ΔV: Rings of Saturn News

[h3]Kessler syndrome accelerating[/h3]
A runaway Kessler syndrome triggered by a rogue asteroid impact earlier this year is accelerating. While cascading collisions produce more fine-grained ring particles each day, covering the upper and lower areas around the A-ring, scientists believe that proximity of the ring plane will eventually cause the cascade to slow down and diminish - but provide no estimation on when that will happen. Crews excavating in affected areas are urged to exercise caution.


[h3]Labor law expanded[/h3]
The Mining Guild of Enceladus managed to win a class lawsuit against Enceladus Corp. Effective today, downtime during interlunar transits, as long as it is fully controlled by the autopilot, is classified as paid vacation. While this forbids employers from requiring crews to perform tasks not mandated by their job duties, some station citizens vote concerns that interlunar transits could be subtracted from mandatory vacation quotas.


[h3]Shadow dives available[/h3]
With a new navigational array being available on polar orbit around Saturn, greatly enhancing the resolution and light sensitivity of Enceladus Corp systems, the station will now allow launches of private spacecraft into the shadow-covered regions of the rings. While lack of solar lighting can prove to be a challenge for inexperienced crews, many captains are excited about lower traffic volume and prospects of higher yields.


[h3]Maintenance Logs[/h3]

• Fine-tuned in-game physics options to allow better performance of the physics engine based on real-world data supplied by players.
  
• Shifted computing majority of the ring background particle system from CPU to GPU, which improves average framerate on all systems with modern graphics cards. Older and integrated GPUs will not be affected.
  
• Improved performance of ore chunk physics simulation. Immobile chunks can now free up computing power, lowering the processing requirements for strip-mining ship builds depending on cleaning up a large area of the rings and capturing ore with nanodrone systems.
  
• Adjusted parameters of simulation throttling system. While previous values were effective at keeping the framerate consistent on tested systems, extreme builds could lock the system in a state where no new iceroids were generated. New changes ensure that even with a limited simulation range, iceroids can still appear around you.
  
• The physics throttling now adjusts the area of detailed simulation, not its radius, giving it much finer control over changes introduced in the game physics.
  
• Nakamura-Titan Mining Companions now have a slightly reduced iceroid detection range. While it makes them a bit less effective at mining, it reduces the CPU load of their onboard AI by over 400%, which allows ship builds sporting multiple companions to work with much better performance.
  
• When many in-game days pass in an instant - during interlunar transit, repairs or extended vacations on the station - your crew used to gain education experience for the first day only. Now you will get the full benefit of the entire time period. For most playstyles, this will increase the rate your crew educates itself downtime by up to 500%.
  
• When your processed mineral storage becomes full, your ship will now sound a brief alert.
  
• Adjusted the physical cargo bay shape of the Pelican Prospector so the cargo baffles installed inside work as expected.
  
• You can now turn off all the dynamic lights, including the sun, with the lowest lights detail setting, which improves performance on low-end systems. For roleplaying purposes, you can assume you are diving into the shadow of Saturn.
  
• The in-game profiler overlay available with the F11 key will display a version string for easier comparison of changes introduced in different releases.
  
• The Equipment menu “Simulation” and “User Manual” tabs now have icons, making them easier to spot by novice players.
  
• Elon Interstellar Model E cargo door dampeners are not as stiff now, making the ship open and close its excavator much quicker.
  
• New cargo acquisition protocol ensures that ore deflected from an area that the ship considers a cargo bay will not be accounted as on-board cargo briefly.
  
• Adjusted the physical shape of AT-K225 to better match the displayed sprite.
  
• If you created a custom player-created ads directory but did not put any custom ads inside it, the game would crash when loading the Enceladus station.
  
• When a ship appeared on your lidar, your astrogator assigned it a tactical marker - but if it moved into a shadow for over 60 seconds, its name would disappear from the list on the Pilot tab.
  
• Adjusted the default game settings for a new game to offer better default performance and experience over a variety of systems. You can still adjust the settings to your liking.
  
• Some events were despawning much quicker than they should have, which made locating them challenging.
  
• Updated game engine version for Linux and Steam Deck to Godot Engine 3.5.1, bringing all the new performance and stability enhancements to these platforms.
  
• Updated translations.
  

• New reaction explosion visual effect, with destroyed ship parts now flying through space.
  
• Improved the performance of the explosion shader and added it to the shader cache, so the first explosion in a game won’t cause a lag spike anymore.
  
• Tactical markers of ships that exploded will now disappear immediately.
  
• Moonlets and other big entities won’t appear too close to each other anymore.
  
• The search and Rescue team will not ask you if you have seen any disabled ships if they can see a derelict ship themselves.
  
• Fixed a race condition in HUD initialization that caused tuning settings specific to a type of HUD you are using to not show up in the Tuning menu at random times
  
• Changed the visual prompt for “waiting for a keypress” when adding keybind to the Settings / Controls menu to be visible when the bloom option is disabled.
  
• When you send your crew over to salvage a derelict ship, they will refuel it when they reach their destination, not when they launch from your craft. This prevents a derelict from booting up prematurely and acting without crew direction.
  
• Derelict ships that your crew judges are too damaged to attempt salvage will be actually damaged if you tow them back with a salvage manipulator.
  
• Derelict options would not show up if there were hostile ships or drones nearby, even if you were not aware of them and they were not aware of you.
  
• Improved performance of the derelicts - they will now use far less resources than a working ship uses.
  
• The storyteller module is now more aware of the performance considerations and will attempt not to trigger two demanding events in close proximity.
  
• Improved performance of nanodrone systems.
  
• In an exclusive full-screen mode, the resolution scale slider did not work immediately and required a game restart or changing the display mode.
  
• Carbon Anomaly would not de-spawn after the first appearance, causing degraded performance and constant music shift.
  
• You can now use a custom paint job for the Vulture Prospector with custom-vulture-prospector.png file.
  
• Adjusted the physical shape of AT-K225 simulation again. The previous collider could be overzealous and accounted ore hitting the sides of your ship as cargo briefly.
  
• When discussing a location with another ship and astrogating to another location while still having comms open, the event exposed to you will now be based on the location the ship you were talking to was when you started, not the new location of your ship. This includes when you both astrogate to a new location.
  
• Adjusted in-ring astrogation trajectory abort conditions. Speeding over the required velocity will not disable the trajectory immediately anymore.
  
• Changing your active crew will update the relative skill indicators on the hiring tab immediately.
  

• Fixed the controls display in the Setting menu for keyboard controls, which showed a shift key for all controls.
  
• Your ship logs will not scroll upwards anymore when you enter the menu for a second time.