Ostranauts News

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

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.7 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 primarily aimed at adding a few debug tools to help folks with save games bloated by NPCs from earlier bugs.

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 debug tools to prune NPCs from the Star System.
  
• Added option to Respawn Ship debug tool also wipe NPCs and respawn.
  

First of all, I apologize for the rough couple of patches we've had this past week. There were at least 3-4 bugs introduced that made save games either too crowded with NPCs to use, or even unloadable at times. And ironically, all of these were the result of us trying to make things smoother, but not anticipating side effects in other areas of the game.

Yesterday's patch, 0.12.1.6, seems to be mostly stable again, and folks can get back into their save games. We still have bugs to fix, and I'd like to see if I can get that performance/stutter issue improved. But at least people can get back to playing as they did before.

That is, unless you have one of those save games with NPC overpopulations.

Some saves became overwhelmed with police ships spinning around, NPC ships littering the area, and/or K-Leg stations filled to the brim with dozens of NPCs each. And all of this balloons load/save times and craters performance.

This patch adds a few extra debug tools those users can try to help prune their saves back to manageable. No other fixes or features are in this patch.

And since these tools might become useful again to others, we created a pinned post on the Steam forums here:

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


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 v0.12.1.6 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 save-related issues, as well as NPC spawning and other issues.

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 saves to fail loading if the character had a single-word name, and was created before v0.12.1.5.
  
• Removed support for loading save games created in 2022 and earlier.
  
• Fixed a bug in the load game UI that would show the temporary zip extraction folder as a clickable option, which causes crashes when clicked.
  
• Fixed a bug that could allow the game to continue spawning more than the maximum number of NPC scavenger ships in a region.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause extra living and dead NPCs to spawn on NPC scavenger ships and other non-derelicts.
  
• Changed ship broker price markup/discount to always be the same percentage, instead of changing each restock event.
  
• Fixed a bug that generated lots of log spam about images when loading characters.
  

The biggest deal here is the save file bug fixes.

It looks like our earlier fix for single-name characters caused it. Before the fix, the save game loader would find missing relationship info, and just skip it.

But now that single-name folks are starting to have save data, it actually tries to load their data, and stumbles when it comes across relationship info saved before the fix. Crashing before it finishes saving.

And to compound things, when it crashes on load like this, it leaves a copy of the save game in the Ostranauts folder, where it temporarily unzipped the save.

That temp unzip save shows up in the list of save games you can load, and players attempting to load it get a crash.

So this patch fixes that relationship loading issue, for one thing, and also hides that temporary folder so players don't accidentally try to load a bogus save file.

This also requires cutting off support for really old save formats, from before 2023, which we *think* should be safe now :)

We also finally found the cause of huge NPC ship spawn amounts. Or at least one of the causes.

It appears the code to repopulate space with NPC ships could get into a situation where the number of planned ships to spawn increased faster than it could spawn them, resulting in a runaway population of NPC scavenger ships.

We added some validation fixes to this code to prevent that from happening again.

Note, however, that this won't *delete* all the spawned ships. Just stops them from spawning if there are too many (> 16) around OKLG. If you want to prune a save file that has this problem, try making a copy of it first (just in case), and inside the zip file, you can try deleting a bunch of ships starting with "O-" (which are usually scavenger NPC ships).

Just be careful not to delete any ships starting with "OKLG," and your own ship's ID. And once you load that save, the NPC ship count should go down without any errors.

We also found a bug that caused NPC scavenger ships to spawn pirates, dead bodies, and other NPCs, which while hilarious, was probably also unloading those NPCs onto OKLG when that NPC ship docked.

This caused not only OKLG's extreme NPC count problems, but also players being ganked by pirates, and seeing lots of dead bodies on stations.

Again, this patch won't trim those NPCs out of OKLG. But at least they'll stop spawning (and future games should be cleaner).

The last two fixes address ship broker mark-up/discount amounts changing over time, and trimmed some extra log spam that might help with performance.

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