Redefining Plants: Moddable Plants, Berries, & Watermelons

This Issue has now been resolved.

Thank you all for the excellent response, feedback, and helping us work the issue.

We really appreciate the Stationeers community!

Due to a critical issue we've had to roll this patch back. Not everyone was experiencing this issue but enough that it justifies rolling back until we can resolve the problem. This update is still available on the Beta branch. If you have been playing on Default and have any of the new items(any of the 3 new plants or the Icarus suit) then you will need to switch to beta. The update will be available on Default branch as soon as we have a solution.

Data Defined Prefabs

Until now our pipeline for creating new prefabs, things in the game, was very Unity dependant. This process has largely stayed the same since the beginning of the project, and while it does allow us to add new things to the game quickly it does not follow the data driven mindset that we now follow.

We've taken a small subset of prefabs, plants and moved them to be defined entirely in XML. This means that to add a new plant we simply create a new custom plant in our game data XML. This data points to the relevant meshes and textures that are loaded at run time, instead of build time.

A few extra tools have been included with the game to help generate the blueprints and thumbnails required.

thing blueprint // Generates blueprint

thing thumb // Generates thumbnail from thing by reference id

We would like to roll this out to all kinds of things the game but have started with something smaller to prove the concept. Being able to define completely new devices purely from XML would be the ultimate goal but we will see how this goes before making any decisions.

New Plants

We've also added 3 new fruit plants to help test the new system. When consumed these new plants will have a positive effect on your mood, but they are not currently used in any recipes, they will be later when we do a food update.

The new plants are Strawberry, Blueberry, and Watermelon.

Your support makes these updates possible

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2624/Stationeers_Complete_the_Set/

Change Log v0.2.5314.23994

• First pass on moving plant life requirements to xml.

• Added Scripts and models for future content.

• Fixed Multigrid structures not registering to every cell they block.

• Fixed Global Atmosphere mix calculation issue in previous commit (rev.23875)

• Added Prototype Global Liquid Renderer. Very large quantities of Liquids in the global atmosphere will now be rendered via a liquid plane.

• Added strawberry xml plant example.

• Added first pass on importing plants from xml. Meshes, textures and plant stages can be defined in xml and will be imported at runtime. Blueprints can also be created but for now, the wireframe edges will have to be manually entered into the xml. Later on we plan to make this automatic or add a tool to export edges for custom meshes.

• Fixed nullref on dedicated server when instantiating prefabs from source list.

• Added Missing scene update from last commit

• Fixed normals on strawberry meshes.

• Added thumbnails for strawberry plant and seedbag.

• Made custom plants fail to register if their name is already taken to stop potential name conflicts with existing things.

• Changed Global Liquid visualiser now uses the same system as in-world liquid. Global liquid will now not be drawn inside rooms.

• Removed 1st global liquid prototype from scene.

• Missing class name changes