The 18th free Content Patch since FortressCraft left Early Access will be available early tomorrow morning, but I've spent the ENTIRE DAY assembling this... thesis... inside Valve's post editor, and I'm worried I'll lose it - so you get the verbose patch notes just a few hours early. Onward!
There have been 2 major focii for this patch; Rooms and Progression, along with Base Scanning, Healing, Agriculture, Lenses.
TL;DR
Added Rooms. Join the public server P18 Room Showcase to have a look
All T1 Recipes reworked. Upcraft everything. Don't keep Ingots in your inventory.
Diamond, Emerald, Ruby and Sapphire lenses now give flat-rate boosts
Be more careful about taking damage, use Ampules to heal yourself
Mini and Logistics Hoppers are no longer slow and horrible, just small.
Added Priority Splitter. Sends ALL items right unless the Right is blocked, then sends left.
The recent negative feeback has been overwhelmingly about the complexity of the game. I initially thought that people liked complex and difficult games, but it seems a large number of Factorio players would much rather than each resource turned into one crafting ingredient; previously, in FortressCraft, there were 9 types of Plate, 9 types of Wire, 9 types of Coil, etc. The sweeping change this month has been to address the complexity, and make the game more streamlined. Overall, it's turned out to make the game much faster and less frustrating to progress through.
To this end, Bars are of virtually zero use, and you will have to use Crafting machines to make almost everything now. This process has been hugely time-consuming, but I would say that the T1 progression (approximately the first 6-8 hours of the game) is now much much smoother. Some T2 work was done, but I will be looking at that as time goes on.
For now, with few exceptions, you will ALWAYS want to upcraft your useless Ingots into useful crafting items.
Copper Ingots -> Copper Wire
Tin Ingots -> Tin Plates -> Lightweight Machine Housings
Iron Ingots -> Iron Gears -> RackRails
Lithium Ingots -> Lithium Wire -> Lithium Coils -> Charged Lithium Coils.
Please do this via automation. Feeding in bars by hand into the start of an Automation run means you'll be wasting time staring at it!
T2 materials are 'mostly' improved, but it's much more hit-and-miss than T1.
As FortressCraft has grown and grown, I spend large amounts of my time optimising the game. Sadly, the main effect of 'doubling the speed of the game' is 'people build bases twice as large', so to a degree it's a losing battle. At a rough guess, FortressCraft can maintain a base 25 times large in P17 than it could when it left Early Access at the same framerate. However, despite some horribly complex vis systems, people still manage to beat the frame rate into submission. So, what's the solution?
There's a few. One of them is a cascading segment-based view system, but that is quite a lot of work, and the end result doesn't change or improve the game, barring the framerate. Patch 18 is in Unity 5.6, giving you access to DX12 and Vulkan, neither of which appeared to substantially improve the drawcall overhead.
The solution I've moved towards, and have implemented the first pass for P18, is that of Rooms.
A room is defined as a rectangular area, encased in walls, a floor, a ceiling, a Room Controller, one or more Inner Airlocks, each of which is connected to an Outer Airlock. Inner and Outer Airlocks must have a gap of exactly 3 metres between them.
Once established, a room has one major, MAJOR technical advantage over randomly covering stuff up with walls - if you're outside the room, the inside of the room doesn't render, and if you're inside the room, the outside doesn't render! This can turn an end-game base with half a million active machines from 15 fps to 150 fps.
Now, sadly, I find that giving players tools to help themselves doesn't always work. To that end, I hope to move FC towards a much more Room and building-based layout, but for this patch, players will be required to build rooms only for the new Hydroponics and Medbays.
It should be noted that the Rooms are a major, MAJOR change to the feel of FortressCraft. You have the option to opt into P17-Frozen if you do not wish to move to this patch
So, in short; Room advantages - they look cool, they have predictable lighting, they speed the game up, and if you're on the surface, they also make the air warmer.
Do not attempt to enclose your CPH in Rooms. Also be a little wary of making skyscrapers diagonally too close to your CPH. If Rooms take off, I will be revisiting the concept and implementation of the surface attacks.
It's very simple tho; research, craft and place a Room Controller. It will start to search for a regular-shaped room around it. Although the theoretical max size is 128 metres (+- 64 around the controller), this is ridiculous, and I recommend you don't do this.
The Room Controller should guide you through the process. You will need a 3x3x1 or 1x3x3 Inner Airlock flush with one of your walls, and, in front of that, leaving a gap of exactly 3 metres, an Outer Airlock. Done. The Room Controller will let you know if it's having problems. Just remember that the Blue area shows the size of the expected room.
Room limitations!
Inner Airlocks connect room to Outer airlocks, which connect rooms to the outside. The outside can be covered up. This is the only supported paradigm. The airlock->airlock area should be covered, or vis will break. This is Your Responsibility.(Think of Rooms and Buildings - you aren't forced to have all your rooms as little 'sheds' out in the wilderness - just put the Rooms in a Building, or have a nice lobby to go into all the rooms. You are allowed to have Doors without Rooms - you will be warned that these confer NO performace boost)
Room controllers can share multiple segments, and multiple room controller can share a single segment. Really tho, I'd spread it out a little bit.
You CAN leave holes in the floor and the ceiling. If you do this, it'll look stupid. I don't care. Don't build it so it looks stupid. The MAIN thrust of this feature is a player-controlled portalling and occlusion system. This is Your Responsibility. I've erred on the side of allowing the room to work whilst looking broken, as opposed to forcing the player to exactly adhere to every single little sub-requirement.
You cannot put machines into the walls. The exception is the Induction Charger on the floor.
To get things in and out of the room, use Power and Logistics Grommets. These are supported by PSBs and Conveyors.
A PSB touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite it.
A Generator (PTG, Solar) touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite.
A conveyor touching and facing a Logistics Grommet will transfer any items to any machine that normally accepts items from conveyors. Conveyor and Storage Hopper are favourites. This is infinite speed, so you can essentially build room walls straight through existing Conveyor runs without affecting your logistics.
MineCarts can go through walls. It looks stupid and I'd like to address it in the future.
Lasers cannot fire into Grommets. Lasers can receive power from Grommets.
Suggested uses, initially, are for segmenting your base into logical groups; Smelting, Research, Assembly Lines, Sorting, Storage, etc. Putting all of your base into these rooms WILL MASSIVELY IMPROVE YOUR FRAMERATE.
Note : Putting all of your base into one massive room won't achieve anything. This is obvious - right? The current maximum size of a room is +-64m from the room controller, so about 129x129x129 metres. I won't stop you doing this, but if you do, you might have slightly missed the point.
Hopefully it's fairly idiot-proof. If not, please start a thread on the forum and I'll try and help out. A much better option is to join the Public server P18 Room Showcase and have a look around.
Medbay and Health changes
One of the changes to P18 includes stopping players using the 'deathport' exploit. Players aren't bothering with logistics, lifts or teleporters, and are just dropping down a shaft, grabbing ore, and killing themselves to teleport back to the surface. To this end, the health system has changed. If you take small amounts of damage, you won't see any difference whatsoever. If you receive major damage, it will take quite a while to sell-heal; it's about 10 minutes to recover to 100% health from 1% health, but it's only about 20 seconds to heal from 90% to 100%.
To combat this, the player has a couple of current options. The first of which is the MedBay - this is a cheap machine that MUST be built in a room, and heals you if you stand near it, it heals you. Secondly, there's the Ampules. These work very much like the Power Boosters - stick it in your hotbar and left-click to use it. Different grades of Ampules will give you a different level of healing boost. Right now, the Ampule Dispenser machine must also be built inside a room, and will generate 1 Ampule per 10 seconds. Once it has 5 MK1 Ampules, it'll start to upgrade them to Mk2, and so on. This is designed to be paired with the new HerbiCors, which will automatically harvest plants within a few hundred metres of your base.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in Patch 16, I completely re-did the surface rendering and generation, taking advantage of Unity's new Instanced Rendering system. New for Unity, that is - FortressCraft used Instanced Rendering on the Xbox 360...
The main upshot of that were plants. A lot of plants. Patch 18 adds in the very first start of being able to use the plants.
There are 7 types of plants, and 7 colours, for a total of 49 possible combinations of final plant.
Plants are currently locked to their spawn colours. Future work will introduce breeding of plants from the current 7 types to the total of 49.
The player cannot plant plants outside, but CAN Harvest them with RMB. Plants outside grow/regrow very very very slowly.
If you want to harvest plants quickly and automatedly, then use the new Herbicors. They will pull in any plants within approximately 256m. Tests have shown that this will net you approx 8k plants (yes, and will speed the game up a bit). The disadvantage is that Herbicors destroy the plants that they harvest, so this is not renewable.
The player can place plants into a Hydroponics Bay, or an Advanced Hydroponics Bay. The plant will then grow much faster, and can be harvested and re-harvested regularly.
As of P18, there is no fully-automated way to renewably obtain more plant material. The ConstructoBots in the Adventures Pack will cover this. There may be other methods implemented to do so.
As of P18, right now, Plants have only one use - any set of 8 of the same plant can be used to make Ampules. The Ampules are planned to rely on specific plants, and I plan to add more effects than 'Faster Health Regen' in the future.
What effects or uses would you like to see? With 49 plants, I'm not likely to run out!
Base Monitoring
As well as rendering, part of the advantage of Rooms is that I know the player's PC will have plenty of spare grunt to do more complex things. (An example would be shadows-on-lights-in-rooms)
As part of my bid to teach players to be more brilliant at playing FortressCraft, I've implemented extensive monitoring of every ore, bar and all of the power generation of a player's base. The first 45 days of play is recorded (Haven't decided if I'll just write-over the data or stop recording at that point yet). The player is able to analyse this data by placing Base Scanners (name pending) inside rooms. Placing ore, bars or a PSB inside the hopper will then let you monitor only those ores/bars or power.
The Base Efficiency rating is feedback to the player about their relative Ore/Bar production. If your Base Efficiency is less than 100%, this means you are extracting more Ore than you're dealing with (This includes manual schlepping of ore!) - I hope to use this metric to hint back to the player that having collected 30,000 ore really isn't helping them progress.
If your Base Efficiency is OVER 100%, that means you're burning through your ore reserves making bars, and will eventually run out. Balancing this number to 100% means you're making the most efficient use of your automation time.
If you want to monitor something, stick it in a hopper underneath the Scanner. It also supports a hidden hopper behind the screen, if that's your thing.
Things you can monitor!
All bars!
All ores!
Base Power! (Stored power vs Power capacity) - put a PSB in there
Currently the first 4 tiers of Lens (Diamond, Sapphire, Topaz and Emerald) are mostly available to the player whilst they have T0/1/2 lasers. As these lasers provide very low PPS, a percentage-based increase doesn't give much difference. As an example, a T0 laser with an Emerald in it gains 30%. 30% bonus to 1.16 PPS is 1.508 PPS. In larger Tier lasers, all Crystals provide a wonderful boost - but by the time the player get T2/T3 lasers, the Organic Lenses have far outstripped the lower-tier Crystal ones, and thus are pointless.
T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald was 1.5 PPS
T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald is now 31.5 PPS
T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald was 416
T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald is now 360 PPS
This should make early-lenses more useful, and means that a T0 Laser with a Sapphire Lens is now a massive 101 PPS - but you will have to put in some manual time searching to get that reward, making exploration that little bit more rewarding.
Diamond is 15 PPS bonus
Emerald is 30 PPS bonus
Ruby is 60 PPS bonus
Sapphire is 100 PPS bonus
I reserve the right to re-balance these in the future. ;-)
I get two main pieces of feedback about the CryoPlasm in Frozen Factory; 1) What CryoPlasm? 2) DEAR GOD WHY HAS MY BASED DISAPPEARED UNDER A SEA OF FROZEN HORROR.
To this end, I implemented a system so I could actually monitor the CryoPlasm growth. I then turned it into a machine and gave it to you.
I then created a number of short animated movies for overnight CryoPlasm growth, so I could analyse when it worked well, and when it didn't work so well.
Based on that knowledge, I altered how the CryoPlasm works.
The aggression of the CryoPlasm is based on the size of your base. Think of it as CryoThreat
Now, if you start Frozen Factory, you're not likely to see much issue; the Cryo is much more predictable, and doesn't worry so much about boring through rock to get to you. The 'boring chance' instreases as the Threat goes up.
However, if you are a mid-to-late Frozen Factory playthrough as you update to Patch 18, then you are going to see a massive and sudden jump in the aggression of the Cryo, often leading to it completely swamping basic Lancer defences. If you've been defending 'properly', using Freezon Boosting, terraforming and Dazzlers, and extensive Bomber defence, then you'll be Just Fine.
I mean. Maybe. But be prepared for a much bigger and more exciting challenge than P17!
Also, hey - what happens if you build it on the surface?
A huge 'thank you' to everyone who's bought the Dapper pack in the past. This patch implements 2 new machines and 6 new specific Dapper blocks
The Super HEIST can inject 16x more items into your inventory at double the range. Ideal for paste!
The Super Construction Paste Grinder is 8x more efficient than the regular one, and also allows you to hook up Coal veins for paste, partly as a 'thank you' to those awesome people, but mostly so their super-pretty bases don't require them to spend ages collecting paste.
This should hopefully allow the more creative amongst you to make really brilliant rooms without suffering too much from a Paste deficit. You also get access to 6 sexy new lights for Rooms.
Room light 1 and 6 are available to everyone in Patch 18 (this includes NON Dapper owners). This is a neutral-coloured strip light, and a 'cross' light. The Cross light reacts to CPH attacks and failure by changing colour. It's therefore classed as Gameplay and not Cosmetic.
YES I ACTUALLY HIT THE LIMIT ON THE SIZE OF PATCH NOTES! IN YOUR FACE VALVE! I'll be pushing the final patch live on the morning of the 21st, and that will include the detailed breakdown of everything changed. I seriously have had to split these into separate posts!
Patch 18 imminent.
If you hate change, and feel that Agriculture, Rooms and Base Graphing is not for you, then please opt into the P17-Frozen branch.
I'm currently typing up what feels like 300 pages of patch notes, and prepping the Staging builds. Watch this space!
ADVANCE WARNING
Patch 18 fixes and improves CryoPlasm to a great degree. If you have been gently going through Frozen Factory, going 'meh, Cryo? It's not all that', and you haven't been creating strong defences, then you have 2 options.
1) Finish Frozen Factory before Patch 18 lands
2) Prepare yourself for vastly improved Cryo.
Note : This only applies to existing worlds; Cryo now has an internal 'threat' system, so large bases modulate Cryo behaviour, meaning it can't get stuck.
This means that if you go from P17 to P18, you may end up with the Cryo effectively going from the slow and docile start mode to the 'designed for Dazzler and Terraforming' mode!
Patch 18
We're now about half way through this patch cycle, so I thought it was a good idea to invite you all along to give feedback before it's all done!
I have some ideas to improve crafting, as well as to encourage players to play in a nice efficient way - a large part of this was a recent review, where the poor chap failed to get enough T2 mats to make a second Smelter after playing for 30 hours!
If you're interested or have feedback, please pop to here:
I dunno, you wait around 10 months for a patch, then 2 come along all at once. Yes, you've had Christmas, but what about SECOND Christmas?
This patch is mostly aimed at fixing some of the issues that weren't thrown up during the surprisingly extensive P17 testing, plus just a few shiny new features.
The most useful and helpful of these stems from a discussion that be summed up as follows.
uPnP doesn't work
Yes it does, shut up
No, look, I did all wireshark stuff, it doesn't work, and I'm smart and know technical words like 'TCP'
Look, it blatantly works, I'm running a server with it!
I don't think it works. I'll look up stuff. Wait, I configured wireshark wrong. But the game is doing a UDP broadcast when it should be doing a M-SEARCH multicast for the SSDP.
--At this point I needed to do code things and read up on what any of those words meant--
The code has been changed. Try that.
It works!
So, basically, FC uses Lidgren, which is an industry-standard bit of networking code, and it follows the Microsoft/Novell recommendations which are WRONG.
TL;DR - uPnP should work on many MANY more routers than before.
So, on with the subject of networking - after a LOT of testing of the server, which MANY of you have joined, I did some further work, and have come up with a sweet optimisation for the itemdata for networking. Previously, this data was approximately 1 gigabyte/hour/user. It's now down to about 50 megs/hour/player.
And, sorry.
Mynocks will spawn on Slopes. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
And the rest!
Fixed H and P erroneously opening up Help and Pause panels whilst searching. Hopefully didn't break anything else else.
All (known) Drag and Drop issues fixed
Added MMB to assign currently-hovered item in the Inventory to assign to currently selected HotBar slot.
Added Controls note to this effect.
Fixed issue where teleporting players took FOREVER to arrive - they should arrive within 2 seconds now!
Added teleport graphics for network players
Loads of handbook entries updated
Players will no longer be told to make a Lab if it's already researched and built.
Fixed Fast/Slow conveyor description when making a new world.
Updated bootstrap screen
Added a minor glow to Conveyor base, to allow you to see them in the dark
Added auto readout of Ore Veins for network players
Sign fix will now persist and also work over the network.
Blocked/Unblocked messages should now filter out much more strongly to clients from Conveyors.
Fixed debounce on MS output filters
Caught InstancedRender failure and displayed message
Fixed DiskThread.ProcessCleanUpQueue crash
Fixed readout issue for Cargo lifts when on Rapid difficulty.
Altered handbook to correctly show Rapid boost for Cargo lifts.
Fixed Mod upload button
Public server count now shown on the main menu
Minecarts rideable again!
Fixed texture assignment to Minecarts; Basic/Fast/Large should now correctly Tier with Loader Yellow, Green, Blue
Added directional chevrons on the Minecart Tracks. Might help a little.
"Crafted Item" filter now supports stacks of items, not just single items.
Magma Caverns are now lit for network clients.
MK3 WorkFloor Excavators should now spin SLIGHTLY slower, and not miss any block
Dyed Marble now just 1 shader darker by default.
Ohhh yes. Your CPH will now match your player, ARTHER and your SpiderBot, if you have the Dapper DLC Pack. I felt that the pack was a little weak, and wanted to find ways to let players show off all their hard-earned Skins. So with an amazing piece of work by Andy and Todd, you can now do this! (In a multiplayer game, CURRENTLY, the CPH will just reflect YOUR skin, but this will change)
Have YOU always wanted a Pink CPH?
"If the answer is no, you are sad, and I've no desire to speak with you further." - Sir Hammerlock.
And finally, I kept a visual diary of some of the glorious pics from the recent P17 multiplayer playthrough. Check 'em out if you're bored!
The floaty-orange-button on some machine interfaces has been fixed.
YOU ARE WELCOME
Oh, you want more?
Major Features
95%+ complete internal support for multiple languages
Complete replacement of UI API, giving support for double-byte characters, ie Arabic, Chinese, Indian, etc
Network bandwidth now as low as 5% of previous network usage. This should reduce 'packet loss' issues to a hopefully distant memory.
MK1, MK2 and MK3 Mass Storage StockPilers added (Allows you to limit the maximum number of an item in Mass Storage - thanks to SteveMan0 for
this!)
To celebrate the HUGE PERFORMANCE INCREASE in Multiplayer, there's a new Skin Pack available
This includes Santa (Yes, I missed the date on this a bit), Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, USA, Canada, Australia, The Nettherland
and my favourite, the rainbow-themed Proud skin :
I plan to get translation support into the game for these languages over the next few patches - if you'd like to help out, head over to the Translation section on the forum!
Unreleased ('Patreon Only') Features
Orbital RailGun now buildable. Patreons only (until release of the Adventures Pack)
Orbital Railguns that save out at the Firing state no longer end up completely broken on reload
Fixed a really derpy code derp in the Orbital Railgun
Orbital RailGun Rings now cool at a rate of 1 degree per 30 seconds. (approx 120 minutes). A Freezon Canister will reduce this by another degree.
Orbital RailGun Rings currently require 100 resin per shot, per ring. (20,000 total Refined Resin) (TBD)
Orbital RailGun Controller needs 9 million power to fire. (TBD)
Destroyed CPH using Mutator Important CPH now causes all HiveMinds to grow. Yes. All.
Happy Feet Pandora's Box effect prototyped - need a name for the 'unhappy feet' equivalent.
Patreons will no longer be bugged to purchase the Frozen Factory expansion!
Networking optimisation details
Added SegmentEntity.Base.MaxNetworkSendDist - allows mod authors (and me) to not bother syncing specific machine types with distant network players. Defaults to -1 for no culling.
Conveyors now use this to aggressively cull unnecessary send data, further reducing the load on networked servers.
Improved server CPU readout to include machines, items and 'other'
Improved server disk CPU time monitoring
Item Updates have gone from ~600 megs/hour to ~20 megs/hour
Conveyors have gone from ~600megs/hour to ~1.3megs/hour
Servers will now consume approximately 1 gig per hour per 3 clients, depending on MANY factors. However, this is approximately 1/20th of the network bandwith of P16.
Server Network CPU time massively reduced; the server should now use approximately 30 minutes of a single thread CPU time per 24 hours of simulation.
TechAxe exclusive Patreon reward should now show up reliably for network players
Fixed overload of Build orders on large instanced entities on network servers
Saved approx 300 megs/hour by smartly discard dropped item data
Reduced item update footprint from to 320 bytes to 248 bytes
Collated total network usage of machines
Deeper introspection into UPDATE_CHANNEL usage
Massive optimisation to Minecarts' network efficiency (from upwards of 2500 bytes/update to 60 bytes/update)
Added deep and details /report to dedicated servers. This covers networking usage to the byte, and I'm gladly accepting reports from interesting and end-game and long-term servers!
removed 260 bytes/sec/player from SpiderBot updates
removed 100 bytes/sec/player from LOIC update
Knocked several seconds off of dedicated server loading time
Fixed issue where corrupted server information would break all public server accesses
Added per-machine network usage readout
Added PlayerData network usage calc
Quality of life improvements
<*>Community fixes from SteveMan0, MadVandal and AgentMinty!
<*>"Clearing Excavator" mission now supports Extractor naming (via Signs)
<*>Build2Me orientation support for minecart track
<*>Mad Vandal's fix for falling through lifts. Widens window for recognizing being on the lift to prevent spurious idling and keeps the feet out of the lift to prevent sliding through it.
<*>Added Funelling. If you don't know what that is, it doesn't matter. If you do, you'll be all like 'oh wow that's clever, and I hope Dj shares some cool funelling analytics with me' - and you'd be right!
<*>MK3 Workfloor Excavators now have DOUBLE (!) the range
<*>Hooked up new IP query service
<*>Signs should no longer be upside down
<*>New loading screen! (remember, submit your amazing loading screens and I'll include them in the roster)
<*>Added 'hint' when Mass Storage exceed 100 crates that perhaps, just maybe, you haven't designed your base quite right.
<*>Stopped hinting and just telling that it's a bad idea when Mass Storage exceeds 1,000 crates.
<*>Tunnel Nukers now spawn with much vigour during the start of the game, getting around a mistake in timing. This should mean Organic Rock is available to the exploratory player nearly instantly, and to regular players within the first hour.
<*>Dead Overminds can no longer headbutt you.
<*>Further support to 0.001% of my userbase - Linux should now accept chatline inputs, working around a Unity bug. Yup, FC supports Linux better than Unity does.
<*>Hard Resin Detectors now show distance to resin AND distance of resin to base, as well as the last time the active Hive Mind gew.
<*>Hard Resin Detector now shows encroaching Resin with audio and lights.
<*>Made the Research Screen quite a bit less cluttered and more understandable.
<*>25 conveyor mission disables on Peak. Fixes MP issues.
<*>Added 'You really shouldn't be using low texture detail' warning, due to streamers continually misunderstanding the slider.
<*>Added slope conveyor mynock spawning to HiveEntity as well. Sorry.
<*>Fixed T4Grinder/CCCCC power exploit
<*>Advanced Conveyor Filters are now available using T1 resources, meaning that you should be able to start sorting things much, much sooner into the game.
<*>Fixed a dead-end in the tutorial (yes, really!)
<*>Increased Research Assembler internal power storage from 1500 to 3500
<*>SpiderBot Power Cores now give 2500 power, up from 1000
<*>Public server entries that cause the game to fall onto the second page now correctly allow access to the second page
<*>Deep network clients should no longer be pestered about making a PTG
<*>MK1 Workfloor Excavators now available earlier, and cost significantly less to craft.
<*>Freezon-Boosting Liquifiers now works
<*>Performance boost to Ablators
<*>Fixed issue where Hiveminds that were 'contained' by many Ablators and Liquifiers wouldn't flip from 'shell' to 'tentacle' mode. This might mean that they're a little better at breaking out of containment. Sorry. #notsorry
<*>Reduced Particle Compressor from 1024 to 512 pps
<*>Boosted Geothermal output by 50% across the board.
<*>Refineries now use 500 power per item, down from 1,000. MaxPower is still at 3,000 per vat.
<*>Fluid now capped at 250 block/tick (down from 500) to attempt to keep build orders clear
<*>ARTHER Releases from current recharge station if asked to dock with another
<*>Threat Scanner should now indicate when all surface attacks are cleared, and will give CryoPlasm readout instead
<*>MK2 Trenchers now extract 2x as much ore as MK1 Trenchers
<*>MK3 Trenchers now extract 4x as much ore as MK1 Trenchers
Performance Improvements
I'm listing these as I continually get told I should be optimising the game instead of adding new features.
Plants on busy worlds will sleep for 10 seconds if they receive an error when accessing segments.
Fixed Lifts not using Instanced rendering.
Substantial performance improvements to rendering and CPU usage of Organic Rock.
Substantial render performance gains all over, using new Vis system
Substantial render performance gains on FALCORs
Tweaked Low LOD of all PSBs
Added rendering optimisations and LODding to Signs
Known Isssues
Biomass Ore Pings don't always work
LPTs that are directly behind you may have missing lasers (visuals only)
Items in your Suit Inventory do not count on the crafting interface
Mass Storage Input ports don't correctly visually sync for clients
Mod Upload doesn't work
Bug Fixes
Fixed issue with available materials being reported as 2x
Fixed error in Overmind renderer
Plants on 'grassy' dedicated servers will now grow.
FIXED FLOATING MOVING RANDOM BUTTON ON DIALOGUES
Fixed a generic issue with UV scrolling; this should mean no more flicking mynocks
Mouse sensitivity now works in both directions
Further vis fixes
Stack Split dialogue fixed
Fixed LPT Max Power issue
Fixed missing string on SuperDig
Fixed graphics on Workfloor Excavators
Pause menu will now correctly show current world data.
Lifts no longer use the wrong texture.
Wheelmouse should correctly scroll in all circumstances
AutoExcavator area effect at least 83% less embarrassing.
Anything that shows the current number that you own of a thing will now take into account how many are fitted to your suit.
Inventory counts now displayed again
Craft x25 button works again
Fixed Z-fighting on Organic PSBs
Scaled up Floating Combat Text to be noticeable
Various UI alignment fixes
Mass Storage Output Port no longer destroys items when full
Mod support for overriding Mobs (Modding PDF updated to match)
Reduced some client MassStorage spam
Removed the red light while in Creative.
Changed Geothermal Recipe from 512 Crystal Ore to 100 Crystal Clocks (gives a small discount for crafting clocks)
BFLs can no longer be used to mine ore - it just get vapourised.
Mods can be disabled properly now
Fixed locally-hosted MP server UI
Fixed an order when loading up worlds with signs that are a long way away
Delete Server Entry button now works reliably
Fixed issue where Freezon Injectors continually rotated.
Reduced the crafting costs of signs.
Fixed MK1 and MK2 Workfloor Excavators issue with clearing the wrong layer.
Fixed MK1 and MK2 Workfloor Excavators rendering issues
Enabled Unity Performance Reporting (this allows future analytics, but also allows me to get summated crash reports)
Deorbit containers no longer drop if there's more than 16 live ones currently there for the player to pick up
Fixed error where setting the Rate parameter would give really confusing feedback
Fixed issue with Workfloor Excavator error when unloading
Added another column for injections debug to prevent clipping stuff off the bottom
Per Mad Vandal, fix for threat scanners losing their yellow alert state.
Corrected OBO error with toxic cavern plant value entries that misaligned them with respect to the orange glowpod used as a basis. This caused the last plant to always appear as unknown and the other entries to not appear by their correct name.
Safe casting PlantEntity to place nice with mod entity overriding
Organic thief popup text shows the correct name for the machine.
Prevents ConfirmationPanelScript Show spam that can make it appear translucent.
Quarry chevron placement now obeys HardnessLimit to prevent exploits and accidents
Laser borer obeys hardness limits to prevent exploiting but still bores hardened resin
The Freezon Injector now builds facing the machine it wants to inject into.
Abstracted the kill time to a const and corrected the popup text with this.
Removed duplicate tag in air for MadVandal's OCD :D
Updated AutoBuilder handbook to reflect fix of the old transport pipe bug.
ARTHER charging station typo correction
GACs now correctly check permissions of hoppers on offloading crafted items
Restructured FALCOR offloading to prevent floating combat text spam on failed insert
Loading hint typo/grammar corrections
Fix to allow dragging in chromium lenses
Implemented ItemSupplier/Consumer interface for MS output ports for mod compatibility
At Mad Vandal's request, track the current updating SegmentEntity so that machines accessing interfaces can be identified even if they don't get passed to the interface itself.
Mad Vandal identified this error > should be >= at resource check
Disabled "Hit sideways pipe!" log spam
Updated Chromium Bar(s) to list as Chromium and not Chrome for consistency
Stopped HODORs from wasting fuel by consuming it when it is needed.
More typo fixes from Agent Minty and self craft conversion recipes for pipes
Crystal are now marked as machines to protect against B2Me but still be buildable
jlp1528 aka Agent Minty provided several fixes to the TerrainData.xml
Included in these fixes is several category tags to fix Build2Me through machines
Filter shift+E category swap corrected to match the UI
Releases ARTHER from current recharge station if asked to dock with another
Added Build2Me orientation support for minecart track
Put an NRE catch to solve the lock up of GenericMachinePanel on a race with the handbook
MS crates on network clients won't reconnect to their own center reducing log spam
Fixed debug spam due to inverted check on mass storage crate connected state
Crate mapping check out is cleared on delete if the StockPort owns it.
Excluded core multiblocks from stockport search to avoid confusion with placement blocks
Geothermal Generator no longer will blindly dig through machines when laying pipe
Merged Mad Vandal's fix for the Workfloor Excavator beams
Safely write null MachineInventory to prevent rare network crash read past end of stream
Marked grooved cement as reinforced to match it's cost and place as a patreon block
NRE catch to solve the lock up of GenericMachinePanel on a race with the handbook
MS crates on network clients won't reconnect to their own center reducing log spam
Fixed debug spam due to inverted check on mass storage crate connected state
Crate mapping check out is cleared on delete if the StockPort owns it.
Excluded core multiblocks from stockport search to avoid confusion with placement blocks
Huge amounts of changes and fixed to handbook translations, name, location, placement
Fix for _DESC searching in Translation.
Workshop Detail blocks now selectable in again
Creative Hotbar now works again
ServerOverride should now create custom-named worlds
and* load that world back in again.
Fixes to Mass Storage Output Ports
Zebra's 'big bag o' translation' community-submitted fixed and improvements.
Fixes for Mod Icons.
Thanks again to Zebra, SteveMan0 and MadVandal for your community-fixes, helping me towards getting the next patch public!
Ore Smelter missions now more sensitive to threat generation
Added None to available VR types.
Display Bug fixed in Particle Compress, Filter, Grinder, HODOR and Fuel Compressor.
Added MK1, MK2 and MK3 StockPilers. These allow you to limit the maximum amount of a certain items going into your Mass Storage. Thanks to
SteveMan0 for porting his mod into the game!
https://t.co/MX3GKWYowP
Do you hate change, progress and feel that you have the best of everything right now?
The last (major) bug has finally been knocked out of P17, and to that end, I'll be doing a multi-hour, multi-player game on the 2nd; if there's no issues, then P17 should go live shortly afterwards.
However! If you do not want your gaming experience to change AND you promise not post any bugs, the answer to which is "I fixed that in P17", then opt into the new branch
P16-Frozen
And tomorrow's major patch will not affect you.
For the rest of you - see you on Discord to celebrate!
https://discord.gg/tgFvu
Modders!
I've just moved the current Staging branch to p17_debug[for_modders]
This branch is a full debug build, with symbols - it's HIGHLY recommended you ensure your mods still work with the UI changes. NGUI, stupidly, decided to break its API - I've put as much ducttape in as I can, but there may still be issues. The debug build will help you track down issues far easier than the release build.
For the rest of you intrepid testers - I'm in the process of creating non-debug (aka high framerate) versions of all platforms now, for a final bout of testing!
No, no patch for Christmas
P17 has been knocked into shape, but I just ran out of time to get all the builds done and the skin pack live. This should all go live between Christmas and the New Year, unless something ELSE goes wrong...
In the meantime, have a wonderful Christmas, from me, Ajax and Cepheus. But especially poor ill Ajax.
