We last touched base in February where we announced that we're working on a DLC. Shortly after that, we put out another free Content Pack in March... and then a global pandemic hit and work from home began. At that point we decided it was best for the team to refocus their efforts on the new systems and content of the DLC, while putting out semi-regular bugfix patches for the released version of the game. Since then, we've put out our May patch and now our July patch -- releasing in a few days! (And finally fixed infinite digging, I might add!)
New Systems: There are 3 major new features:
Multiple colonies on multiple asteroids running simultaneously! From lonely mining outposts to thriving hubs of industry, each world can contribute to sustainability across your civilization.
A new radiation simulation and overlay, with conduit-like infrastructure to harness it for science and industry! We're adding this as a new fundamental system with integrations into many parts of a successful colony.
Space gameplay has been reimagined. Space destinations are now actual playable asteroids which can be landed on and settled. Rockets themselves are now easier to launch, more interesting to control, and have a deeper role to play by providing infrastructure between asteroids.
New Content: While the majority of the new content will of course be in service of the new systems, we're also adding a new start biome, and multiple new biomes throughout the asteroid cluster with their own critters, plants, and resources to discover and integrate into your colony.
We're also adding other bits of content, new buildings, traits, and more, to keep expanding on the ONI experience!
Keeping performance steady as we add these new features, and trying to improve on it where possible, continues to be a high priority for us while developing this DLC.
What about Vanilla?
The base game, which you currently own, will also see a large update when the DLC is released! Bug fixes, UI improvements, balance and tuning improvements, and base-game content updates will be synchronized across all versions of the game. So even if you choose not to play with the DLC, we're working to improve your experience as well!
Timeline
We're going to get the DLC into your rubber-gloved-hands some time this year. The fallout from Covid19 has really altered our estimates and shifted our priorities, so we're not going to make a more specific promise than that. As we get closer to the big moment, we'll be sure to give you more updates!
In Summary
Most of the team has been hard at work staying safe and developing the new DLC, even while we've continued to fix issues and performance on the released version of the game. We are adding new fundamental systems so we're taking the time to make sure we get them right, and especially working to integrate them well into the existing gameplay for all players to enjoy.
We're as excited as you are to be playing the game with these new features in it, and can't wait until it's complete! Thank you from the bottom of our cardiovascular systems for all your support, suggestions, encouragement and enthusiasm, which has got us this far. Onward!
We're putting out another hotfix on the live version of the game today! We've knocked out a bunch of recently introduced bugs, cleaned up and expanded some of the new features from the Automation Pack, and added a lot of refinement to the way crashes and mods are handled.
Additionally, there's a new color blindness mode which can be selected from the options menu. Read all about it and leave comments on this post!
I'd also like to mention that like many other teams, the ONI team has been affected by the transition to working from home. We're not sure yet how this is going to affect our future releases, but we're glad to provide this weird pee simulator to amuse you during these times and we're going to keep making it better! We're still here and still working hard to improve the game, so please report bugs and leave feedback for us.
Thank you!
FULL PATCH NOTES:
Features and Changes
Add Protanopia and Deuteranopia color blindness modes.
Added Feedback button below patch notes as shortcut to feedback options.
Mod and Crash Screen Improvements:
Mods Screen button says "Browse" instead of "Subscription" for local mods. Hitting the button always opened a folder to the local directory, now the text matches that
Hook up new art for crash report screen
Enable/Disable all mods button on ModsScreen
Errors encountered while mods are installed will now bring up an error dialog.
Fix localization on the error screen
Error screen now has a "MORE INFO" button that reveals the callstack, and a copy to clipboard button
Mods referenced in the stack trace will be disabled by default (unless they are dev mods).
Disable mods that are non-dev mods when they fail to load, even if other mods are dev mods. This was causing infinite loops for mod creators when a mod was crashing that had nothing to do with what they were developing
Mods can be disabled or enabled directly on the error screen.
Under the hood, Timer Sensor now counts Logic Ticks rather than Time.time, which will make them more accurate and better at staying in sync with each other.
Counter Sensor improvements:
Add "Advanced Mode" toggle to Counter sidescreen. Advanced Mode performs a % on the count, rather than a direct comparison, allowing for actual binary counting.
Advanced Mode: sends a Green Signal only for one logic tick, rather than continuously.
Standard Mode: After its initial 0, Counter Sensor sidescreen displays its count as "10" rather than 0.
Counter sidescreen visual polish.
Improved counter's reset behavior to be more reliable.
Added some new hammer strike sounds
New logic gate sounds, changes and remixing
Sweepbot Station contents are always marked for clearing - similar to user marked sweeps on floor ore. This allows their storage priority to be set right on the Sweepbot Station
Notifier sidescreen now has tooltips for the three notification types.
New !! icon for VERY BAD notifications
OR and XOR gate backpieces shaped to look more like their symbols.
Add Copy Settings button to Signal Switch, Power Switch, Ribbon Reader, Ribbon Writer.
Counter Sensor description updated to make it more clear that it resets on the next signal after reaching max count.
Add localized string for "Reported Error" confirmation dialog
Ore chunks show their element description if necessary in Sweepy/receptacle side screens. Player visible debug message removed.
Revised description of the Feedback window
If world generation fails it displays an error message instead of continuing to selecting starting Duplicants
World generation will no longer retry with a new seed if a seed fails. This means that errors in worldgen will cause failures instead of silently changing the seed in the background.
Fixed world generation failing on some seeds resulting in a world filled with Abyssalite. This was reported primarily on Volcanea Asteroids but it could happen on any asteroid type with world traits.
Note: due to the combination of the above two fixes, a small number of seeds have been changed where previously that seed would fail on the first try and then succeed. This will not affect the vast majority of seeds.
Medical Cot severity slider requirement default is set to 70%.
Fixes
Further fixes for constructions getting dragged around during autosave and when the Notifier triggers
Fixed building toggle errands not being saved.
Fix rocket module meters not matching the offset of their parent module
Fix crash when deconstructing a tile
Counter Sensor defaults to the "off" anim state when first built.
Counter Sensor no longer sends Green Signal for its initial "zero" state, making daisy-chaining possible without requiring to reset.
Copy Settings works correctly for Liquid Reservoirs and Gas Reservoirs
Signal Switch and Circuit Switch sidescreens now scale correctly with UI scaling.
Signal Switch now initializes in the right animation based on whether it's on or off, instead of always defaulting to off.
Signal Switch no longer says it requires Duplicant operation.
Control Inputs on the Signal Selector/Signal Distributor now only read from the first bit of an Automation Ribbon.
Canister emptier no longer shares auto-bottle strings with bottle emptier
When paused, multiple Signal Switches/Circuit Switches can be toggled at a time, and general improvements to the functionality of the player controlled toggle sidescreen.
Automation Ribbon Bridges now correctly de-tint if they are offscreen when the Automation Overlay is closed
Light audio mix and performance fixes around creatures
Fixed issue allowing for 2 Sweepys to be produced for the same base station
MOTD strings can now be translated by Language Mods
Sweepy fixes:
Refined metal for sweepy production will no longer be cleared from the Sweepy base station as if it were swept clutter. This should fix some infinite delivery loops with the sweepy station.
Improved Sweepy status item when trapped
Fixed empty status item for Sweepy. Added status items for common states. Added placeholder string to base station description to describe emptying behavior.
Fixed the dying animation sometimes being interrupted by the idle animation.
Fixed bug allowing Sweepy to magically change the temperature of things swept.
Fix some instances of dupes still carrying on conversations after death.
Fix crash when a dupe greets another dupe right as they're dying.
A couple fixes for trying to retrieve the schedule of a dead dupe.
Fix crash when a critter dies right before they get wrangled.
Fix crash when a building or plant is destroyed while its room is being updated.
Fix achievement crash for very old saves.
Fix retry-loop when a translation mod becomes enabled somehow.
Prevent softlock when a modal dialog is rendering behind the crash report screen.
Separate limits for sliders and text input fields in sandbox tools. Should allow very negative heat gun values and prohibit <1 brush size values.
Sandbox brush size limited to 50
Sandbox settings revert to default settings if the saved data is not applicable (update IDs loaded in base game). Mass, temperature, and brush radius values are better clamped.
Further fix for refunding secondary materials from construction when a building is replacing itself
Tweaks to the Reader/Writer and Ribbon art to overlap better and display the proper animations
Wheezewort description updated
Sweepy Recharge description updated
Fixed blank status item for Sweepy moving to charging station
Make "Infinity" and "-Infinity" translatable.
Add closing color tag to privacy policy description
Fix sandbox backup save file path on non-Windows machines
Potentially fix broken "Browse Log Files" link for Linux
Fix color for red duration tooltip on Timer details screen
Hover tooltips properly use selected color mode for logic description strings
Duplicants can no longer get the "Pacifist" trait if they have a Digging interest. This prevents the bug where their stats would reroll if they ever had both Digging interest and Pacifist.
Door toggle buttons once again animate while waiting for a Duplicant to perform the action
Remove duplicate "Tutorial: Scheduling" entry from the codex
Fix typo in Pip codex entry
Weight plates now properly detect when an element solidifies directly on top of them
Fix crash when creature dies while it's laying an egg
Also cleanup the inactive egg left in the scene
Fix old hack that had sweepers always drop their contents on load. This was to stop them from putting their current contents into an unrelated fetch. Now the arm drops everything only if its new fetch doesn't match the current request
Fix unrelated entities taking on mass when combining same elements on a cell
Fix crash when a sweeper has to drop an item
Fix Counter not changing output signal when receiving reset signal
Fix inconsistent Timer Sensor behaviour dependent on framerate
This will reset all timer sensors for save files currently on the preview branch.
Fix strange input if a mouse button was clicked twiced in a frame. This caused the area measurement numbers to stick around, "phantom" constructions, and other oddities.
Properly load localized string keys for Sweepy status messages
Fixed Auto-Sweepers sometimes dropping their contents before their errand was actually finished
Optimizations
Removed validations in our arrays which were were taking up over 5% of the frame
Minor optimize to ConduitFlow
Bridge optimizations save about 3% of the frame when a steady stream of elements are passing through conduit bridges
Reduce memory usage during save:
State Machines don't allocate extra memory
Compress save data directly into the filestream instead of using a separate buffer
Move our serialization of the Sim directly into our primary buffer
Estimate our deserialization buffer capacity based on last load or save
Save ~1% frame time when setting animation symbol overrides
Reduce memory usage when saving numbers. And there are a lot of numbers in this game...
Reduce memory usage for writing out encoded strings
Reduce Report Manager memory usage while saving
Slight improvement to the speed of the algorithm for fetch errands
Slight improvement to the speed of data lookup for fetch errands
Modding
Added hooks to LogException in KMonoBehehaviour's try-catches for mod support
Removed IEffectDescriptor; in every case except one it just deferred to the game object anyways, so no reason to inject the BuildingDef. This makes all effect descriptors use the same interface, simplifying things.
Support archived versions for mods
This will allow modders in the future to publish versions of their mod simultaneously for the testing and release builds. There's no immediate changes to be made right now. However, next patch this can be used to update mods on the Testing branch without breaking them for Release players!
The "current" most up-to-date version of the mod continues to live in the root folder of the mod as always.
Archived/previous versions of the mod can be moved into an 'archived_versions' folder, and their last good version specified in a top-level file called 'archived_versions.yaml'. Its structure looks like this:
Fix a crash where animations could be invalid when a Duplicant finished working at a building Fix a crash when a Duplicant leaves a Tourist Module on rocket landing
Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know that we really appreciate the bug reports and feedback you leave for us. Though the game has been officially released, we have been and will continue to put out patches with fixes and quality-of-life improvements. There are some fixes to new content we didn't get into this patch for stability reasons, but we're continuing to improve the game and will get those fixes into a later update! For the whole story be sure to read the roadmap.
[Game Update] - 399090
Solid Conveyor Filter no longer gets "stuck" if an ore sublimates and sends an empty box to the filter
Fix the Conveyor Element Sensor and Conveyor Shutoff being "one tick behind".
Fix to Sweepy's sleep sounds
AND gate audio added
Some automation sound volumes adjusted
Fix crash in Element sensors when an object is destroyed while in the conduit
Update Chinese strings
Logic Gate animations are now Played, not Queued, since they are all much quicker. Prevents the animations from playing continuously even after a signal has stabilized.
HOTFIX - 398437
Fix crashes in certain tile/wire replacement situations
This reverts the change that fixed the bug where replacing a tile with two materials would only refund the primary material
Changed message text in the new automation ports popup when loading a save
Send a clearable notification message for each building where a wire is connected to a new automation port (only shows in saves that haven't been "upgraded" yet)
Art updates for NOT gate
Fixed sweepy base station rest animation layering issue
Shortened the animation length for Signal Selector / Splitter for more responsiveness
Banhi's Automation Innovation Pack Now Available!
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Hello friends!
Today we're releasing a new free content pack, Bahni's Automation Innovation Pack, available automatically as part of the game! This includes several new sensors and automation buildings, as well as improvements and bugfixes to many of the existing automation buildings. These new tools will let you increase the effectiveness of your automated contraptions, improve your control and awareness of colony operations, and maybe even let you express your creative side.
To help you get started on this computer-controlled journey, we've introduced Sweepy, a sweet robot caretaker to help you keep your floors tidy and dry! Not the brightest little bot, but it'll get the job done.
And of course we're continuing to hack away at bugs and work on performance. In case you missed it, we posted a new Roadmap a few weeks ago that explains what's been happening and what will be happening with ONI over the next little while, please check it out.
Thank you as ever for your feedback and bug reports, we appreciate them so much!
New Features and Notable Changes
Fixes
Buildings
Duplicants
Critters
UI
Audio
Strings
Frontend and Backend
Simulation
Performance
Modding
Hotfix 394232 & 394616
Hotfix 394232 (2/11/2020)
Further fixes for the crash caused by duplicate pipes/wires on the same cell
Fixed the main menu to show the message of the day and patch notes
Low-Res texture mode works correctly once again. Those who have been experiencing out-of-memory crashes should make sure this is enabled, and those of you who previously enabled it will once again receive the benefit. :) (This is located in Options > Graphics > Low Resolution Textures)
We haven't posted a roadmap since before launch, so it's about time we got you up to speed on what the future holds for ONI.
Recap
Oxygen Not Included dug its first lump of asteroid in a prototype over 5 years ago. Since that time it's had tens of thousands of additions and changes, from tiny tweaks to game-redefining sweeps. Systems have been added, systems have been removed, systems have been ripped up and rebuilt. With your help in Early Access, we guided the game from a basic thermal sim to an elaborate asteroid-spanning, fart-collecting epic!
Post-launch, we took time to recover and focused on bug fixes and performance for some time, while we figured out what was next for ONI. We feel like the game still has lots of room for growth and improvement, and there are so many ideas we'd like to try out!
So after a season of prototyping and planning, here's what we're up to:
DLC
Most of the team is hard at work right now building a DLC for ONI!
This DLC is going to be quite sizable, including new game systems and many refinements on the base game. Because we're introducing new systems, we want to take our time to test and iterate our ideas -- and throw out things that aren't working. This approach means that we can't predict when the DLC will be ready, but if everything goes well we'd like to have something to show during the summer, and the release would follow in the autumn after further testing and refinement.
We had ideas for new systems that we thought would be interesting to add to the game for a while, but because of the incremental nature of Early Access as well as the complexity of the game for new players, we decided not to to make these part of the base game. Putting new features into DLC allows us to more deeply integrate new systems, as well as give new players (or anyone!) an easy way to opt in to additional challenges and facets.
Overall we want to emphasize quality over deadlines, so this represents our plan at this moment. If the timeline changes, we will let you know!
Ongoing Updates and Bug Fixes
While all that happens, we want to make sure we're not ignoring you in the community, and continue to tend to the released version of the game. A portion of the team will still work to address bugs, take in feedback, and make sure the ONI that you are playing today constantly grows and improves.
As well, we want to periodically put out new content into the game in the form of free packs. The first of these was Meep's Recreation Pack in December, and there's another one going into public testing next week!
Performance
We know that ONI is a beast of a game, and we think we can still get some significant performance improvements out of it. Improving performance gets more challenging as we make progress, and all the obvious and easy things have been done now. We’re now at the stage where we come up with ideas, run experiments, and if the experiment is successful, try to work it into the game without breaking the gameplay.
The going is slow, but we're still hammering away at it, and look forward to releasing performance improvements to you as they happen!
In Summary
All in all, ONI is still fully in development, even if we've been pretty quiet from the outside! We're balancing live support with DLC development, and working to ensure that the DLC makes the game better and not just bigger.
We love this game and we're so glad that you love it too! Thank you so much for all your support and input over the years, and we look forward to working on ONI together with you from here into the future!
LoFi Dupe Hop Radio - Oxygen Not Included Soundtrack Now On Sale!
The soundtrack to Oxygen Not Included is now available! From Feb 11th - 14th SAVE 20% with the Steam Soundtrack sale!
It's the official way to unwind as your space colony teeters on the brink of disaster. Featuring the original atmospheric music composed and arranged by Vince de Vera, this OST contains all of the game music, and a couple of extras, in both FLAC and MP3 formats.
Purchasing the soundtrack on Steam also entitles players to free updated of any additional tracks we may add to the game, or in our animated shorts in the future.
We hope you enjoy these chill lofi dupe hop tunes while studying / chilling / surviving / thriving. ♥
