The Power Line Update

This update focuses on power infrastructure management. A new Cable Gun for laying long runs of cables, accompanied by an Electrical Belt that feeds it cables, and Power Pylons for spanning between bases and outposts. It also comes with some major changes to multiplayer traffic management that should help with multiplayer on large bases, especially those with high latency.

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Power Pylons

Power Pylons can be used to run power and data long distances. While not technically a cable the pylons will bridge two cable networks together to become a single network.

Build them from the Power Pylon Kit and link them with Super Heavy Cable, up to 40m a span. A Power Pylon Terminus at each end ties the line into your base's cable network. Wire cutters disconnect a link and return the cable to you.

Cable Gun

The Cable Gun is used to quickly lay long straight sections of cables. It comes with the restriction of not being able to merge cables or place around corners.

Click to start a run and click again to finish. The tooltip shows the length and what it will cost, and it uses the long cable variants wherever it can. It works with all three cable coils.

It can be used in conjunction with the new Electrical Belt, pulling more cables from the belt when it runs out.

Electrical Belt

The electrical belt comes with a few new features. It has 6 cable slots for when you are doing lots of cabling work, and when you deconstruct cables, if your hands are full, the deconstructed cable will go directly into the belt if there's space. As mentioned before, it can also be used with the Cable Gun, reloading it mid-run when its coil empties.

Both the belt and the gun are printable in the Tool Manufactory.

Heavy Cable Long Variants

Heavy cables had been excluded from having the long variants because they were actually a very complicated model, but they've now been simplified and long variants of three, five and ten added.

Material & Tool Replacements

Expensive materials can now be used where cheaper ones are required, so you don't need to carry both. Steel Sheets work in place of Iron Sheets, Heavy Cable Coil in place of Cable Coil, and the insulated pipe kits in place of the regular ones. Deconstruction always returns the item the recipe originally called for.

Multiplayer

All multiplayer traffic previously shared a single reliable, ordered channel. The whole world delta had to arrive in full and in order every tick, so one late packet stalled everything behind it while the server queued ever-staler data it was still obliged to deliver. This is what produced the thirty-second-action death spiral on large saves.

Physics now travels on its own stream where newer data simply replaces older, resting bodies drop back to a heartbeat, and pipe, chute and cable network values are only sent when they change. On a 50,000 object save this took client bandwidth from around 650KB/s to under 100KB/s, and it tolerates packet loss far better.

Quality of Life

• Empty slots that only accept a specific item now show that item's thumbnail.

• The Rocket Uplink (Compact) is taller at the base, so it can be used with floor pieces.

• Zrilian's starting air canister is now named Methane Canister, since Methane is separate from Volatiles.

Notable Fixes

• Fixed elevator placement being incorrectly blocked by shafts above or below, and rounding errors stopping levels registering with the elevator network.

Upcoming Changes

Crewed rockets and the new orbital play space they go with are still in progress and haven't made it into this update. They remain available on beta if you want to try them early.

Change Log 0.2.6420.27780

• GetCommandDescription() returns proper text for IC10 opcodes bapal and acos

• Fixed incorrect doc text for IC10 opcode bnaal

• Fix small localization issue in CableGun

• Fixed pylon cables being able to go through terrain and structures

• Added new behaviour to the electrical belt so that when deconstructing cables they will automatically go into the belt instead of onto the floor, if your hands are full

• Added a gif creator to the thumbnail tool for generating gifs for the blog post. Run command 'thumbnail'

• Added CableToolBelt blueprint and thumbnails

• Fixed mixed-up scene references in WorldManager.

• Slot display now shows the restricted item's thumbnail for empty restricted slots

• Added error state on Cable Gun when no coil is available

• Added Cable Gun auto-sourcing from Electrical Belt when its own coil is empty; partial coil returned to the gun at end of run

• Added Electrical Belt: 2 tool slots and 6 slots restricted to cable coils, printable at the Tool Manufactory

• Deprecated legacy Power Pylon Input/Output prefabs (kept for save compatibility)

• Added pylonlog console command for tracing pylon network merge/rebuild decisions

• Added Power Pylon Terminus - cable networks unify across pylons so power and data flow through as one CableNetwork

• SmallGrid.FillConnected is now virtual to allow subclass override

• Made the Cable Gun visible in the Stationpedia.

• Added the Cable Gun to the MkII Tool Manufactory.

• Fix the on/off button on the mkII mining drill to not clip though the model

• fixed cable gun constantly running update

• Fixed non-standard implementations in the cable gun

• Added physical on off switch to cable gun

• Cable Gun now shows cost/length in tooltip.

• Cable Gun can now build into open space.

• Cable Gun is now click-to-finish instead of click-and-drag, and has an interaction style more similar to other tools.

• Fixed several issues with elevator placement being blocked incorrectly by shafts above or below. This should also fix a few possible issues with elevator network registration. In some orientations, rounding errors could cause levels to not register correctly. This behaviour should now be more consistent.

• Cable Gun now has a short activate delay, more robust internals.

• Add Heavy Cable 10 Length

• Add Heavy Cable 5 Length

• Add Heavy Cable 3 Length

• The rest of the Heavy Cable thumbnails

• Update all Heavy Cable wireframes

• Update ItemCableCoilHeavy

• Data trimming

• Update CableHeavy.fbx

• Trim extraneous editor data from prefabs

• Fixed a bug where certain editor tools did not cleanup their state properly

• Cable Gun can now lay all three kinds of cable, Cable gun tooltips improved.

• Removed redundant ref on InitializeSaveData for synced referenceables.

• Changed synced referencables save and load methods to be closer to how Thing works. SyncedReferencable no longer takes a generic save data type and instead will use the InitializeSaveData and cast paradigm that Thing uses. This gives us a bit more flexibility with inheritance if desired.

• Tablet Dock can't have non-tablet items dragged into it

• Slots can now define an array of specific prefab hashes they can accept

• Added a printerror for ReferencableNetwork if merged networks still have members after the merge - this should never happen but the error is just a precaution.

• Remove some debug messages

• Cable Gun creates merged-cable variants of straight segments using a greedy algorithm

• Code for last

• Compound cable segments record their unit length

• Added wip blueprint-like visualization for placing pylon cables. You can now also cancel placement by pressing right mouse or by changing hands/dropping your cables. At the moment it just draws a line for where the cable will go but could be changed to a mesh in future.

• Power pylons will now return their cables when unlinking pylons with the wirecutters. When deconstructing pylons, disconnected cables will be returned but will drop on the ground at the structure position rather than go into your hand.

• Moved logic to create or stack items in hand when deconstructing into a static helper OnServer.CreateOrStack().

• Added new SyncedReferencable concept. This is a non-thing, non-gameobject object which will be synced over the network and saved using the same paradigm as Thing. There are several non-thing classes in the code which need to be synced and currently they all do slightly different things and require a lot of boilerplate to set up. This new structure will allow us to set up these objects easily and enforce data structure standards such as SyncList and DensePool. Power pylon connections are one such example of this and have been moved over to use SyncedReferencable. Note: Thing types are sent over the network via PrefabHash. The SyncedReferencable equivalent is a typeid which should be generated from the class name e.g. Animator.StringToHash(nameof(PylonConnection)).

• Cable Gun has okish tooltips, respects more build conditions

• Update the Unity rider package

• Created a new ReferenceableNetwork base class which allows us to have networks made up of members that are not structures. StructureNetwork will inherit from this. Some duplicated behaviour on networks has been moved to this base class and the base will now manage add/remove/merge/split more neatly. Rebuild events have been renamed to RebuildReferencableNetworkEvent. This should result in more consistent network behaviour and also give us more options when implementing networked things such as power pylons. This is still a bit of a work in progress - now that logic has been unified we should be able to make further performance improvements.

• Added missing fan references on rocket manufactory prefab which was cauing error spam.

• toolreplacements.xml added which acts like materialreplacements.xml but for tool overrides

• materialreplacements.xml now defines how one material can replace another in a construction recipe

• Certain expensive materials can now be used as substitutes for certain inexpensive materials in construction

• Fix rare case where timing code would compound long running frames with extra delay cycles (Credit: Discord)

• Made base mesh taller for rocket uplink compact, so it can be used with floor pieces.

• Zrilian's starting air canister renamed 'Methane Canister' since Methane is is now a separate concept from Volatiles.

• Updated pylon pole mesh to work better when placing on terrain. Fixed a few inconsistencies with placement bounds and blueprints.

• Removed the syncing and saving of partner node for power pylon input and output. This was no longer needed as the 'partner' is recalculated when the pylon network changes.

• Fixed power pylon input was snapping to the large grid incorrectly.

• Fixed pylon connections would not disconnect when the power pylon structure was reverted to an incomplete build state.

• Updated hardcoded strings in pylonhelper to be gamestrings.

• Updated cost to power pylon cable placement to change with distance. Fixed a few errors when pylon structures were incomplete and when they were destroyed mid cable/connection placing.

• Updated model for power pylon kit. Added build state for power pylon. Pylon input and output still only have one build state for now.

• Added missing button meshes to 1x5 solar panel varians. Have moved these to a separate prefab with shadows turned off.

• Fans on Manufacturing machines now use the fan prefab

• Added basic spline system and mesh builder to create power lines that are rendered with graphics.drawmesh. (should be changed to drawmesh instanced soon).

• Added first pass on power pylon system. Pylons can be connected to each other using super heavy cables and disconnected with the wire cutters. The network of pylons should start at a pylon input and end at a pylon output. These will transfer power in a similar way to rocket power umbilicals. This system is still a work in progress so expect a few more changes to come through over the week.

• Fixed terrain issue where in MP the incorrect LODs would be used due to incorrect player position state updating.

• Improved debugging tooling for network debug command.

• Major refactor of network architecture. Split out a Dedicated physics stream and delta gating. Previously all multiplayer traffic shared a single reliable, ordered channel. Every tick the whole world delta had to arrive in full, in order, so one late packet on a slow connection stalled everything behind it while the server queued ever-staler data it was still obliged to deliver, producing the thirty-second-action death spiral on large saves. Physics now travels on its own sequenced stream as disposable batches where newer data simply replaces older (with wake and rest poses sent reliably so nothing drifts), unchanged bodies are suppressed to a phased heartbeat, pipe/chute/cable network values are only sent when they change, and new diagnostics (network sections, network awake, a Streams debug tab) show exactly where every byte of a tick goes. On a 50k-object save this cut the per-tick state payload from 19.5KB to 1.0KB, physics from 25.5KB to 3.6KB, and client bandwidth from ~650KB/s to under 100KB/s while becoming more tolerant of packet loss, and it clears the path for per-client rate adaptation next. This change is very experimental and will be rolled back for rework if issues arise.

• Update the Steam entry in the Stationpedia

• Fans in atmospherics machines use the new Fan prefab