Beta Branch Patch 2.4.3 now live! - Patch Notes

[Hans]

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'Beta Branch - Newest Changes & Experimental Features'.

UI

• Improved consistency of subsystem tooltip descriptions

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where client and server disagreed about docking state
  • This should resolve cases where the ship was shown as docked but various menus sent errors about not being docked
• Implemented a workaround for an AMD GPU driver issue
• Fixed an issue where ancient gates could be connected to world boss sectors
• Fixed an issue where it was possible to give orders meant for ships to stations
• Fixed a crash when a station was ordered to support a ship and the ship left the sector
• Fixed an issue where boss health bars were visible in build mode
• Fixed a crash related to destroyed entities in scrapyard sectors
• Fixed an issue where a tooltip obstructed the confirmation dialog when removing a subsystem with shift-click

AMD situation
Some users reported crashes with AMD cards when creating or loading a galaxy using AMD driver version 23.12.1 or 24.1.1. We have implemented a workaround that hopefully addresses this issue. If you had this issue, please report in the comments if this patch fixes the issue for you (on driver 24.1.1). If the problem still exists we recommend a downgrade to driver 23.11.1.

Details
Some background on the status of this issue, by one of our devs:

"This problem is particularly difficult to debug. Originally none of our office PCs with AMD cards were affected. However, we managed to build a PC where we can reproduce the issue, but even with this PC, the crash doesn't happen reliably.

On a technical level, the crash happens in a thread run by the AMD driver in the Avorion process. This should not be possible unless there is a bug in the driver. For those who don't know: a driver *must not crash*. We have verified multiple times that our code is correct and doesn't raise any errors. We've contacted AMD multiple times over different channels but have not received a helpful answer, yet.

Warning, technical: To analyze the cause, we tried to disable various parts of the engine. When the crash disappeared we always had to test many times, as it wasn't 100% reliable. No crashes a few times in a row can just be plain (bad?) luck and lead down the wrong path. We finally found different, independent functions we could disable, that individually stopped the crash. None of them look like they made sense as a cause for a crash. Just leaving them disabled was no option either, we had to find a solution without impacting the content of the game. We settled on restructuring a small part of preparatory texture work so we give the driver less work while loading the game, and forced the driver to complete some of its work on our schedule instead of its own."

We're very sorry for the inconvenience. We hope that the workaround we've screwed into our engine fixes the issue for you fine AMD folks, and we hope we can remove it once the driver crash was fixed by AMD.