Lurking In The Shadows

Happy Halloween! We're celebrating by releasing loads of optimizations and multiplayer stabilizations, along with a few dark secrets.

Fantastic Frights

Be careful what you find creeping in the darkness. It might be a lost crew member's residual energy, or it might be something far worse. Also, Arachnoid and Gnat are back in action.

LOD System

We've been exploring how we can make room for more creatures, vehicles, and base items in the world and have created a powerful and robust level of detail system. Completely custom coded, lightweight and powerful, this system intelligently handles processing of all objects in any given scenario to ensure proper persistence, functionality, and item data sync. We have been testing this in the Experimental Branch and have graduated it here to Main.

Multiplayer Stabilization

Chasing down desyncing in multiplayer has been a huge focus all month, and after a couple of rounds of identifying edge cases we've applied more fixes and graduated these updates to the main branch.

Change List

Added - Lurking in the Shadows Event Additions
Added - Makeshift Marker to utilities and dungeon early game crafting options
Added - New experimental chunked LOD system, currently implemented on only a few objects, but eventually should assist with performance on larger or more populated maps if testing continues well

Changed - Localization will now automatically default to your local system's default language
NOTE: Saved localization language setting has been reset to local system's default language with this update
Changed - Partially reworked multiplayer Savegame handling to increase reliability during network/performance instabilities, more changes coming to further increase stability and reliability
Changed - Reworked multiplayer persistent object spawning to increase reliability
Changed - Space Station travel route calculation is now much faster (Reworked and greatly optimized connected structure collector code)
Changed - Reworked Spaceship Crash handler

Fixed - Rocks and plants should no longer be invisible after a trip into the mines
Fixed - Reduced severity of common framerate hitches when navigating around a large space station
Fixed - Azalea bush should remain visually harvested at a distance
Fixed - Persistent objects that were previously dismantled should no longer reappear after reloading
Fixed - More instances where spaceships were getting duplicated after travel between planets
Fixed - Conduit Bender now properly works in third person
Fixed - Multiplayer disconnects should be much less frequent
Fixed - Performance impact of droids and creatures should be greatly reduced
Fixed - Various instances of Spaceships getting lost after the game is force closed
Fixed - Spaceships that are respawned after a crash or force close should now properly spawn with the player inside and be fully visible
Fixed - Persistent buildables duplication should be much less prevalent in multiplayer due to reworked multiplayer saving, even during network/performance instability
Fixed - Droids that are lost under the world will be teleported back to the surface after a short time
Fixed - Vehicles that are lost under the world will be teleported back to the surface after a short time
Fixed - Various issues with connected structure collection code that caused the route calculation on the Space Station to take far too long

NOTE: Work In Progress (WIP) - Not yet visible systems, still requires setup on all moons and planets for these changes to be visible in gameplay.

Current creature spawn system is operational and unchanged, will be disabled once new system is operational.

(WIP) Added - New approach to handling creature spawns to avoid distracting creature pop-in, leveraging new LOD system to maintain performance at scale
(WIP) Added - New Creature Conductor that manages creatures daily schedules, efficiently updating them when they are distant from the player
(WIP) Added - Persistent creature system, creatures will only visually despawn when out of range, and will be saved and loaded with the world, and will be respawned over time
(WIP) Added - Support for dynamic creature patrol routes
(WIP) Added - Support for different AI States in creature AI logic to differentiate behaviou’s among various species