05.05.2026 Devlog - Cameras work! and other things

A v0.1.329 hotfix shipped earlier today, and almost immediately the

new build started reporting CAMERAS broken on Steam — every bay

flipping to STATE: OFFLINE / "Feed unavailable. Camera node not

responding." I want to write up what was wrong because the cause

was a stupid one and the diagnosis took longer than the fix.

What was broken

When you opened CAMERAS on the Steam build, all four bays — Bridge,

Cryo, Engineering, Hydroponics — showed an empty black feed and the

caption strip flipped to OFFLINE. Locally (running through the Godot

editor) every bay worked fine.

The fix in v0.1.329 had patched a missing-enum bug in the bay decay

controller, so that part was real. But the OFFLINE state pointed to

something else: `ResourceLoader.exists()` returning false for every

bay path on the shipped build but true locally.

Root cause

Every export preset had this exclude pattern:

exclude_filter="assets/blender/*, ..."

That pattern was catching the four bay scenes — `bridge_cctv.glb`,

`cryo_bay.glb`, `engineering_bay.glb`, `hydroponics_bay.glb` — and

the viewscreen HDR alongside them. They never made it into the

shipped PCK. Locally Godot fell back to the source files on disk.

On Steam, the source files don't exist; the PCK is the only path,

and the PCK didn't have them.

The fix

Move the four bay scenes and the HDR into a separate folder

(`assets/cameras/`) that the exclude pattern doesn't touch. Update

five path constants in `CamerasPanel.gd`. Done.

I also did a quiet repo cleanup at the same time — Blender source

files (.blend / .obj / .fbx, ~1.2 GB worth) and unused .glb props

moved out to `~/Documents/dead-reckoning-source-art/`. The shipped

download grew about 500 MB (the four bays plus their textures had

genuinely never shipped before), but the repo itself shrunk a lot.

Decay tiers — what they look like at PWR 10

The new bay decay system kicks in once reactor power drops below

specific thresholds. At PWR 10 every bay is on emergency strips:

• **Bridge** — main ceiling cut, viewscreen flickering, only the

forward console rim and a couple of red emergency strips are lit.

• **Cryo** — pod aisles dark, two of the strip rows show the

intermittent brownout pulse, magenta pod lights muted to a low

cycle.

• **Engineering** — reactor down to a slow dying pulse, turbines

no longer running, blue console glow gone, only the corridor

emergency strips are alive.

• **Hydroponics** — grow lamps off, pumps stopped, the magenta wash

that normally runs the whole bay is replaced by red strip lights.

Achievements

Honest answer: I haven't been able to verify these are working on

Steam yet. The libraries ship correctly, the GodotSteam GDExtension

loads, and a diagnostic report writes to

`user://achievement_diagnostic.txt` on every successful Steam boot.

If you've installed v0.1.330 and an achievement you should have

unlocked didn't fire, that file pinpoints whether the issue is

library load, init, or a code/dashboard name mismatch. Drop it in

Discord and I'll dig in.

What's next

• Verify achievements path-to-path with the diagnostic.

• Bay decay tooltip when you hover an offline bay (right now you

• just see "OFFLINE", which doesn't tell you *why*).

• More icons for the achievements that are still placeholder.

— Garan Lorn