Stormworks: Build and Rescue News

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we release minor update 1.4.17, including new outfit items, as well as many bug fixes and improvements.

This update is dedicated as a tribute to all of the Youtube content creators who are part of the Stormworks community. These content creators have a genuine passion, they are highly skilled communicators, editors, story makers, and are just lovely people with a positive energy that we admire. Building a Youtube channel is very difficult. It takes huge commitment, energy and skill. Building a brand and a business up from nothing is a great achievement that few have achieved.

I am not sure if we have spoken about Youtubers before, but Stormworks owes a great amount of it's success to the many content creators who have covered, supported, and promoted the game over the years. Almost all games that release on Steam don't reach enough players and fail. A lot of people would say that Stormworks has been lucky, but it wasn't luck. It was Youtubers, and players who gave their time up to help others, the incredible player created workshop items, and all the players who share our love of design and engineering.



In appreciation, we have added new branded shirts and hoodies to the Stormworks wardrobe in honour of Camodo, Spycakes, Beautiful OB, MrNJersey, Raptor, Frantic, ND, GQ, LynxHighland and RubberDuck. This isn't every great Youtuber, but we have added outfits for the top 10 youtubers by most viewed videos from the last year or so. Please consider checking out their channels.

And there is more in this update! Check out the extra wardrobe items and huge list of bug fixes and improvements in the patch notes below.

The new crash reporter that we added last week is working well and this update also includes some crash fixes so crashes should be dramatically reduced. We continue to monitor quality and will continue to add more fixes.

We have also added a new "auto" physics setting for the physics quality. The game will automatically step the setting up and down based on the physics simulation speed. If you do experience physics issues, you can always set this setting back to "high".



We hear the players who may be pointing out what their ideal next minor update is, and perhaps not all players watch as much Youtube as we do! But please do take a moment to consider how all players benefit from the content creators, vehicle builders, teaching players, and the community that has supported the constant free updates for the last 4 years.

We hope you found this weeks update interesting, and enjoy the new content and fixes! We look forward to your feedback :-)

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.17

Feature - New casual outfits and youtuber outfits
Feature - Auto physics quality (Steps up and down based on fps)

Fix - Frequent crash caused by destroying physics objects
Fix - #2196 Characters do not clear ragdoll on revive
Fix - #2190 Characters get of beds on death for clients
Fix - #1860 Player can return mission objects set as 'show on map' to workbench, but get sent to 0,0
Fix - #1427 Coal duplication glitch
Fix - #567 #6913 Monitor block rendering flickers when it moves
Fix - #4924 Whale animation issue
Fix - Static vehicle behavior inconsistencies with electric
Fix - #5113 Door tooltip at hospital island
Fix - #5330 Wave patch issue for sealed volumes in whirlpools
Fix - Light and billboard light distance rendering re-balance
Fix - #6455 Ocean draws over elements like HUD or light halo
Fix - #5611 Vehicles Fall Through the Ground in Low Physics
Fix - #6305 Crankshaft Converters do not output RPS value
Fix - #6367 Fish spawning upright at save load
Fix - #6377 Radio RX composite descriptions are switched
Fix - Ladder climbing now respects the inverted movement setting
Fix - Fixed fog/water attenuation for light sources
Fix - Fixed volume lights using atmospheric fog values when underwater
Fix - #6712 Swimming direction inverted on controllers
Fix - #6718 Increased catalytic converter conversion speed
Fix - #6701 Updated property slider description in micro-controllers
Fix - #7185 #6761 All controllers are now activated on any controller button press
Fix - #6802 Added several missing localizations
Fix - #4968 Removed dynamic icebergs
Fix - #6808 Missing face on battle-cannon
Fix - #7165 Vehicle spawned by script does not have a peer_id of -1
Fix - #7415 being unable to heal survivors while in seats and stuff
Fix - #7469 Guns don't deal damage to other players
Fix - Main menu settings not saving correctly

Dear Stormworkers,

This week development has pressed forward, with big progress being made on the 2 next minor updates, the next major update, and the new crash reporting system.

The next 2 minor updates have long lists of bug fixes and we are making good progress on fixes and improvements. We use the issue tracker to get info from players on where the quality issues are, and this gives us clear metrics on how many identified issues there are. This data shows we are steadily reducing the total number of bugs, and our new quality control processes are introducing relatively few new issues.

Next weeks minor update will also include a new cosmetic feature, and we will announce more next week as we release it!

Recently we have seen a surge in reports of crash to desktop, which is of major concern to us, particularly with our recent push to resolve issues and implement bug fixes. We have been unable to reproduce this new crash, with the game playing very stable in the office. Steam crash reporting only works with 32bit software, and most players play the 64bit version of Stormworks. We had tried using Bugsplat (a 3rd party crash reporter) but that also didn't work well for us. So, we have implemented our own and put it live yesterday. The new crash reporter is very similar to the built in Steam one, except it also capture data when 64bit applications crash.



Immediately we can see that the crashes are probably just a single issue related to physics objects being despawned, and we are already investigating how to fix. Moving forward, the new crash reporting system will help us monitor the stability of Stormworks, and quickly recognise any quality issues, as well as clearly see exactly which update introduced new crash issues.

We will return next week with the next minor update!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



v1.4.16

Feature - implemented new crash reporting system

Dear Stormworkers,

Today we release the multiplayer bandwidth and vehicle desync update!

Bandwith and Sync Improvements

Players have told us the multiplayer experience needs to be improved, and we have been hard at work for a long time. We have made 3 major changes - we have reduced the overhead of our network protocol, vehicles now use a new technique to replicate, and we have created a proprietary compression algorithm that works specifically for Stormworks vehicle data.

This means that bandwidth usage has reduced by 60% to 80%, and the issue where vehicles would sometimes appear delayed is resolved.



This isn't the first multiplayer update we have released, and multiplayer has been a long-standing challenge for us. In Stormworks, vehicles can often have hundreds of individually moving physics bodies, as well as hundreds of complex logical components, all of which have lots of data that needs to be replicated between server and client. Stormworks is probably the most complex vehicle builder game, with the smallest block size, and the most data to sync up. This is simply a problem that other games have not had to solve and so requires a lot of engineering.

This new update solves a lot of these issues, and the new bandwidth reduction and netcode dramatically improves the multiplayer experience for a lot of players.



What About Slow Down / Slow Motion?

Some players experience slow-motion. This is caused by playing on a server with too much stuff spawned in, or the computer being below min-spec. When too many physics objects are spawned in and interacting with each other, the game will slow down. This is true for all physics sandbox games.

If you check the comments, I am sure you will find a few multi-threading and optimization arm chair experts who think the game just needs to run faster. However, the reality is that the physics calculations are complex, we have already optimized a lot, and there are no shortcuts if you want the detailed physics, robotics, ocean physics, and other mechanic that Stormworks has. It is the nature and the core of Stormworks to be a detailed physics sim.



So, if we can't magically make the same game run faster, what are the solutions? We are putting a lot of thought into this and welcome players to let us know your thoughts and ideas!

This isn't the only change and we have been also working hard clearing out the bug backlog. Please see below for the full list of fixes and improvements.

We hope this new update improves your multiplayer experience and we look forward to seeing you in-game!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.15

Feature - Improved crash dump reporting system
Feature - #5247 #6364 #6221 Multiplayer time dilation algorithm overhaul
Feature - Multiplayer bandwidth optimization

Fix - #6770 #6862 Two sided buttons now use the correct color zones and are paintable on both sides
Fix - #6765 Door color changes after saving and reloading vehicle
Fix - #6777 Window inverse pyramid 2x2x2 mesh offset
Fix - #6764 Instrument panel bar and radial indicators are now unpaintable
Fix - #6757 Door frame edge and corner component coloring not working

Fix - #6465 #7029 Gamepad sensitivity issues on varied framerates
Fix - Controller Axis settings getting reset
Fix - Small inputs on controllers when leaving the dead-zone not registering correctly

Fix - #369 Menu Audio Glitching
Fix - #106 Clients moving while in workbench
Fix - #1365 Rotor blades don't snap off
Fix - #3920 Small Engine sound inaudibly quiet
Fix - #2797 Mirrored barrel extensions for rotary canon rotate incorrectly
Fix - #2762 Editor tooltip sometimes get stuck
Fix - #4885 Wind sounds when submerged
Fix - #5140 #6673 #7044 Environment sounds no longer play in editor
Fix - #5098 Laser beacon not rendering glass/additive mesh
Fix - #5527 Character deforming when emoting in photo mode
Fix - Tornado wind affecting enclosed compartments
Fix - #5235 Meteors show in editor
Fix - #5699 Autocannon belt naming inconsistencies
Fix - #5862 Visual glitches on HUDs
Fix - #6082 Fuel stations pumping slowly (Updated default gantry plumbing)
Fix - #6100 Very tall tornadoes
Fix - #6199 Engine temperatures below absolute 0
Fix - #6210 3x3 and 5x5 Fluid Heat Radiator (electric) missing faces
Fix - #6211 Cost calculation is not reduced when in mirror mode and parts are deleted
Fix - Kraken sometimes refusing to let a ship go
Fix - Host not waiting for tiles to simulate correctly (falling through map on teleport)
Fix - #6354 Tank wheel mesh issue
Fix - #6571 Weather and Time of day overriding when a player joins a server

Rework - Updated default path nodes to match the new iceberg tiles

Addon Lua:
Fix - setGameSetting can now correctly set weather_override
Fix - #6150 onVehicleDespawn happens twice

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, as we alternate between game updates and announcements every Friday!

This week, we will discuss the upcoming updates and general plans we are making at the moment.

We already have the next 2 minor updates underway, with many improvements already complete and being reviewed. At the moment, we are regularly testing multiplayer as we want to make improvements to this area of the game. We are making progress, but this is still being worked on. Players can expect some improvement although we are not sure how much will be in the next minor update. Players can know this is being worked on and some progress is being made.



Otherwise, we have a long list of bug fixes and minor improvements that have been requested on the issue tracker. We are working our way through these, and we are making good progress. The new quality processes we now use have dramatically improved the quality of releases, with much fewer new issues, and we are fixing things at a good rate. Our goal is to reduce the total issues and get through the back-log of issues that has built up as a priority.

That said, we are still dedicating some resource to feature updates and major updates! We have loads of minor updates planned for the rest of the year and we are working on the next major update which should release at some point this summer. Our support plan for Stormworks continues to run indefinitely, and we are already discussing update ideas for the rest of this year and into 2023.



While we are committed to supporting Stormworks into the future, we are also thinking about other projects. The engine powering Stormworks is our own in-house engine and is now 6 years old, so we are discussing how we want to do things differently in the future and looking at creating a new engine that could power our next generation of game. This is still in the game-engine design stage and a new game is still a long way off.

Be sure to come back next Friday or a new minor update release!

And do let us know if this style of announcement is useful! We want to keep players in touch with the studio's plans, but with our personal style, we prefer to "do" rather than "talk", and we prefer not to give too much detail on anything until it is complete and working, so that we don't disappoint.

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we add support for painting components on multiple sides! This has been a consistent problem for creators, particularly for things like 2 sided buttons and some windows, where you may want to set the paint color to be different on the inside compared to the outside.

Many components now have different paintable zones where needed, so you can change the color of different parts of the component as you wish.



We have also been hard at work fixing issues and making various improvements. The full list of patch notes is below. The issue numbers are included so those who want to cross-reference with the issue tracker may do so if they wish.

We are continuing work on the next minor update (due in 2 weeks), as well as the next major update. We will announce more on this when we have more info to share!



Thanks for all the players who have been asking for multi-sided painting, it has been a very long requested feature and we are pleased to have brought it to the game.

We look forward to your feedback!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.4.13

Fix - #6405 #6369 Seats displaying wrong tooltips

v1.4.14

Feature - #2885 Multiple component paint colours
Feature - #5693 Re-painted and optimized ai/mission vehicles

Rework - #2878 Ammo drums now lose their ammo when exploding
Rework - #502 The chat window no longer shows up over other UI
Rework - #5514 Fish no longer spawn under island meshes
Rework - #5257 The tutorial will now end when moving away from the starter island
Rework - Disabling vehicle damage now also disables engine overheat effects
Rework - Passworded servers have been pushed to the bottom of the server list
Rework - Servers now sort by network quality
Fix - #3472 Clients not taking damage from explosions
Fix - Fixed some code causing weather desync (#4881 #5245 #6138 #6204 #6251)
Fix - #4880 Wind override slider inverting its value
Fix - #4795 Gap in rail-line near O'neill base
Fix - #5480 Disaster Sirens now take into account tsunami travel distance
Fix - #3087 Lowered some dock mission zones for boats with origins below the waterline
Fix - #5818 Players lose their hair when in the seat
Fix - Buoyancy surfaces added to the air and liquid exchanger components
Fix - UI focus not clearing in certain situations
Fix - #6495 #6471 Fix Kraken data for saving/multiplayer
Fix - Ping always displaying as 0ms in multiplayer

New packet loss network graph has been added to the F1 menu

Addon Lua:
Feature - #5307 Added setWeather lua function
Rework - #715 onButtonPress() now returns the type of interaction (press/release)
Fix - #4588 parented server.spawnFire only spawning at vehicle center