Stormworks: Build and Rescue News

Dear Stormworkers,

It is announcement week! Next week is minor update update week, and next week we will be releasing the recently announced physics sensor, as well as other fixes and improvements.

A new major update is on the way! We were hoping to announce this week, but as always, we are very cautious to announce anything until it is ready, and there are some more improvements that we want to get finished.



Our Update Announcement Strategy

Big updates are exciting, and when you are working new features, it is very easy for developers to get carried away with enthusiasm. We are no exception, and it is thrilling to see things come together and think about the new possibilities that this new work unlocks! We would love to share every step with players, but this can result in an overall negative player experience, as players would see the many ideas that don't work out, get cancelled, or de-prioritized. We are also big believers in doing rather than talking, and the focus has always been about the product and real value, rather than words or promises.

So, our strategy is to get new features to a stage where we are happy, then share the news to players with the confidence that we can deliver.



Studio Plans and Development Strategy

Stormworks released on Early Access on 28th Feb 2018, almost 5 years ago! And we had the invite-only beta 6 months prior. For years we released updates every week, and now every 2 weeks. There have been dozen of major updates and even two DLCs. Players have amassed over 6000 years of playtime.

We are very fortunate that Stormworks is a popular game, and making updates for players and seeing their reactions is very rewarding. This is something that must continue and we want to do our best to serve our players as best we can.

The challenge we are increasingly facing is that after 2 years of pre-release development and 5 years of servicing, the code becomes more and more fatigued. The Stormworks source code excluding third party libraries and comments is over 15 million characters. On top of this, we have made all the easy updates, and a lot of the not-so-easy ones. Stuff that should be easy turns out to be very complex to integrate with those 15m characters of existing source code. What is left tends to be difficult to deliver.

Our current strategy is to just get on with it and do the jobs, no matter how difficult. Obviously, this is a short term strategy and in the long term, there are better ways to serve our players.

So, our long term strategy is a new game and we have some very ambitious plans. Moving forward is important, so the new game won't be Stormworks 2, but it will be design and vehicle building game, taking lessons from Stormworks and from what our players have told us. We are discussing a lot about player authorship, modding, gameplay and purpose, and a lot of things never done before in a game.

Stormworks updates will continue, and we will work on our new game in parallel.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback! Catch you next week for the minor update.

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is update week and we have added 24 new occupation themed outfit items for your characters!

These new outfits can be accessed and tried out via the wardrobe in game. These new outfits are based on workplace attire and include clothing from surgeon and nurse uniforms to park rangers and fishermen.



This update also includes several important fixes and improvements. Please see the patch notes below for full details.

We have a big announcement to make next week about a new update so please be sure to come back for that!



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

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.6.13

Feature - 24 New Occupation Themed Outfit Items

Rework - Steam Train Wheels balance and fixes (#16227 #14723 #14697 #16960)
Rework - Updated and improved the default cargo containers (#9615 #10724)
Rework - #7841 Updated the Helicopter preset vehicle and added a Default Container preset
Fix - #5126 #4135 Fixed various hangar door sounds, indoor zones and airstrip lights
Fix - #12983 Police station door and other physics fixed
Fix - #15564 Fixed thin tile physics issue
Fix - #16221 Prevented memory leak caused by LODS when there are no tile sin LOD range
Fix - #14595 Rope length output node now updates dynamically
Fix - #15169 Sync resource storage data on game join
Fix - #16146 SpawnVehicleRope using the wrong data for loaded vehicles
Fix - #16288 Respawn issues when respawning under delayed damage
Fix - #16404 Ski mirroring issues
Fix - #16184 Coal hopper network events for sub-bodies

Added new sound effects for the Wildcat and [REDACTED]

Addon Lua:
- #16090 setVehiclePosSafe behavior reworked to avoid unreliable internal data
- #3854 Added setAudioMood which allows setting the audio mood to a higher level for a peer which naturally decreases over time
Added setAudioMood calls to the default missions script
- #15918 Add support for map label type 0 to prevent crash

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with minor updates happening last week and next week!

This week, we discuss the Stormworks community, as well as provide a short overview for newer players.

Stormworks now has over 500,000 players. As a designing and building game, many of our players have passion and enthusiasm for making things, or have interest in mechanical sciences, and a fascination for how things work. Our players can be any age, but even our younger players are often mature and thoughtful. The community is so often a bright, positive, and engaged place, and we pay tribute to all the kind and talented players who make it what it is.

As a developer, it is hugely rewarding to have a role in a positive, intelligent community, and see players teaching and learning, creating and thinking. We find the creation aspect of making software to be rewarding, but to see this community grow from just a piece of software means so much more, so thank you to all players.

If you are driven to create, or otherwise interested in simulation games and vehicle operation, we recommend checking out the community and sharing your experiences with others.



Official Discord Server: https://discord.gg/stormworks

The official discord server is a great place to share what you are working on, check out other people's creations, and chat and learn from the other 50k players on the server. There is the vehicle showcase, which is an image only channel where people post images of their creations, and is awesome to browse and source ideas and inspiration. There is also a dedicated channel for discussing lua in Stormworks, as well as add ons. There is even a fan-art channel (although this is mostly Stormworks memes!).



Official Issue Tracker: https://geometa.co.uk/support/stormworks

The official issue tracker is where players can report bugs and request features for Stormworks. This is the best way to reach out to the developers. We review all requests and have frequent meetings where we discuss new and old issues. Players can only log in to the official issue tracker through the game menu but can browse with the link above. With over half-a-million players, the issue tracker has been essential to managing the volume of communication and requests, and lets us order and organize. It's actually version 2 and there is an old issue tracker which we replaced to improve player experience and our own efficiency.



Steam Community: https://steamcommunity.com/app/573090

The Steam community has some great content, and you can browse players screenshots, videos, guides, and more, as well as see the news (where this announcement gets posted!). These posts are weekly, and are the place for official announcements!



Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/app/573090/workshop/

The workshop is just incredible and brings the entire dev team so much joy. The creations that players have made are breath taking and you can add them to your game with just a single click. Many items have taken players hundreds of hours to create, and the top items can have over 50k subscriptions! Thank you to all the players who have shared their creativity here.



Unofficial Communities

There are also loads of unofficial communities, including other Discord servers, sub reddits, Youtubers and their subscribers, and more. The above is only the tip of the iceberg.

If you want to get involved, please treat others with respect and be positive!

Next week we will be bringing you new outfits and other improvements in the minor update! And we are still working on other updates including the next minor update which we will share info on soon!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers

Dear Stormworkers,

This weeks minor update is focused on fixes and improvements. While there is no headline feature, the update does contain a variety of reworks, rethinks, improvements, and fixes. All these changes are in response to player feedback on the official issue tracker so many thanks to all those players who have been in touch!

We have reworked the benchmarks to be a single benchmark application that uses the same vehicles used in the Weapons DLC AI conquest mode.



We have also added a new vehicle spawning warning for vehicles that contain a lot of data. There are internal limits on max data payload of a vehicle. These limits are very rarely hit but the warning is useful if they are hit. These limits relate to the data size of an internal format rather than the xml save file format that players would be more familiar with.

As well as these, there are many other changes. Please see the full list below for details.

We have many updates planned, in development, and in testing, that contain new features and are due for release in the coming weeks and months. We will continue working hard to get these updates ready!



We look forward to your thoughts and feedback on these new changes!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers



Patch Notes

v1.6.12

Todays update features various bugfixes and quality improvements.

Misc - #3755 Display a warning when spawning vehicles with large file sizes
Fix - #14986 Replaced old benchmarks with a single new benchmark with updated AI vehicles
Fix - #14293 Missile laser sensor erroneously culling data points
Fix - #14597 Search filtering including filepath as vehicle name
Fix - #14677 #14784 #14751 Improved editor arrows for steam train pistons to indicate orientation
Fix - #15079 Audio playback rates for some sound effects differing from preview
Fix - #15769 Render eyebrows in armor outfits
Fix - #15827 Editor symmetry erase highlighting
Fix - #15817 Addon editor issues with cyrillic/unicode filepaths
Fix - #14678 Removed bottom voxels from train wheels and pistons to reduce collision issues
Fix - #8603 Fix Magall light not updating for multiplayer clients
Fix - #15828 Remove parented addon zones when their parent despawns
Fix - #15863 Restock tooltips now show the correct item name
Fix - #16013 Update Spycakes hangar resource storage placement
Fix - #16062 Fix localization generation for files with missing xml nodes
Fix - #16075 #16983 Fix mesh and physics issues at North Harbor
Fix - #16127 Vehicle selection grid lists no longer reset scroll on open
Fix - #16178 Fix creatures being spawnable without the DLC (and crashing)
Fix - #16186 Fluid nozzle description update
Fix - #16258 Fix physics mesh at Donkk Ruins
Fix - Fix addons not rebuilding internal locations correctly on reload, fixed these cases in default missions and weapons dlc scripts

Dear Stormworkers,

This week is announcement week, with minor updates releasing every two weeks (next one is next week!).

This is a short post, discussing the upcoming updates.

As usual, we are planning minor updates every 2 weeks, with a few major updates per year. Upcoming minor updates include bug fix focused updates, new occupational outfits, new compact physics sensors, cross-script communication support, and more.



We are also hard at work on some of the upcoming major updates, one of which we hope to announce soon.

We are also reviewing many of the older feature requests submitted on the issue tracker as we plan more updates for the year!



We will return next week with the next minor update and look forward to sharing more minor and major update details soon!

Much love
The Stormworks Developers