[2023] Performance Improvements and Better Carry AI - Beta 0.12.0.2 Patch Notes

Hello dear friends!

https://preview.redd.it/3pl8w7h95oba1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=9af9a8b39dc8be69f778811461f9de9b43363283

I've been working away on the Gwdir race and they are very close to being ready for the beta branch. I wanted to put out this patch in the meantime as it has quite a few performance improvements, but, most importantly, carrying behaviour improvements. Settlers were wasting so much time carrying inefficiently and I needed to address that. Settlers will now focus on items closest to stockpiles first, and you should notice they will keep animal enclosure stockpiles filled in a more reliable way too. As long as you have the haulers and items of course.

I'm working on a job which lets you designate items to haul immediately. As an example, this will make it so you could force settlers to carry items on the edge of the map over items right beside the stockpile.

There are a few tuning and bug fix changes for you to check out in the patch as well. They should make things a bit more enjoyable and less teeth-grindy.

-Feature: Command line item spawn can now recognize item spawn groups with the '-ig' option. i.e., spawn -ig isg_starting_loadout_settlers
-Feature: Trees can now grow and many have larger trunks and roots. This change supplements the giant trees the Gwdir race rely on for their gameplay mechanics.
-Polish: Plants with low health will now get a color shift to show they are dying.
-Tuning: Containers will now show a different visual when full instead of when they have at least one item. This is to indicate at a glance how many containers are at full capacity.
-Tuning: Hated/harmful items are now added to prohibited items for room stockpiles if the room has 'Auto-populate diet items' on.
-Tuning: Entities will not put items into containers if they are lying on the ground in a stockpile room (as long as the item is permitted in the container).
-Tuning: Entities should stop less often when going about their duties. Cleaned up some unnecessary pauses in their behaviour.
-Tuning: Command line prediction is more accurate when comparing strings.
-Tuning: Plants will spawn less as their numbers grow. This is to avoid too many growing in one biome at a time. This does not affect planted crops, just naturally spawning plants.
-Tuning: Bumped up old age for Humans, and decreased their chance to die of cardiac arrest.
-Optimization: Item storing and management has been tuned and optimized to be more efficient. Entities should be much better at getting closer carry jobs to stockpiles to avoid going to collect items on edges of the map.
-Optimization: Music no longer creates a lag spike when it starts playing.
-Bug Fix: After 60 days, a settler wave event would occur every hour forever.
-Bug Fix/Tuning: Entities were continuing to move to a set point for a job even though they were close enough to do it. They will now start the job as soon as they are in an adjacent block.
-Bug Fix: Selecting New Map from the overworld screen without selecting a tile would load the tile from the previous map.
-Bug Fix: Items were being spawned in trees.
-Bug Fix: A null reference related to the lighting algorithm going out of world bounds.
-Bug Fix: Some item counts weren't displaying correctly.

I'm very excited to share the Gwdir soon. They are super cool and I think that you will all like them. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for that update to the beta. :)

Thanks everyone!