previous character's target, and will now correctly clear that list.

We also disabled the crew cycling hotkey while inside a control panel, as that could cause issues, particularly when the crew was on another ship.

Several players have reported colliding with invisible objects while approaching OKLG from certain directions, and we tried to reproduce this without much luck. We added a bit more code to prevent collisions with invisible objects, just in case it was the cause.

If anyone has a save file where such collisions are happening, please share them with us!

Also in hard-to-reproduce bug news, a few players reported losing OKLG entirely in their game, and we haven't yet found the cause. To help with this, though, we've adjusted the debug Respawn Ship code so it will also now work if OKLG is missing.

Finally, we fixed two null exceptions that seemed to occur when the player had a stolen ship docked, and removed some spammy logging.

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

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.8 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which is aimed at helping reduce save file size in longer-term games.

Saves from v0.12.0.0 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.

• Added code to prune expired items and people from game memory and save files on save game.
  
• Added code to skip loading COs from save file if no ships list them as on board.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused deleted people to re-manifest themselves when one of their friends moves to a new ship or station.
  
• Changed NPC transit flow to always prefer going from higher population districts to lower.
  

The most important change here is a fix to the way games are saved, which should overall reduce the size of save games as they get older. We had a bug which caused save files to retain data on deleted objects, so as the game progressed, the save file would grow to unusable size.

This build addresses that bug, and should tame that file size from here on when loading and saving a game.

This fix also addresses the issue players ran into when attempting to use the NPC pruning and station respawning tools described here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1022980/discussions/2/3803904095528444525/


Because the deleted items were retained in the save data, the prune only emptied the visible NPCs (which helped framerate in-game), but could potentially cause the save to stop loading due to memory limits.

If anyone was unable to load their save after using the Prune NPCs or Respawn Ship debug tools in 0.12.1.7, you should try that process again in 0.12.1.8. Loading a pre-debug-pruned save should work, and re-saving it should drop the save file size. And if you wish, re-running the Prune NPCs or Respawn Ship should similarly drop save file size more.

Finally, we added some more shaping code to the NPC transit system, so they would prefer to go to lower population areas. This should help the OKLG districts stay a bit more balanced with NPC counts.

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