Ostranauts News

Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.13.0.15 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which addresses inventory issues, docking fees, and meat spawn rates.

Most of these changes should be compatible with older 0.13 saves. Though if that save has already had the goatman encounter, some of those effects won't be seen until a new game is started. (See below for some tricks to edit your save.)

• Fixed a bug that could cause inventory windows to close intermittently when controlling crew and the captain was moving.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused audio to cut out intermittently while controlling crew and captain was doing EVA.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause inventory container stack to be drawn incorrectly when picked up from the ground via quick action button.
  
• Fixed bug that prevented quick action buttons from updating when item moved between inventory containers and slots via mouse.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused ships to deny docking permission when they are a gig delivery target.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused docking fees to continue forever after undocking with a stolen ship.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented NPCs from Fleeing in some situations.
  
• Fixed several typos in game data.
  
• Fixed a bug that failed to close the trade UI when a trader is closing for restocking.
  
• Changed the trader code to force them to restock if an NPC becomes a new trader later in the game.
  

Plus some potential spoiler changes and fixes:

• Changed goatman final encounter to stop new meat derelicts from appearing.
• Changed meat derelicts to be less common before the final encounter.
• Added Pray action to altar, so cultists that meet the Goatman can use altars to pray for more meat after.
• Changed default meat infestation spawn size to be smaller.
• Added new conditions to let player configure meat spawning rules via F3 console.

One of the more annoying bugs players have reported involved inventory windows closing intermittently. And thanks to some players reporting hints on reproducing the bugs, we think we've fixed it!

Basically, the inventory UI was assuming the character that first opened it was still the one using it. So if the player had multiple crew and was using the inventory, it could detect the wrong character's range and close containers without warning.

Related to this issue, audio effects for the captain could take over what the player hears when controlling other crew. The sound would appear to cut out for crew randomly, but it turned out to be caused by the captain going in and out of EVA.

There were also a few bugs related to item stacks and Quick Action Buttons available on items not updated when the item was picked up using a QAB.

We found the cause of perpetual docking fees after undocking, as well. This appeared to be due to ships not being owned by the player, and the station was using that to detect when to release the recurring docking fee cycle.

We also fixed a number of plot-related things, which we've surrounded in spoiler tags in case people don't want to ruin the surprise. For those that don't mind reading spoilers, we have some more information about patching your save to take advantage of them.

If you wish to edit your save to take advantage of the new plot variables, you can use the F3 console to query and/or add conditions to your character. For reference, the new conditions affecting meat spawn rates are:

• StatNoMeat = For every point of this condition on the player, a normally-occurring meat derelict will be meat-free. E.g. 10 of this stat will stop the next 10 occurrences.
• StatMeatRate = When the player does encounter a meat derelict, this many StatNoMeat points are added to the player.
• StatMeatBlobMax = The largest starting meat blob size on a new meat derelict.

Adding a cond to a character works like this:

addcond Firstname_Lastname CondName 1

Where Firstname_Lastname is your character's name separated by underscores instead of spaces, and CondName is the stat you want to add (both are case sensitive). And the "1" is however many you want to add.

Note that if you are simply editing the current selected character, you can omit the name entirely, and the game will assume you meant the controlled character. Also, negative numbers remove.

You can also query the conds on your character in the same way:

getcond Firstname_Lastname CondName

This will report how many of CondName is on your character (if any). As above, you can skip the name if you just want the current selected character. And you can do a partial search this way to get, for example, all conditions starting with "Stat".

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 v0.13.0.14 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which addresses item stacking bugs, NPCs with airless helmets, and gigs/plots targeting the player.

Saves from v0.13.0.0 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 bug that caused lost/inaccessible stacked items when picked-up from an inventory grid and right-clicked in the world.
  
• Fixed several other issues related to moving stacked items around in the inventory UI.
  
• Changed plots and gigs to prevent making the player the client or target.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused NPCs to have empty helmets if they were spawned for the first time in an off-screen ship.
  
• Added code to prefill pirate and other EVA-wearers' suits if spawned in an airless environment.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs to lose all survival behaviors if they were wounded or otherwise interrupted before they could finish spawning. (E.g. collision damage or derelict spawn damage)
  

The stacking bug was introduced in an earlier patch where we fixed buying stacked items from a trader and moving them to an off-screen barter zone. Because the fix involved removing stacks from their homes completely before moving them, some of the other inventory stacking situations that relied upon them still being in their home started to break.

As a result, a number of places in the inventory code needed updating to handle situations where a stack was fully or partially moved from either a slot or a grid location to either another slot, another grid location, or an invalid screen location (like the game world or other UI). There are at least a dozen permutations of how items can be moved around in stacks, so please let us know if we missed a particular case.

We also found and fixed several bugs that led to NPCs with airless helmets.

NPCs in pressure suits are supposed to "carve" out some of the ambient atmosphere to match the atmo mixture wherever they spawn, but a timing issue meant that they carved it out of a room that no longer existed, leaving their helmets empty.

Related, but different, was a bug where EVA-wearing NPCs would spawn in airless environments. In these cases, we had to artificially give them some O2 to mimic their suit providing the O2. But a previous fix to prevent them getting O2 each time they donned a helmet meant this broke down, and NPCs like pirates and police would come running aboard the player's ship for a breath of air before returning to their normal business.

This should be restored to normal again.

In the process of fixing these, we also discovered that many NPCs would lose all their survival programming if they were interrupted before they finished spawning. Normally, NPCs get their survival training the moment they spawn, since it differs from NPC to NPC.

But this requires that they finish several actions in their queue. And if they spawned on a ship that later collided, or lacked air, they would immediately clear that queue when panicking. The result is that many clueless NPCs would later dock with OKLG and die with helmets on, or forget to eat/drink.

Finally, we added some guard rails to the gig and plot generation code to avoid cases where jobs were targeting the player, since many players felt that was an error.

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 v0.13.0.11 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which addresses the constant hauler and derelict collisions with OKLG.

Saves from v0.13.0.0 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 haulers to continuously hover outside OKLG, banging into it, and dropping derelicts just outside the station.
  
• Added code to cleanup ships that were bumping OKLG constantly when an affected save game was loaded.
  

The bugs addressed in this patch took a lot longer to find than they did to fix!

For a while now, we've been hearing players complain about haulers constantly banging into OKLG. The reports say that soon after starting a new game, they'd start hearing constant collisions with the station, and looking at the NAV station, they'd see one or more haulers clinging to OKLG with derelicts in tow.

We tried all sorts of test cases and scenarios to try and repro this. Starting new games over and over and watching the first couple haulers go out and do their thing without issue. Creating custom scenarios where haulers came at the station from various angles and distances. Trying all of the above at different game speeds...

As it turns out, this was a bug which only happens when a hauler is out on its second or later mission, and that mission happens to be a deployment mission to drop a derelict into the boneyard.

A bug in the code that docks haulers with OKLG failed to clear their target coordinates, so when they launched again with a new derelict in tow, they thought their target deployment coordinates were inside OKLG!

This patch fixes that bug, so future haulers should no longer be doing that.

We also wanted to add some code to this patch to try and clean up any messes left by this bug, and that turned out to be its own kind of tricky.

Right now, when you load a save created before 0.13.0.11, the game will attempt to find all ships within about 15km of OKLG that have a VREL close to OKLG's. Basically, ships hovering just outside OKLG.

Then, we ignore any ship the player is on, or owns, or has claimed (i.e. used the NAV on or installed items on), since we don't want to kill any players' hard work. Plus, of course, any ships that are considered stations. (So we don't delete OKLG_MES, etc.)

In practice, this should stop the constant banging when you first load your save. Note, however, that if haulers/derelicts got stuck near Ganymed 1036 (the asteroid OKLG is on) and OKLG has rotated far enough away from those, they'll still be there. And there could be some ships/derelicts missed by our filter. So some manual clean-up might still be needed, depending on your save.

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 v0.13.0.10 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which primarily fixes issues with stuck crew members and glitched stats on them.

Saves from v0.13.0.0 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 crew stats to double-process a change, resulting in more than one stat threshold existing at once.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause food to have no eat option, even when character was hungry.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused characters to get stuck and ignore commands in AI Manual mode when they had an emergency, such as hypercapnia.
  
• Added code to fix saves from 0.13.0.8 and earlier which might have these duplicate stat thresholds.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused inanimate objects and wounds to start thinking for themselves and planning their next move.
  

While there are only a few main fixes in this patch, they address some issues that were pretty annoying to those who ran into them.

The first fix involves the way we calculate survival stats on people (and some things). As a particular stat goes up and down, it crosses thresholds that signify better or worse conditions. E.g. Satiety has a range from Hungry through Sated, Stuffed, and Sick Stomach, as its relevant stat goes up.

The bug would happen when the character received or lost a negative condition, such as nausea, that alters these thresholds. In some cases, adding or removing one of these conditions caused the threshold to change, and that threshold change would cascade into another threshold change before the first one finished. This could sometimes result in the "outer" threshold change to add an extra stat to the crew when it shouldn't.

One such example was satiety threshold of Hungry and Stuffed at the same time. To the player, it would appear that they have Hungry in the UI, but the game would deny them the ability to eat things because they also had Stuffed in the background.

This patch fixes the code to prevent this situation from happening. Furthermore, it attempts to repair any save file created before 0.13.0.8 where this has happened. In our testing (and testing by brave players with the bug), this patch seems to fix things.

The second fix is to a bug we introduced in the last patch. 0.13.0.7. In that patch, we gave survival "pledges" to the captain so that it could survive without player input when it was placed in Behavior AUTO mode. E.g. it would eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, and seek fresh atmo/don helmets when needed.

In order to ensure this didn't hijack the captain while the player was moving them around, we disabled these pledges when the AI was in MANUAL mode.

However, we forgot to add that same guard to those pledges' "emergency" modes. All AIs do a series of emergency checks before continuing whatever their current action is, so they can interrupt a long action if they are in danger, and deal with it.

But in this case, the emergency mode was triggering, and the pledge to address it was not, because the AI was in MANUAL mode. As a result, some players ran into situations where their captain or crew suddenly stopped responding to orders and would stand in place, paralyzed or repeating an animation. Usually when an emergency arose, such as hypercapnia.

This patch matches the emergency mode tests with the regular tests so they can act in concert again.

Lastly, this fixes a weird bug where inanimate objects and wounds would start to plan their next move after being in the game a while. It appears the code we added to make AIs plan their next move was not correctly guarded against inanimate objects and wounds, and in some cases, those objects would finish a turn the same way AI does, putting them into the queue for planning their next moves.

In practice, they couldn't really do much without other things the AIs have (like pathfinding). But still, they were probably eating up CPU cycles better spent elsewhere. So some users may experience better performance in this build, particularly in later game saves.

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 v0.13.0.7 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Lucky Number 13" update, which is a mix of bug fixes, fixes for crew behaviors, and fixes for visual issues.

Saves from v0.13.0.0 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 which could cause ship layouts to overlap if there was a problem when docking, causing game to become unplayable afterward.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause crossing an airlock to become impossible in some ships.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause the ferry encounter UI to become stuck on screen if it arrived for non-captain crew when they were unconscious.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause the PASS ferry to fail to pick up player when it arrived.
  
• Fixed several null exceptions which could cause the game to become unresponsive to mouse clicks when unpaused.
  
• Fixed a null exception that would occur when attempting to set keybinds from main menu.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused AI to don helmets when considering repairs on an item that was in unsafe atmo, even if it ultimately didn't decide to do the repair.
  
• Changed Reply, Eat, Drink, Repeat, SurviveO2, SurviveCO2, and StandUp pledges to only fire when AI is on automatic mode.
  
• Added code to make player eat, drink, refresh helmet, stand up, and reply automatically when in Behavior Auto mode.
  
• Added code to retroactively fix saves from 0.13.0.6 and earlier to have captain survival behaviors.
  
• Fixed bugs that could cause the fetch item plot to fail to end and/or re-trigger later.
  
• Changed the vent plot to be clearer, and conclude correctly.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused stacked items to be lost/inaccessible if purchased from a trader and sent to barter zone on an off-map ship.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused broken lights to not flicker.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause the fixer to buy and sell at prices that allowed infinite money exploit.
  
• Added new encounter illustrations to the game.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused ship silhouettes in NAV UI to have wrong scale.
  
• Fixed a bug which could cause null exceptions if an AI attempted to pathfind to a point on a ship that had recently undocked.
  
• Added code to warn the user if attempting to debug dock to a ship which is already docked.
  
• Changed some trigger-checking code to be faster, for slight performance improvement.
  

Most of this patch is to address bugs which were causing the game to become glitched or unplayable when certain events happened. These bugs could manifest in several symptoms including overlapping ships, stuck UIs, unresponsive controls, blocked pathfinding, or being unable to complete certain plots.

While this patch doesn't fix everything, hopefully these are some of the most severe or often encountered issues, and we can address any ones we missed (or new ones) in the next round.

The patch also includes some changes to how crew AI handle helmets. In particular, the captain now has some survival "pledges" to match regular NPCs, so if the player leaves them on Behavior Auto mode, the captain can autonomously eat, drink, remove helmet, and stand up if prone. Note what when Behavior is set to Manual mode, it works as it did before, and player must handle all those tasks manually.

Crew AI also had a bug which caused them to don a helmet when merely considering a task that involved an airlock opening, even if they ultimately never planned to follow-through. This has been fixed, and AI should now only put a helmet on if they eventually plan to use an airlock. (It may take a few moments for them to get around to said airlock task, though.)

Several visual issues were also fixed in this build, including the lights not flickering when broken, and ship silhouettes being too small in the NAV UI. Plus, we have some fun new artwork for you to enjoy when you see certain encounters now!

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