[2022] Nitrogen Ice, Optimizations & Tutorial Improvements

The pace of our development has been able to substantially ramp up. The refactor work to redo much of the games foundations is now paying huge rewards in terms of our ability to iterate and produce content and fixes. Additionally, the new team members we added over time are now operating at full capacity with a much more robust codebase.



Through the week and the weekend we worked with the community on discord to continue to hit off some of the more problematic bugfixes, introduce a few community requests (such as exposing more logic variables), and fix bugs. A huge thank you, as always, to our amazing community for this hard work.

Support our development with this New Cosmetic DLC pack
Many on our Discord have been asking for ways to support the project. Last year, we put together a cosmetic pack for the Human Species, but got distracted with our significant refactor. But here we go - a purely cosmetic pack for the Human species, adding hair and new faces.

This DLC offers players a way to support for our development. If you like the work we have been doing, please do consider purchasing

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2089290/Stationeers_Human_Cosmetics_Pack/?beta=0
We have added a note to all our DLC indicating their purpose. We continue to add new content (such as new worlds) without locking them behind DLC, instead opting to put packs out like this to offer ways for players to support the project.

Stationeers is quite a niche game with a limited market. Thanks to the support of the community so far, many of whom are purchasing the DLC simply to support the project, we have been able to expand our great team and delivered on a major refactor to the project. We look forward to a bright future from the base we have now established.

Localization: German Voices In Game


The German community continues to be incredibly strong for the game. We still have a long way to go with our localization, and we will continue to work hard at this. But in the meantime, we have a thank you to the German community by including our first voice pack in the game. Currently, German voice will only be used if your language is set to German as a temporary measure, in future we will allow you to set the voice pack language separate from the text language.

Additionally, we have redone the voice pack audio effects in line with community feedback to make them less "clean" sounding. As always, please let us know your thoughts about these changes and we will continue to adjust them.

Optimizations
As we work towards establishing what the "stationeers" survival experience will be, we want to make sure maximum scale is supported. We believe one of the defining characteristics of Stationeers is the sheer scale the game is able to simulate. This is possible due to extensive work to use the maximum cores on your computer, and for multiplayer provide a very efficient system to send data out to clients.

This week we include a lot more optimizations, many quite small in their own right, but together (especially with large bases) many users might notice some further improvement in their frame rates. We will continue to optimize the game more and more with every update.

Airlock Speed and Performance
One specific area players will notice is that Airlock Circuitboards now operate significantly faster. They're also more performant as well. If you have many airlocks running, you will notice improvement performance now.

Atmospheres Changes


As we head towards broader enhancements to our atmospherics system, we need to better provide resources for players to be ready.

Nitrogen Ice now spawns
This week we have nitrogen ice spawning in worlds (non hot ones). This can be used as an inert gas, which will become important as we introduce concepts such as O2/CO2 Toxicity. Additionally, it is useful to reduce the flammability of your atmosphere.

Coming Soon: O2/CO2 Toxicity
As noted above, balancing your air requirements is going to become much more important. Managing the atmosphere to balance all you need from it will gain increasing importance. You will need to start balancing the amount of O2, ensuring not too much CO2, and using inert gases (such as Nitrogen) to balance the difference.

Coming Soon: Fire Improvements
We have extensive changes coming in the next few weeks that will make fire much more of a hazard. Already in this update, a few changes introduce more sources of ignition (such as fabrication machines, microwave, etc...). A complete refactor to fire will be released in the next few weeks which will really up the danger of fire in general as well as visually enhance it a great deal. Use these next few weeks to start preparing your bases with a view of safety.

New World Preview Scenes


We've been working to improve the preview scenes for the worlds, so you'll notice some beautiful new views before you head in! Additionally, Vulcan now has a new and improved Black Hole sun to really enhance the experience. A new world is planned to be added sometime soon as well, we're thinking how we could use this new world to enhance the game further so stay tuned.

Your support makes this possible The major refactor has been a huge milestone for us and we think you can already see the tremendous success. Your support through bug reporting, suggestions, and direct involvement with our team on discord makes a tremendous difference.

If you like the progress we have made, please consider taking a moment to leave a positive review. This makes a great deal of difference to the project. We have worked hard on this project now for five years, and we feel confident the game is substantially improved from when we started. Many projects steer clear of the hard tasks, and we are proud to have taken them on.

Additionally, you can support us by purchasing the DLC we made to allow those whole like the game to support us, and in return get something a little fun to continue to use in the game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1038400/Stationeers_Zrilian_Species_Pack/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1038500/Stationeers_HEM_Droid_Species_Pack/

Changelog v0.2.3456.16909

• Fixed in game hair variant not changing correctly when wearing hats or helmets
  
• Added Appliances (Microwave/ReagentMixer) and Fabricators (Autolathe etc...) are now ignition sources. They will also put out a small amount of extra heat when they are operating. Be careful using in environments that have volatiles etc...
  
• Added ability to ping ui slots for tutorials
  
• Fixed misc NREs when loading game on dedicated
  
• Fixed CommsMotherboard exception on dedicated when joining
  
• Fixed saving spinner being visible when you launch the game until a game is saved
  
• Minor optimizations to logic screw audio noises.
  
• Minor optimizations to audio, trading, and logicOnOff button.
  
• Optimized occlusion manager handling of dynamic things.
  
• Optimized batterycell flashing animation and helmet switch state animations.
  
• Optimized LogicDisplay render text changes, and roadflare burning.
  
• Optimized wheel rotation for stacker, vending machine refrigerator.
  
• Optimizing drilling animations for the Mining Drill.
  
• Optimized movement controller to reduce memory allocation for jumping and emotes.
  
• Fixed mission pings not showing up for things in slots
  
• Fixed Star settings were not being correctly applied to world. New Star class (may require a change by modded worlds) applied for the two star mappings. Also optimized the star rotation and material functionality.
  
• Removed obsolete methods. Pointing Checkfiles to new StationSaveUtils class
  
• Fixed NRE directory when starting new game
  
• Added German suit voice.
  
• Updated Audio processing on English suit voice.
  
• Added placeholders and migration methods for new save directory structure.
  
• Fixed broken seams between chunks. This is an exploratory fix, it may now allow seams to be better sealed. This allows chunks to make as many rebuild tasks as it likes.
  
• Fixed normal maps too heavy for new human cosmetic pack faces
  
• Added Large Passive Radiator. It is optimised for convective cooling/heating and will be most effective in environments with world atmosphere. The Device is fully passive and the liquid/Gas will flow throw the radiator in the direction of pressure.
  
• Added ItemKitPassiveLargeRadiator recipe to PipeBender Tier 2 printer.
  
• Updated Character Creation scene, using the same suit (hardsuit) for both masculine and feminine human species.
  
• Fixed helmet added in character creation scene doesn't match the suit.
  
• Added DLC cosmetic hair to all female and male DLC characters.
  
• Fixed facial expression not working for one of the new faces
  
• Optimized locker handling of making items visible/invisible when closing.
  
• Optimized render change assignments when being made off the main thread.
  
• Optimized off thread changes for Entities, Sensors, IC Writer Motherboard, and Logic Buttons.
  
• Optimized Status update (blinking notifications).
  
• Optimized player suit leak system and prepared context strings for localization.
  
• Fixed skybox prefabs would remain in scene when returning to main menu from a game.
  
• Updated all menu scene previews for world to be more interesting, with additional prefabs and more effects, new textures, and models.
  
• Replaced old UI planetary main menu Vulcan scene with an improved one.
  
• Replaced in-game Vulcan Black Hole Sun with an animated and visually improved model.
  
• Fixed plants were decaying when planted in a tray. Credit: Neouni
  
• Optimized item decay. Was being handled individually (!!). Now moved to a centralized tick, on the server and client, that handles decay on items. Currently being handled on the main thread but in future can be moved to a worker system. This could give significant memory and performance improvements for bases that have a lot of decayable items.
  
• Optimized Station Batteries so their flashing image was no longer generating coroutines and causing memory churn.
  
• Optimized Chunk Generation and item out of bounds despawning to reduce memory churn and CPU usage in cleaning up, especially when lots of chunks are being rendered at once or items are falling out of bounds.
  
• Optimized WaitThenInteract for all interactables. Now no longer uses coroutines that was causing memory turnover and wasted CPU cycles.
  
• Optimized WallLight shadow changes. Now no longer uses coroutines that was causing memory turnover and wasted CPU cycles. This was occuring as players walked around, so very often especially if you had a lot of lights. With large bases this will reduce some of the GC overhead for memory, helping slightly for CPU.
  
• Removed old LogicType.Idle functionality from ArcFurnace, as it was effectively useless.
  
• Added LogicType.Idle to ArcFurnace. While return 1 while the ArcFurnace is actively smelting, and 0 once it has finished.
  
• Added LogicType.Idle variable to door. Will return 1 while the door is animating, false while it is not 0.
  
• Pulled ArcFurnace tooltip strings out into GameString so they can be localized to other languages. This will be a long process where we pull out of a lot of these strings.
  
• Optimized ArcFurnace to not use coroutines for smelting. Changed from LocalGrid to GridPosition for source of smelting gas, possibly fixing arc furnace if it is the source of heat spot bug sometimes reported on forums.
  
• Fixed ReagentReader next mode was reversed, causing the wrong direction to be used when getting the next mode. Credit: Risu.
  
• Fixed possibility of an invalid cast of an enum for Programmable Chips for double and int. Credit: Risu.
  
• Added LogicType.EnvironmentEfficiency and LogicType.WorkingGasEfficiency values to be read on the StirlingEngine, at the request of Mordiaky from discord.
  
• Added action to motherboards and circuitboards for AttackWith a screwdriver. If you use a screwdriver on a motherboard or circuitboard, you can clear the motherboard. This will attempt to delete all references on the board, helping when they get bricked due to null devices containing a reference when deleted. Options to do this on the card will be dealt with later, but this is a temporary solution.
  
• Optimized AdvancedAirlockControl and AirlockControl to no longer use coroutines giving performance gains, especially where they are used often. Also increases the speed of the airlocks significantly. Reduces the GC can CPU usage for airlock controllers.
  
• Added IsBusy property to Doors to allow for faster operation of airlocks and associated systems.
  
• Fixed exceptions caused by missing cosmetics data on characters during load.
  
• Fixed handling of null character kit resulting in halted execution during load. Now will gracefully print an error in the console and continue loading.
  
• Added Nitrice (Ice) item and Nitrice voxel deposits. These will only appear in new worlds, as VoxelTypes are created for your save file, to preserve save functionality during balancing and changes. 'Nitrice' is a form of Solid Nitrogen found as deposits. It is an inert gas that can be useful for pressurizing atmospheres. It will become more useful once O2 and CO2 toxicity is introduced.
  
• Fixed a variety of strings in the Stationpedia were incorrectly using color tags.
  
• Added a lot of links in the stationpedia that were missing, to help people find information better.
  
• Fixed missing character kits getting stripped in build
  
• Fixed server pausing on hosted server.
  
• Fixed head meshes not showing up in character customization
  
• Fixed missing materials in character customization scene
  
• Added placeholders for improving steam cloud sync for saves
  
• Fixed port being parsed as an int32. Changed to uint16 all the way down the chain.
  
• removed blocked.txt in favour of new banning system
  
• Improved server banning. Now adds ID to blacklist regardless if client exists. File location now respects SaveData setting.
  
• Fixed LargeExtendableRadiator required a mkII angle grinder to deconstruct (now any angle grinder will deconstruct it).
  
• Added Script for Large Radiator.
  
• Fixed issues with player cookie being used on dedicated server
  
• Fixed character dlc missing script in player prefab again
  
• Moved devconfig to persistent folder and out of repo
  
• Fixed character hair choice being offset by one on loading character customisation
  
• Fixed missing character kits for DLC
  
• Fixed character changes reverting when opening character creation
  
• Fixed voice notification changes not saving
  
• Added new graphic for quick save button
  
• Added new human DLC pack
  
• Adjusted game string formatting for localization
  
• Added `AutoPauseServer` setting when no clients are connected. True by default.
  
• Added meta server game session refresh attempt after a failture happening.
  
• Added placeholder for nonsteam clientId system.
  
• Changed pinging meta server to every 30s. Now silently tries again if fails
  
• Fixed Localisation error for bottle slots on powered WaterBottleFiller.
  
• Fixed Powered WaterBottleFiller Throws error when using smart rotate.
  
• Removed Animator Component from Powered WaterBottleFiller.
  
• Fixed InvalidOperationException in ElectricityManager.SerialiseDeltaState() when player joins
  
• Changed RocketBinaryWriter.Position from method to property to add setter as well.