Consolidated Patch Notes v0.1.1671.7828

So it's been a really big week for us. Often, in game dev, some weeks are slow and some weeks a lot of stuff comes through. We received a bit of feedback on discord that last week didn't have enough fixes. We made sure this week had lots of fixes! Also some new content that we have been preparing for a while.



For a long time growing plants has remained one of the areas it was completely impossible to automate. Now we have an item that will, with the future tech tree, become more of an "end game" way of growing plants.

This automated station has an Import, Export, and Growing slot. You can send custom Logic command (Plant, Harvest) to the machine with a value of 1 to get it to process itself via logic. Or you can click the buttons on the machine.



The first phase in a major atmospherics refactor has been completely. The game uses threads to help with performance. This means the game is able to do many things at the same time, without those other tasks impacting on the rest of the game.

This is a very complicated way of making a game, as these need to be carefully synchronised. Often areas of the game were accessing this "volatile" information while it was being changed, resulted in weird values. This caused significant issues; such as the dreaded "Temperature Low" often for brief seconds. This has now been fixed!

Over the coming months we will continue to introduce more changes to make the atmospherics system more robust. We're very confident that this weeks refactor will provide significant improvement in stability.



As an additional part of the atmos refactor, is the preparation for surgery in the coming weeks. We've added N2O which, in larger quantities, can cause you to go unconscious. Currently it's only available by debug spawning, but throughout the week will add more.







Filters, Unloaders and Stackers have not been able to easily be controlled via logic. Now, if you set their Mode to the appropriate value (2 for Filter, 1 for Unloader and Stacker), they will enter a "wait" mode.

In this mode, they will process a single requested operation, and then go back to waiting. You can see (or set) this state using the Output variable.

For example with the Filter, -1 is idle, 0 is left, and 1 is right. With the Stacker, -1 is idle, 0 or greater processes a single requested stack size. With the unloader, -1 is again idle, 0 unloads the slot item itself without removing anything, and 1 removes a single item from what you have loaded.

This allows you to use these items in any custom way, with the new IC's or the existing logic system. They will be able to work in lock-step with your logic systems.

The following script sets a stacker to Logic mode, with a setting of five, and processes one stack:

alias Stacker d0 # sets the screw to show stacker​
s Stacker Mode 1 # set stacker to logic mode​
s Stacker Setting 5 # stacker size will be 5`​
s Stacker Output 1 # stacker will process once

Based on excellent community feedback the IDE for editing IC code has been improved significantly, and many bugs found and fixed. Now your string based jump labels (e.g. "start:") will be colored purple, with other strings white. There are still some bugs but this will continue to be improved.





You can now share your IC Code creations on the Steam Workshop using the in-game code library. This feature has been available in beta for a couple of days, so there's already several items available. Once subscribed, they will appear in the code library from where they can be easily loaded into any Computer with a Programmable Chip Motherboard inserted.





All the basic manufacturing machines have been given a bit of a visual touch-up with recipe selection finally getting its own button. In addition, the recipe selection UI has been given an overhaul and now features more sensible sorting and thumbnails. It also now properly supports localised item names in languages that require extended fonts.



As your base gets larger, we have more stuttering. This is caused by Unity's Garbage collection occurring. We have included an update in this patch that reduces this by about 30% but it is still very noticeable.

We have some plans for this:

• We are looking at upgrading to the latest Unity version
  
• Refactoring all our code to make it more memory efficient
  
• Replacing Unity's MP system with our own that is more memory efficient