Improvements to Saves, Performance, Venus, and Other Bug Fixes

Update v0.15.1.2 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a feature update to our "Across the System" milestone, which includes a mix of performance improvements, Venus fixes, and other bug fixes.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

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• Save files with an overly large OKLG_SEC.json (>15MB) should decrease in size significantly after a save/load with this patch.

• OKLG_SEC should no longer spawn a limbless pirate in the prison cell.

• Save sizes should generally be a bit smaller overall, as the game progresses.

• Ores (and other items) should once again be placeable on cargo webs.

• Restoring and extinguishing fires should now increase faction standings, instead of decreasing them.

• It should no longer be possible to ask every item in the universe about Benjamin Choong.

• Jettisoning a corpse will no longer delete whatever object the player is dragging now.

• 📢Accessing inventory of nearby objects is now near-instant.

• 📢A new unarmed Babak variant will now spawn in the boneyard and ship brokers at OKLG, BCRS, and BCER.

• Babak Refit and Royal Flush ships should no longer spawn with non-uninstallable racks.

• NPCs waking up from hibernation and entering the map will no longer slam performance with log spam.

• NewCal construction Robots should no longer have human faces.

• NewCal construction Robots should no longer spawn without law enforcement training and get attacked by other robots.

• 📢LEOs and robots chasing the player across map levels should now stop if they lose sight after transit.

• Venusian aerostats should once again have gravity.

• The PDA Notes app should no longer crash if it has too many notes.

• Every NPC in the universe will no longer contribute their notes to the player's PDA Notes app.

• 📢The default star system and starting station for new games is now defined by TXTDefaultStarSystem in loot.json.

• Performance should be improved when the game is attempting to load a special event and cannot.

• White wall lights and custom white wall lights should have correct relative brightnesses now.

• The game's log should now have fewer spam entries about missing Rex Korin.

• Loading screen will now show more information during LOADING SHIPS phase.

• Save game will now record which version it was started in vs. last saved in independently.

• Games saved in 0.15.1.1 that caused little present icons to appear everywhere should no longer see them.

• There should generally be fewer error messages when loading saves now.

• Message log should have better subject-verb-pronoun agreement in some more edge cases.

One of the more insidious bugs fixed in this patch involves OKLG_SEC. A prisoner there would spawn without any limbs or containers, and this caused items spawned on them (which would sometimes accumulate due to collisions with the station) to bloat save files. Some OKLG_SEC.json files were 200MB!

This save fixes the prisoner, as well as the redundant way it stored items that caused bloat. Saving and then loading any affected games should see significant drops in save file size. (Plus, more generally, save files should be slightly smaller now.)

We also made several changes which reduced the amount of log spam the game generated, which should also help improve performance and reduce crashing. In one case, a log file crashed the game when it hit 2 million repeated entries due to a "thawing" NPC that walked onto the map.

And speaking of spam, the player's PDA Notes app will no longer be the playground of bored NPCs across the universe.

Some players noted that restoring items and extinguishing fires on stations caused faction drops, instead of increases. This turned out to be a sign error in the data, (and not disgruntled maintenance union workers, as some surmised) and has been fixed.

We noticed some players wishing that inventory was a bit snappier, especially when sorting through many containers in their possession. So we've tweaked opening inventories to be near-instantaneous when the item is in range.

Venus also had some updates and improvements.

First of all, we discovered that several robots spawned in the construction zone there had messed-up careers, portraits, and other stats. This led to issues like human faces in the MTT, robots with citizenship or illegal status, some robots without LEO training being ganked by the other robots. It was pretty chaotic!

Those issues have been fixed, plus the AI tweaked so that LEOs and robots chasing the player across maps will no longer bee-line to the player after emerging from transit. Now, if they don't have line of sight, they'll switch to searching.

Lastly, the Venus aerostats had their gravity restored, plus a little sunlight tweaking for better visuals.

A new variant of the Babak ship will now spawn in some places, jettisoning corpses should no longer delete dragged items too, ores and other items should once again fit in cargo nets. Plus, modders can now specify which star system and starting station New Game defaults to via the TXTDefaultStarSystem in loot.json.

It's a pretty juicy patch!

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC