Beta Branch Patch 0.16.2 Patchnotes

[koonschi]

Patch 0.16.2

 

Date: March 1st, 2018

 

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'.

 

Balancing

 

"We had a few issues with PDCs being way stronger during the early game than intended, so we changed their damage type to the same as anti-fighter cannons, leaving their specialty of destroying torpedoes and fighters intact, but reducing the damage to everything else."

• PDCs now deal fragment damage, ie. more damage to torpedoes + fighters, less damage to other things
  
  • This only affects new PDCs
    
  • Damage to torpedoes and fighters remains the same
    
  • Damage to other things is decreased to 10%
    

  [*]Persecutors no longer spawn in sectors with alliance or player ships that wouldn't trigger the spawn by themselves

  [*]Scaled down damage of used turrets in fighter factory based on their slots

Graphics

 

"Improved visuals to better display torpedoes, so you know where they come or came from and what exactly hit you."

• Added a torpedo engine tail
  
  • Tail has the same color as the warhead to show which torpedo is coming
    

UI

 

"Mostly convenience things, and we also added a way to change the ingame difficulty without you having to edit .ini files."

• Turrets no longer lose their favorite or trash marker when built onto a ship
  
• Added a combo box for the ingame game menu to change difficulty
  
  • Only in singleplayer or when you have the correct permissions on the server
    

  [*]Added borders to dropdown menus of UIComboBox

  [*]Added a pause key

Misc

• Added more debug info on exception in workpool thread
  

Server

• Added a /difficulty command to change the difficulty of the server
  

Bugfixes

 

"As always, user bug reports are marked with [uBR]. Thanks guys for reporting and helping us make the game better! Keep it up!"

• [uBR] Fixed an issue that caused one-way gates
  
• [uBR] Fixed an issue where the order of stations in the station founder gui wasn't stable
  
• Fixed an error in german translation
  
• Fixed several client-sided crashes
  
• [uBR] Fixed an issue where wreckages in a stationwreckage sector had an active deletion timer
  
• [uBR] Fixed an issue where travelling merchants had the civil-ship icon instead of their specific trading one
  
• [uBR] Fixed an issue where bonus stats in a turret factory would change when transferring it to the alliance
  

[Ulrich_Rüstungjäger]

"Persecutors no longer spawn in sectors with alliance or player ships that wouldn't trigger the spawn by themselves"

 

Happy days

[Ravien]

Persecutors no longer spawn in sectors with alliance or player ships that wouldn't trigger the spawn by themselves

 

Thank you! This is a great change.

[Shirurthane]

and i just build 20 pdc :D damn

[NoSvOrAx]

and i just build 20 pdc :D damn

 

This only affects new PDCs

[Shirurthane]

i know i want the new ones :D older is just cheating for me :P

[NoSvOrAx]

Anyone know of anything in this update that would force a server wipe from the previous, other than getting rid of the OP PDC turrets?

[Kamo]

The gamebreaking "no damage from weapons" bug is still here. Additional information: now even some collisions (especially glancing at high speeds) do no damage, but with/at some rare blocks or some time intervals damage registration happened.

I killed the pirates by crashing onto them, then got to another sector, where Xsotan attacked, same problem: they began by attacking a passing hauler that didn't go in an endless trail of explosions and dropped cargo.

Also, a screenshot of me firing at those Xsotan, they aren't even noticing I'm firing as they stay neutral ???.

It feels that something is wrong between client and server, at either damage registration level or projectile management: projectiles are fired and hitting their targets on the client side, but at no effect on the server side :(.

 

Good debugging~

[koonschi]

The gamebreaking "no damage from weapons" bug is still here. Additional information: now even some collisions (especially glancing at high speeds) do no damage, but with/at some rare blocks or some time intervals damage registration happened.

I killed the pirates by crashing onto them, then got to another sector, where Xsotan attacked, same problem: they began by attacking a passing hauler that didn't go in an endless trail of explosions and dropped cargo.

Also, a screenshot of me firing at those Xsotan, they aren't even noticing I'm firing as they stay neutral ???.

 

It feels that something is wrong between client and server, at either damage registration level or projectile management: projectiles are fired and hitting their targets on the client side, but at no effect on the server side :(.

 

Good debugging~

 

This seems like your server is having trouble keeping up. Can you enable profiling in your server.ini and then type /status into your chat window? The server will print out some information into files which you could then post here, so we can find out what's going wrong.

 

Edit: Also: Server Logs!

[Ulrich_Rüstungjäger]

https://gyazo.com/429be1c4c64c208493d7951c757a7057

 

While it's not a server log, it does show what people are referring to.  I really don't think it is the server not being able to keep up, but rather something to do with the position of either the ship or the weapons themselves.  While the gif I posted doesn't show it I unloaded the entirety of both railguns onto the target until they overheated with no effect. I then moved around to the back of the target, fired and did damage.

[Meesmaalt]

Ulrich means the old bug where wrecks or ships appear to be at one place but in reality they are slightly in different position, few hundred meters to few meters away form where they appear to be.

 

That bug appears most often when going to salvaging big wrecks. You need to fire in "air" where the wreck actually is for server/client to render/pos it into correct position.

[Kamo]

I changed the profiling to true in the ini, then played a little (around a minute, prints the log), firing at my target until it was half health. Since it didn't move a lot as the authorities' ships surrounded it, more of my shots registered, like one in eight.

That server sure does a lot of saving. Joined both logs.

 

Ulrich means the old bug where wrecks or ships appear to be at one place but in reality they are slightly in different position, few hundred meters to few meters away form where they appear to be.

 

That bug appears most often when going to salvaging big wrecks. You need to fire in "air" where the wreck actually is for server/client to render/pos it into correct position.

It reminded me of when I tried salvaging a station wreck, a few months before. Fired at it, didn't do damage, so I flied by and WHAM the wreck seemed to teleport into my ship and deal it a crippling blow ! Also once happened with asteroids (of course destroying my ship).

 

P.S.: Whoops, forgot the /status. Doing it again.

...Done it again, with another target and a collsion for good measure. Sending the profiling stats and other file by message... if I can do it.

[Ulrich_Rüstungjäger]

The wreck was my only thing i hadto shoot at in that fame of time I had and there were no ships around that had the issue.

[koonschi]

I looked at your logs and it looks like your machine is simply not able to handle all the updates of all the sectors you have stations in. If this problem is gone when you're starting a new game, then that's the cause.

[Kamo]

The problem is effectively not happening in other galaxies, like my testbed which has less Out-Of-Sector-Production enabled sectors, where I got to a naonite sector and fought against torpedo-firing pirates which behaved normally under fire.

After all, my machine is right on the minimal requirements for the game, so it's a way of observing how Avorion fares with very limited resources.

So, it'd be a priority-based problem between In-Sector realtime gameplay and Out-of-Sector simulation, explaining why only some people have that problem: gaming rigs nowadays are more than ten times as powerful, so it would need ten times as much stations to observe the same-ish bug.

 

...d'oh, it kinda kills the whole "making a whole galactic empire" ambition of mine ::).

 

Maybe the simulation's update interval needs to be scaled with its available resources by simulated sector, or a server option to manually change the update interval.

I screwed around with the "emptySectorUpdateInterval", putting it to 5.0 then 30.0 from the default 0.5. Didn't do much.

[MoronicCinamun]

Not sure if this is the place to post it because I'm not sure if it's a bug or not:

I just switched over my old save to the beta branch, apparently mining and salvaging lasers are now "armed", not unarmed turrets, and are taking up all my slots. Is this intended?

[Ravien]

Not sure if this is the place to post it because I'm not sure if it's a bug or not:

I just switched over my old save to the beta branch, apparently mining and salvaging lasers are now "armed", not unarmed turrets, and are taking up all my slots. Is this intended?

 

Known bug.