Duties UI and Gravity Fixes

Hey Folks!

Update v1.0.1.5 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix patch to 1.0, which fixes issues with the crew Duties UI and stuck gravity, as well as some ship design fixes.

Saves from v1.0.0.0 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!

• Uninstall/Scrap/Repair/Dismantle PDA orders should now be prioritized by their correct categories in the Duties UI.

• The game will attempt to fix incorrect Uninstall/Scrap/Repair/Dismantle PDA order categories when loading old saves.

• Gravity effects of nearby planets will no longer get stuck on the ship's physics when exiting autopilot near a planet.

• Babak ships will no longer spawn with large piles of loose items under bins.

• Several other ships with the 'Starter Battery' have had it replaced with normal batteries.

One of the bigger changes in this patch, and one which captains of larger crews will probably welcome, involves the Duties UI.

For those who haven't used it, the Duties UI is accessible by clicking the right side of the Roster UI, and lets you set which priorities each crew should have by task type. Lower numbers/brighter green means higher priority, and in case of ties, priority goes to left cells before right ones.

As it turns out, somewhere along the line, several of these categories got merged behind the scenes, causing all Uninstall, Scrap, Repair, and Dismantle type orders to be considered Construct type. This meant that crew would do all of those things at whatever priority Construct had for that crew.

This patch separates those Duty types once again, so crew can have differentiated roles. The patch will also attempt to recategorize old tasks when loading saves, so they also get filed under correct categories.

Another subtle-yet-important bugfix involved ships and gravity. One of our players, GDorn, noticed that using course plot and engage would leave a permanent acceleration on their ship after the autopilot ends. 

In most cases, this can be hard to notice, since this effect is proportional and opposite to the gravity at the journey's endpoint (usually in microgravity). But if the trip ends in a strong gravity field, weird things can happen!

GDorn was able to provide a great detailed report of how to reproduce the issue, and even where the expected issue was in the code. And sure enough, when we checked it out, there were competing functions both trying to edit the gravity, leaving a double effect baked-into the ship (which persisted across saves).

This patch fixes the bug that creates this permanent gravity effect. And if your save has a ship impacted by it, you should be able to clear the gravity effect by docking and undocking from a station.

The rest of the fixes are more minor issues to several of the ship designs in-game. In particular, lots of stray loose items baked-into the Babak line of ships, and several ships using the wrong (underpowered) battery type.

We've still got fixes and other changes in the works, and we'll get those into a testing branch once they're a bit more stable.

As always, thank you for playing, and for your help in making Ostranauts more fun for all!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC