ΔV: Rings of Saturn News

In our recent community vote you - our players - decided that I should focus for a while on quality-of-life improvements - things that don't really affect the gameplay, but make using the game easier and more comfortable for players.

[h3]Multiple Save Slots[/h3]
Now you can save in 4 different slots, so you can explore different ship builds, or just have couple of people playing the game on one account.

[h3]Miscelanous Improvements[/h3]
As usual, there is a bunch of small fixes and improvements:

• There is now a save icon popping into the screen to show when the game autosaves, so you know when you can exit safely.
  
• Direction of movement of your craft is now displayed even if you are flying manual. You can adjust opacity of these hints in Tuning menu.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused you to find ore chunks with exactly same mineral content.
  
• In some cases game could crash if some other application interrupted the gameplay and popped into front.
  
• Reactor leak SFX now respect detail settings, so it's faster on low-end machines.
  
• If you install a lot of systems on a Eagle Prospector it's dashboard/HUD would inflate.
  
• Fixed an astrogation bug that caused all of your POI to be recorded counter-spinward of your current position.
  

[h3]Free Bonus[/h3]
You can get an extra save slot if you install our free DLC:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1211880/V_Rings_of_Saturn__Tales_from_the_Rings/

[h3]Meet Ganymedian Anarchy[/h3]
The biggest feature of this release is the expansion of the Ganymedian Anarchy - the pirates - storyline. You can now find their base, get to know what are they up to, negotiate or fight them at their base. If you opt for combat, be warned - the fist of free ringas is not a force to be trifled with.

[h3]Combat rebalanced[/h3]
Introduction of a huge station that you can attack required some combat re-balances. We got new reactor leaks - now the game actually traces where your bullets hit, and the leak will push the ship around, just as any exhaust would. You can also now target parts of the ships and bases - such as reactors - with your autopilot, if you prefer to fly that way.

[h3]Improvements and bugfixes[/h3]
As usual, this release adds a lot of smaller updates and bugfixes.

• I improved overall performance with some extra optimizations and told the storyteller module to be game performance aware, so it doesn't push the story forward if there is already a lot happening out there.
  
• We tuned autopilot a lot, as it was confused by some ship builds.
  
• Gimbaled thrusters got a rebalance and are now turning at the advertised speed, and will turn back to their default vector when not used.
  
• Camera on the Eagle Prospector now takes into account different dashboard and moves to compensate for it.
  
• I made sure all flames give out proper light.
  
• Fixed some rounding errors that could cause replaced part to still register as marginally broken.
  
• I re-wrote memory management from scratch. This is something you, as a player, have no way to notice directly, but it should improve both performance and stability of the game.
  

Don't you just hate when you buy a game and it goes on sale next day? I know I do, so we are giving you heads-up: If you wanted to get ΔV now, a bit of patience will get you some bucks saved!


[h3]Can't wait? I can't blame you.[/h3]
If you buy the game at full price, it will be greatly appreciated, and all the extra funding goes towards developing it even more.


[h3]Set up reminder![/h3]
So if you are hunting for the sale, just hold your horses for a while longer, press this reminder button and get a note as soon as we go live.


[h3]Remember to share![/h3]
Know someone who is thinking about getting ΔV? Be sure to tell him or her to try the demo just for a while longer. You can grab a link to this announcement just below.

[h3]A brand new rings[/h3]
When looking from telescopic distance the Rings of Saturn appear to be flat and monotonous, but they are not such up-close.

I took a good look at the map of the rings the game uses, and I found it quite bland. This release fixes that, with brand new map of the rings. You will now encounter different, distinct regions - places where there are veins of minerals and quite barren, regions of tiny ringroids and huge concentrations big rocks. There is a lot of variety now and you should find that regions are different, even when they made from the same water ice.

Gravimetric scanner will be now much more useful - at least until you learn how to distinguish the field just by observing the movement of the ringroidroids. You can also now spot and visit huge, hundred of kilometres long features of the rings and see them up close.

[h3]Soak tests to ensure stability[/h3]
Nothing breaks the game as much as unexpected crashes. Games are, ultimately, complex pieces of software and many things can go wrong on many levels. To ensure that game is stable I'm running soak tests - rigging the in-game NPC AI to players ship and let it mine on hours on hours. Current version went through over 20 hours of testing without crash, so I hope we managed to find all the problems.

[h3]More bugs fixed[/h3]
As with every release, I try to patch up every problem you come across and report. Here is a list of what's fixed in this one:

• Phage stations won't get hostile anymore if you burn them a bit with your thrusters while docking.
  
• Fixed pixel doubling setting to not require game restart.
  
• Fixed adrenaline booster to work again.
  
• Gravimetric scanner had much too many noise, making the readings unusable in some regions of the rings.
  
• Fixed a bug in maintenance drones that caused them to be affected by your mechanic jury-rigging the ship.
  
• Fixed some visual glitches.
  
• Improved collision detection and AI path-finding, so ships will not ram so readily.
  
• Key prompt for comms and accompanying chat bubble would disappear or appear at wrong moments.
  
• You found couple of conditions that caused crashes, and I patched them up.
  

This is a bugfix patch, fixing up couple of bugs you discovered in the latest release. Bugs fixed:

• NPC ship executing maneuvers at the very edge of simulation range could crash the game.
  
• Changed the way game writes logs to ensure that we always have something to work with when you report a crash.
  
• Patched up couple of memory leaks.
  
• Changed the exit-to-desktop code to make sure it closes all resources before exiting.