Stormworks: Build and Rescue News

Dear Stormworkers,

The new Stormworks: Space DLC will release on 12th October!

Wishlist the DLC here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2383250/

Watch the trailer here:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Stormworks: Space has been years in the making, and introduces space and moon operations to the world of Stormworks:

Space and Lunar Biome

Travel from earth, up through the atmosphere, across the vacuum of space, and down to the surface of the moon in a continuous simulation. Space is infinite nothingness, while the lunar surface is 900 square kilometers of grey dust, craters, canyons, and caves.



New Simulations

Gravity will be simulated and weakens as you travel away from the earth and moon. Ascend high for a geostationary orbit, or build horizontal velocity for a lower orbit.

Vacuum and compressed gasses are introduced, as well as the oxygen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen component parts of air. Maintain life support and avoid over pressure or under pressure, hypoxia and hypercapnia. Equalize pressure before opening doors or risk being sucked through.



New Components

Propel through space with the new liquid fuel engines, fueled by compressed oxygen and hydrogen which can be manufactured using electrolysis. RCS thrusters and gyroscopic actuators can be used for fine control. New navigation components help orientate and position you where there is no GPS coverage. Build spacewalk kit with the new seats.

New Equipment

Operate in vacuum with the new space suits. Limited air supply can be recharged in some seats.

Limitations

Our take on space simulation has some limitations, mostly because the game engine wasn't originally designed for space. For example, while in a seat, you have 6 degrees of freedom as usual, outside of a seat, the player always orientates consistently with the same up direction (no 6-DOF first person controller).

Taking the flat planar world of Stormworks and getting this to work as a spherical body planetary simulation has required a lot of thought. The surface of the earth and moon will tile / wrap around. Our solution remaps 3d space along gravitational field lines, and mostly makes sense in quantum space but is not a true euclidean simulation and has some limitations such as not being able to travel around the back of the moon.



Major Update

As usual, this DLC is accompanied by significant updates to the base game, in order to help with compatibility, and incorporate some of the new systems to the base game where is make sense to do so (such as compressed gasses, world tiling, etc). New components will also be cosmetically available in the base game, with limited functionality to help keep the workshop unified and compatible.

We look forward to your thoughts and feedback on this new update!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week we are releasing an update focused on quality improvements. This is a smaller minor update with several fixes, addressing minor issues reported by players.



See the patch notes below for full details. You will see the support ticket numbers next to each card, which corresponds to tickets raised by players on the official issue tracker.

Please do join us next week for the big announcement and dev live stream! We will be showing the next DLC and major update, and will be answering your questions live!



We look forward to your feedback in this update :-)

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.8.7

Rework - #19596 Updated default gantries and storage to be filter-less and instead delete incorrect fluids
Fix - #19846 Train wheel functionality when mixing flipped and rotated wheels
Fix - #19636 Reset explosion and fire buildup after repairing an engine, battery or furnace
Fix - #19748 Sawyer island terrain issues at bridge entry/exits
Fix - #19541 Emote menu background not filling wide aspect ratios
Fix - #19747 Missing rock face at airstrip base
Fix - #19606 Clear interactions when opening chat menu
Fix - #19623 Beret mesh issues
Fix - #19602 Mesh gap at Taijin dock
Fix - #1976 Removed extra cone on jet engine blade mesh

Dear Stormworkers,

On Friday 25th August at 4PM BST / 8AM PDT, we will be running a developer live stream, and debuting the announcement trailer for the new DLC!

Countdown Timer

The content of this new DLC has been a closely guarded secret, but all will be revealed in this developer live stream! We will start by showing the trailer, then some gameplay, and will be answering questions live from the chat.



This is just the announcement, and not a release. We will be discussing the DLC and will also share the release date at this event.

This new content has been years in development and we are very excited to share what we have been working on. Let us know what you think it could be in the comments :-)



Please subscribe to this event and join us in 2 weeks!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is update week, and we have a bunch of fixes and improvements in this release!

The headline item is a new feature for Industrial Frontier DLC owners! In the third and final addition of new animals, we bring the gila monster and the tortoise as new animals that roam the arid desert.

These sweet and gentle beasts are non aggressive reptiles that live on the Meier Isles. They are shy wild animals, and will move away if you disturb them. In real life, the gila is venomous and tortoises can bite, and both carry diseases, so don't mess with them in the wild, but in Stormworks, they are chill.

Fixes and improvements include a bunch of useful stuff. We have fixed an issue with aerodynamics where we found a tiny typo that slightly changed how aero forces were applied to vehicles. This small offset probably won't be noticable except for very small vehicles with large aerodynamic forces such as missiles.



Other fixes include improvements to the rockets when fired while moving, a performance fix related to missions spawning in the wrong place, and others. Please see the patch notes below for details.

This is the last creature update we have planned, and we have no further plans to add new animals to the game at the moment.

In other news, we are on the final push for the new DLC and have started work on a trailer. We hope to launch this as an announcement trailer when we announce this new DLC, and we may do a developer questions and answers session at the same time. We will set up a Steam event for this when we are ready!



As always, we are also working on additional minor updates, and major updates.

We look forward to your feedback on this new update!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.8.6

Feature - Gila Monster and Tortoises
Fix - #17064 Aerodynamics surface processing issues causing unexpected behavior especially with small vehicles (missiles pitching up)
Fix - #17520 Rocket launcher weapon now respects relative velocity when fired from a vehicle
Fix - #17771 Fixed modular engine audio position and balance the effect radius
Fix - #18543 Centred oil rig base workbench
Fix - #18946 Fixed ocean_milani_explorer mission spawning inside physics (causing heavy lag in a specific area of the world)
Fix - #19418 Structure workbenches ignoring fuel requirements when infinite_fuel is disabled
Fix - #19534 Fixed LUA editor copy+paste for Mac
Fix - #19643 Player names not cleared from the server list if kicked during server join

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with last week being an update, and next week also bringing an update.

This week we discuss a new upgrade that we are planning to the vehicle management engine within Stormworks.

Currently in Stormworks, a single vehicle contains all the physical bodies related to that vehicle. This can include the main vehicle body, as well as any hinged parts such as custom doors or cranes, and any detached parts such as droppable bombs or lifeboats. Because these objects are all managed per-vehicle, this means that these parts load in and out together, even if they have become very spread out. They can become spread out if a part is dropped, or a solid rocket booster is fired off, or a lifeboat leaves its parent ship.

The issue with a vehicle being spread over a large area is that it is hard for the vehicle management engine to decide when that vehicle should be unloaded. This makes it difficult for the game to unload distant islands that the vehicle may be resting on, or unload these distant objects which can improve performance. With the explosions introduced in the Weapons DLC, a vehicle entirely encapsulated within an explosion can be completely destroyed and despawned. Sometimes you can see a missile hit a target before exploding then bouncing off the target or becoming stuck in it. These missiles should really be completely destroyed, but because they are considered a part of a larger vehicle, they are not.



So this is something we are reworking, deep within the game engine. We plan to split vehicles into sub-vehicles, and these sub-vehicles will be managed independently of each other. This will mean that each sub-vehicle will occupy only a small amount of space, which gives a huge advantage when managing them. Missiles and bombs will be destroyed when they hit their target. Distant vehicle parts will unload (unless they have a "keep alive block") which will help performance in some situations. This change will also be very useful for a future major update that we are working on.

The player experience should otherwise not be changed, and returning a vehicle to the edit grid will return the complete vehicle rather than just part of it.

While this is fundamentally a simple change to understand, vehicles connect to almost every system within the game so this change requires us to carefully and methodically upgrade lots of code in lots of places, and has been time consuming.



This upgrade should release later this year.

We look forward to your thoughts and feedback! We will return next week with a new minor update.

Much love
The Stormworks Developers