Consolidated Patch Notes v0.2.1954.8891

Still working through the big-ticket technical backlog, but as usual we have a bunch of fixes and your requests that are worth getting into the stable branch. We're also going to endeavour to keep the 'what we're working on' section of these notes going every patch, to more clearly illustrate that what you see in these patch notes every few weeks is not the totality of what has been done since the last update.


We've added the ability to search for recipes in manufacturing machines. For the IC programmers, we've also added a sleep command. They're small things, but many of you have been very passionately requesting them so we hope you enjoy it.


The first of many audio improvements have taken place in the last couple of weeks with the addition of a new team member dedicated to audio. In addition to bringing across some audio functionality from another project at the studio, we've been able to start looking at some of the most noticeable holes in what you hear while playing the game. We'll be experimenting with a lot of the systems and sound, so give us your feedback and keep in mind that it'll be a continually evolving thing as development continues.


Work continues on the new tutorial, and we'll look at getting this up on the workshop in the next week as well as making available the documentation for authoring your own tutorials or scenarios. Once it has been thoroughly tested, we'll look at introducing it in the beta branch. As this will ideally be a brand new replacement tutorial, we need to ensure it is a bug-free and comprehensive introduction to the game before it makes it to people playing for the first time.


Some of these have been posted in past patch notes, but rather than regularly field questions about it in Discord and on Reddit, we'll try post more regular updates for works-in-progress here.

Session Abstraction
We're working on a lobby system to break up the multiplayer and the game world. This will allow players to join a game before the world is created. The next step will be the preserve this lobby/player data even while cleaning up the world, then once we support being able to transition into a new one with the same set of people then round-based play is just around the corner.

Optimization
While we're trying to leave the bulk of optimization until more of the core features are into the game, occasionally certain things stand-out as being strong candidates for optimization. We've identified a couple of these in the last week or two, so it's too soon to speculate on how impactful they'll be - keep an eye out on the beta branch patch notes.

Audio
As mentioned above, the team now has a dedicated audio tech/programmer! The focus in the immediate future will be sounds local to the character (ie. suit noises), with additional movement sounds to go with the just-added footstep ones.

• Fixed various side effects of refactoring.
  

• Fixed several missing references to NitrousOxide in tooltips etc. [Credit: Risu]
  
• Fixed issue where randomize on the Character Customization screen allowed invalid selections, which if retained would prevent save games with that character from loading correctly.