Stormworks: Build and Rescue News

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we discuss the new modular engine mechanics recently added, the design intentions, and development plans.

We are also announcing that we are taking a 2 week break this winter for the holiday period. Yesterday we moved office, and over the next couple of weeks, we will be decorating and setting up the new office. Up until now, we have been sharing an office with other businesses, and are really excited to be getting our own small studio to make games in.

This means there will be no new announcements over the next couple of weeks, but main development will resume on January 4th.



Thank you to everyone who submitted questions this week for the Q and A session. Our plan is to record the answers for Youtube (perhaps with the help of MrNJersey) so keep an eye out on Youtube for the responses to your questions!

Modular Engine Mechanics

Over the last few weeks, with the help of player feedback, we have been reviewing the modular engine components, how they work, and how they interact with each other. We have added various new systems and updated existing mechanics:

Sea Water

We have split the "water" fluid type into two types - sea water and fresh water! Sea water comes from the sea, while fresh water can be spawned using fluid spawners or tanks. The critical difference is that fresh water is suitable for modular engine cooling, while sea water will cause engine scaling causing the engine to cool less efficiently.

Heat Exchangers

We have added new fluid-to-fluid, gas-to-fluid, and gas-to-gas temperature exchangers. In these parts, there are two routes for fluid or gas to pass through these components. Heat transfers between these routes so that temperature averages out between the two flows.

Be sure to use the right type of exchanger for your application. Heat will not efficiently transfer if you transfer gas through a fluid path or vice-versa.

Heat exchangers are very useful for modular engine cooling, particularly where you want to use sea water cooling systems. Using a heat exchanger rather than passing sea water straight through your modular engine is an effective cooling strategy.

Turbo Charging and Centrifugal Pumps

We have reduced the turbo charger to a single impeller type pump. This allows you to arrange your turbo from two pumps in any orientation you like, use it to make a supercharger, or just use it as a mechanical pump.

Gear Boxes

We have created a new set of gear boxes from the smallest 1 block gearbox, to much larger units. These new gearboxes have a max torque load, and if you exceed their specifications, the gearboxes can be damaged.

Smaller gearboxes does make it easier to create larger gear sets with more ratio combinations.

Electric Radiators

We have added new radiators that include electric fans. Running these fans provide improved cooling at the cost of electric consumption. These radiators can be particularly useful as secondary cooling for vehicles that use air scoops to use moving air to pressurize a primary cooling system. This kind of system may be particularly effective on fast moving vehicles such as jet boats or planes, but doesn't have as much effect when the vehicle is not moving.

We plan to continue to improve modular engines with your feedback so let us know your thoughts and help us shape this next major update!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

We are making this one-off announcement to share some special news.

Carrier Command 2

We are excited to announce that over the past couple of years, we have had the opportunity to build a sequel to the 1988 Microprose classic, Carrier Command (originally created by Ian Oliver and Graeme Bird). This game has been made by an entirely separate team to the Stormworks team, using a different original game engine and original code base.

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This is a huge deal for us. I grew up on Microprose games, and as a game developer, I have always had a deep admiration for 1980s video game development, where the rules of game design were still being invented, hardware was extremely limiting, and development tools were primitive. When we are not making games, we are gamers ourselves and get really excited about classic games.

Carrier Command is one of the greatest example of 1980s game innovation. It was one of the first true 3D games, and the most detailed military sim of it's time. With an open world of islands to explore, and multiple cooperating vehicles, it has been a big inspiration in the creation of Stormworks. The magic and depth of this era of gaming is sadly lost in most of todays games, and something we have aimed to repair with Stormworks.



We have been working with Microprose (yes, they are back!) to create a true spiritual successor to the 1988 original. For us, that has been about capturing the depth of strategy and mechanics of the original, then pushing this all much, much further. You command from the carrier bridge, with a literalism where every screen, button and switch has an important function. You manage manufacturing, inventory, logistics, strategy, systems, and can take over manual control of any vehicle.



Carrier Command 2 is NOT a vehicle building game, it is a military simulation and strategy game.

For many players, this sequel is 30 years overdue and we only hope that we can make it worth the wait.

You can view the store page for Carrier Command 2 here.

What Does This Mean For Stormworks?

Nothing.

Carrier Command is made by a different development team, and the work is almost complete. Over the past 2 years, we have continued to release minor and major updates to our regular, uninterrupted Stormworks schedule and this is going to continue for years.

It has been very beneficial to be developing the additional experience, skills, and technology and both games have benefitted from being built near each other.

It is really important to us that players know we are committed to Stormworks and will support and improve the game for years to come. Let's discuss how:

Stormworks Development Roadmap

Here is our current roadmap as an info-graphic. We only have space to list out the main features and not all the minor updates, improvements and fixes that we will continue to add on our regular timetable.

If you have feedback or ideas that you think should be here, be sure to let us know! We are always listening to players and will adjust the plan to respond!



Answering Community Questions

Keeping players informed and answering your questions is important to us. We are going to trial a question and answer session and ask you to submit your questions over the next few days. We are still making plans but may try and answer them in a Youtube video. If this goes well, it could become a regular feature to best keep players informed and involved in the development process.

Submit your question now by clicking on this link! Thank you for the questions! Session has been recorded but keep an eye out here on the announcements and we may do this again.

Here is to 2021 and beyond! Tune back in on Friday for the weekly announcement.

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week, as a minor update, we are adding vehicle to vehicle fire spreading, and have also added game save compression.

Now, when two vehicles collide with a little force, there is a good chance fire will spread from one vehicle to the other. At the point of contact, fire can spread if that point on either vehicle is currently on fire.

Fire spreading collisions require a little force, but much less than the amount of force required to do damage.

This change only makes fires more able to spread, more able to get out of control, and more deadly. If you are responding to a vehicle fire on land or at sea, please use caution! A small contact could set your vehicle alight and leave you stranded in the ocean on a burning ship!



Game saves had grown considerably in size the past few weeks since we added AI ships, so we added save compression to reduce game saves down in size. Saves typically reduce in size by over 90%. This also resolves several player issues where some players experienced slow downs during saving. We also addressed the issue with slow downs after loading previously saved games.

Save games remain backwards compatible so your old saves will still work.

The reduced save file size will also help us when adding more vehicles to the world, such as AI helicopters and planes that we plan to implement over the coming months.



Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on last weeks upcoming announcement! I don't think we have ever had so many comments on an announcement before.

As always, see below for the full list of changes including fixes and changes.

Also, be sure to check out experimental branch if you are interested in the modular engines. We added loads of new components this week and updated some mechanics. It is all a work in progress so some imagination is required but gives a sneak preview on what we are working on.



We look forward to hearing your stories about spreadable fire and other feedback :-)

Keep an eye out for a one off extra announcement early next week! We will be sharing some very big news as well as plans for 2021. We can't wait to share this info and will post it here on Steam announcements when we have all the info together (probably on Tuesday!).

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

v1.0.25

Feature - Fire surfaces now spread between vehicles upon physics contact
Feature - Game saves now compress vehicles (Smaller and faster saves)

Fix - Lag Issue after reloading a world with AI vehicles in waiting state
Fix - onCharacterSit not correctly returning object ID
Fix - PID Max Error not saved when returning a vehicles

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we will discuss the upcoming major updates we have started working on, and are in the pipeline to be delivered to players over the coming months.

We have taken players feedback, as well as the latest poll results very seriously, and aim to make the best improvements we can to your game.

Let's discuss the roadmap for upcoming major updates!

Modular Engines



Modular engines are currently being publicly tested over on the experimental branch of the game. So far we have added components for 1, 3 and 5 scale engines. We have already shared a render of the modular engine meshes, with many components yet to add, and balance yet to be completed.

We are hoping to make solid progress on modular engines over the next few weeks, and get more components and a better balance on experimental as soon as possible. Modular engines will be the next major update.

Nuclear Power



We are currently looking at component designs for nuclear power. The design concept is that nuclear reactors would be large and heavy and serve as a propulsion system for the biggest ships and submarines.

We are considering including components such as nuclear fuel rods, reactors, steam generators, steam turbines and condensers. In this way, nuclear reactors would be modular and players could arrange and connect them in many ways depending on their application.

We are still early in the design phase and would love to hear players ideas and feedback.

Steam Engines



We are currently looking at component designs for steam engines. There would be some component and system cross over with the nuclear steam components, but would be a lower sized and lower power set for medium sized vehicles.

Components could include coal bunkers, coal screws, furnaces, boilers, and piston drivers.

Let us know your thoughts and ideas, and what applications you would like to see steam engines used for.

More AI Vehicles



With AI boats now live on the main version of the game, we are also looking at AI helicopters and AI planes. These new vehicle types would work in a similar way to boats, with the seat type tagged to use a specific AI type and control input scheme. You would occasionally see aircraft in the sky flying past.

We are working on a set of AI compatible vehicles, the new AI code for piloting them, and the updates to the AI vehicles script to support spawning them.

Vehicle Weapons DLC



As the close second most highly voted request on the most recent poll, modular vehicle weapons are in development. This will be a paid DLC to reflect how big a change it is to the game experience, and to protect the base game as a search and rescue sandbox.

We are considering a variety of vehicle weapons, from 50cal machine guns, up to huge howitzer cannons, or explosive charges for your own mines, missiles, and torpedoes. The gun systems would be modular to incorporate gun cycle and chambering mechanics, and ammunition handing and feeding mechanics. Weapons would cause damage in a similar way to collisions and the new explosions that we quietly added in version 1.0.

With weapons and all other features in development, we look forward to working with players to design the best possible new features for Stormworks.

We have our work cut out, with many months of work planned. We continue to carefully consider players feedback and will be sure to run another poll after we have had chance to release at least a couple of these features so all players can have a fair say in the future direction of Stormworks.

We have also made some fixes and improvements. See patch notes below!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.0.24

Rework - Added Max error value setting for the PID block (set to zero to disable clamping)

Fix - Quit button disabled for multiplayer clients
Fix - Quit button disabled while incapacitated
Fix - Stormworks not responding while saving
Fix - SetVehiclePos() not correctly updating vehicle physics positions
Fix - Updated AI vehicles script to remove unused objects that were causing errors

Dear Stormworkers,

This week, we bring you AI ships! There will now be hundreds of AI ships passively sailing in the ocean. These ships are persistent, and will continue to move around the world even when you are not around. These ships are on journeys and path-find across the ocean to reach their destination.

This feature has been on experimental, but is now in the main version of the game.

If you want to add your own ships to the AI system, follow the guide here: https://youtu.be/DyXhPy1oegc Remember, vehicles with big or complex physics will slow the game down, so please Stormworks responsibly.

To achieve this new feature, we have added a new property to seats: "AI Type". You can now set the type of AI to be used by NPCs on that particular seat. Right now, there is only one type of seat AI (ship piloting), and only NPCs that have had their AI activated via scripts are able to use these seats - but many of you will see the direction this may be headed!



We have also added new Lua functions to modify the AI state of an NPC - including being able to enable and disable AI capability, and set an AI action such as pilot to a destination.

Could this feature be extended to allow players to hire NPCs with AI capability, place them in seats, and give them orders? Are there other ways we could extend this feature? Let us know in the discussion comments!

This new feature has been actively developed over the last couple of weeks on experimental branch so many thanks to all the players who have been trying it out and giving feedback.



In response to your poll results, we are prioritizing new features that the community have decided most important. AI Ships, Planes & Helicopters ranked no. 5 in your most recent poll. We also hope to add AI helicopters and planes in the future. Meanwhile, we have also begun working on other highly voted new features, all while continuing to fix bugs and issues.

We hope you enjoy this new feature, and find it gives more life and interest to the world of Stormworks!

As always, we look forward to hearing all your thoughts and feedback.

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.0.22

Feature - New AI Ships Playlist and character/seat AI behaviour type

Rework - Manual saving now uses a background thread like autosaves
(It is not reccomended to exit the game during saving)

Fix - Added onVehicleDespawn callback for explosions
Fix - Large Rotors editor selection hitbox updates
Fix - Door editor selection hitbox updates
Fix - NPC characters taking damage
Fix - River boats should no longer be treated as land vehicles for towing missions

Playlist Api Changes:

server.setVehicleKeypad(vehicle_id, keypad_name) value, is_success = server.getVehicleDial(vehicle_id, keypad_name) POSITION_LIST = server.pathfindOcean(start_matrix, end_matrix) POSITION_LIST | { i = {x = world_x, y = world_y, z = world_z}}

is_on, is_success = server.getVehicleButton(vehicle_id, button_name)
count, is_success = server.getVehicleFireCount(vehicle_id)
is_success = server.getVehicleTooltip(vehicle_id, text)
is_simulating, is_success = server.getVehicleSimulating(vehicle_id)
is_success = server.setVehicleTransponder(vehicle_id, is_active)
is_success = server.setVehicleEditable(vehicle_id, is_editable)
server.setVehicleTank(vehicle_id, tank_name, amount, FLUID_TYPE)
FLUID_TYPE |
0 = water,
1 = diesel,
2 = jet_fuel,
3 = air,
4 = exhaust,
5 = oil,
value, is_success = server.getVehicleTank(vehicle_id, tank_name)
server.setVehicleBattery(vehicle_id, battery_name, amount)
value, is_success = server.getVehicleBattery(vehicle_id, battery_name)

server.setAIState(object_id, AI_STATE)
AI_STATE |
0 = none,
1 = path to destination,

server.setAITarget(object_id, matrix_destination)

hp, is_incapacitated, is_dead, is_interactable, is_ai = server.getCharacterData(object_id)
server.setCharacterData(object_id, hp, is_interactable, is_ai)