Rocket

Rocket



19 Nov

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Originally posted by JeanDeaux: What I'd really like to see brought in from Icarus is the multiplayer hosting. It's MUCH better than Stationeers host.
Stationeers and ICARUS use the same steam API method for Steam connections, so I am not sure what you are referring to.

Using Steam's API is not recommended, where avoidable, for either game - as SteamP2P has many issues and has been deprecated by valve themselves, in favor of Steam Relay or Sockets. These new API elements, though, are still not as efficient as native RakNet support as Stationeers has.

What is the aspect of ICARUS you think is missing? It may be a bug or other issue?
Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Steam changes a lot of their systems, so the best way to guarantee you have the version you want (and for steam to not try update it) is to make a copy of the game. We ship the game with zero copy protection or DRM, so you can copy the game anywhere on your computer and it will never update.

We have reached out to steam previously regarding download issues and other issues such as corruption with steam cloud. However we have not had a response. As such, we recommend copying the game somewhere.
Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Originally posted by JTHM: I asked this same question back in 2019. Is the end in sight?
On the steam page there are tags regarding the early access state of games. If you click on the store page there is a blue box that appears for early access games. This is only displayed while the game is in early access, once it goes "1.0", then this box will disappear.

In this box is the following:
We're committed to delivering these consistent and substantial updates to the game until both we and our community consider the game ready for a v1.0 release.

We still have substantial updates we would like to make to the game before we think it is 1.0. The game has been updated regularly through the period, including a patch today.

There is some concern in our studio that going "1.0" will indicate to many we consider the game "finished", so therefore we wa... Read more

12 Oct

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Agreed! Thats the idea really behind the terrain rework. We need to make it actually practical, and have good reason, to have multiple bases. Then you also have a reason for a rover!
Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
The maps arent going to be "small". The current rough plan is for 8x8km2, which is as big (for example) as the ICARUS map. That is the largest sized map you generally make in engines like Unreal under default settings.

Currently, it is not actually possible for your games to be limitless, as the terrain system is so non-performant and memory heavy - that you can't really effectively go that far from the origin anyway.

This will also allow us to give reasons for exploration, such as making deep miners work better in certain locations etc...

20 Sep

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Good news is that the terrain system is being completely replaced. this will allow us to do a lot of cool things with terrain we could not before, clear out a bunch of these bugs, make the game substantially more appealing, and more.

09 Aug

Post
    Rocket on Steam - Thread - Direct
Many of you will be familiar with Sol, one of the key characters in the ICARUS universe our players experience. When we made the "No Rescue" Trailer, the game was in constant flux and we could not put together a trailer with just game footage in the time we had to meet the PC Gamer show. I proposed we do a "talking heads" style trailer, using real world actors, inspired by a like of "Ken Burns" style documentaties and how well it worked in a fictional setting like Interstellar. One of the people on the first casting option sheets was Stig, who absolutely fitted what we wanted in the prospector. I actually got to meet Stig during the filming, and he was fantastic. He had come into the studio several times and worked with our audio team. He really "got" the project, and his enthusiasm and work really left a mark on the game as a whole.

You can read more about the amazing life of "Stig, The Piano Man" in the following article:
... Read more

19 Jul

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
As noted above, it is currently intention. We may tie it to difficulties (allowing modders to make difficulties that turn it of), or maybe introduce devices or something that the player has to do to enable it to happen.

This originally occurred way back when Stationeers was only in space. So it made sense once the player had made a "room" there would be gravity, as it got very annoying floating everywhere inside.

02 Jun

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
How are you hosting it? Is it at home or on a server provider?

If it is at home, ISPs will often make changes to how internet is provisioned that make it complex to run dedicated servers. This can include detecting ports being forwarded and used that look like torrents, and blocking them.

RocketNet (the multiplayer synchronization method we developed) is binary data packed using L4Z compression and sent regularly at 20MS. This could fall afoul of some ISPs torrent detection.

If it was working and now is not, it might be worth checking with your ISP that they haven’t made any changes that would require you to alter your port forwarding setup.

19 May

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Our multiplayer system is working fine? If you have issues, let us know what they are.

We currently play the game on a dedicated server ourselves very regularly and fix the bugs we find with it. However most of the time this is working just fine.

Note that is you play using Steam Peer2Peer, we have found their relay system (it is not true peer to peer) does not work very well with larger bases.

So Multiplayer currently works very well, though we do not recommend using Steam P2P, as their relay servers are not as reliable for larger bases.

18 May

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
We used to review the currencies for different regions but with how often things change, it costs us more money to adjust the currencies that we will make in revenue. So we accept steams preset currencies.

As an example, in the last month we have made 724 USD (gross) from poland, which is about USD 400 cash to us. That is the total revenue for Poland for the entire month.

08 May

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
PrinterInstruction.MissingRecipeReagent

Will only show if the recipe is preceeded by a "wait for recipe" instruction. In other words, the MissingReagentRecipe instructions will only be populated if the machine is waiting to complete a recipe.

By default, the machine will not wait - and will skip a recipe and try the next - if it does not have the reagents.

30 Apr

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
There are several ways that Ices can melt in the game:
1. They are in an atmosphere and they are above their freezing temperature
2. They are in direct sunlight

We doing a multi-threaded custom simulation and voxel raycast for sunlight, for performance reasons. This means that there is a chance* that if Ice is on the terrain, the voxel may be filled enough that if the ice is in the right place it might not be considered accessible to the sun.

28 Apr

Post
    Rocket on Steam - Thread - Direct
Contains the following fixes and new features
  • RELOCATED: Tagged mission item so it will show in relevant crafting filter
  • Added active modifier list above mount's health bar when riding
  • Fixed bug where mounts/tames wouldn't attack targets if they failed to path
  • Fixed bug where Moa mount wouldn't attack after unlocking required talent and setting to Defensive/Aggressive
  • Fixed pets having mount talent growth, granting additional talents over
  • Adding Subclasses of Apply To Target so all medicines have their correct 'in-use' modifier
  • Adding viewable creature modifiers when viewing a mount or tames tooltip in world
  • Adding Initial Missions to Styx and Olympus Open worlds to build a mission device similar to Prometheus
Missing from this hotfix The following was supposed to be in this update but failed in test. They will be fixed in the next update.
    ...
Read more

18 Apr

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
This is excellent detailed information, thank you. I’ll see what I can find from our end

28 Mar

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
We wrote our own networking solution and targeted the absolute gold standard for throughput.

This means we make a “byte array”, so all data that needs to be synchronised is written into this in order. It’s then compressed, and cut into packets, sent.

When it is received, it is then unpacked and read in order.

However the reason this method isn’t popular in modern video games is it is very brittle and complex to work with. This means it is very easy for data to be misread, or if a bug happens during reading/writing then the whole array is junk data.

What this means is that the same tiny bug can cause tremendous issues, completely desync the entire game, or cause very little noticable impact.

The good news is the issues themselves, once found, are extremely easy to fix. It’s usually something like writing as an integer and reading as a byte.

24 Mar

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
There is no point to adding rovers until we have addressed terrain and world size. We had rovers, and they caused issues with physics and loading issues.

Rather than do several things poorly and call it a day, we are methodically going through and laying the foundation for us to properly address game issues.

Once we have redone the terrain and how world sizes are configured we will be able look at rovers again.

22 Mar

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Most likely because tutorials were broken for some time while still being in the game. Now they are disabled in the game with a message while we try and fix the issues with them.

Not having tutorials is a big problem for new and returning players, as it makes it hard for them to engage with the new content. This can leave some people understandably frustrated.

05 Feb

Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
The atmospherics system works on its own series of threads and uses thread pools for part of its calculation. This means that for modern PC's the atmospherics system isn't likely to cause performance issues as it is always working concurrently with the rest of the game.

Atmospherics is not likely to cause a performance issue; lighting and rendering are the usual causes of performance issues as bases grow.
Comment
    Rocket on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Stationeers & ICARUS teams have always been different, we have never stepped away from developing the game.

Sometimes updates are paused for us to complete very significant refactors, such as completely redoing core aspects of the game so we could completely redo multiplayer from the ground up.

The studio has many projects in development simultaneously. ICARUS, one of our other games, is developed with a very different game engine (Unreal) so it is not really feasible for our Stationeers staff (which uses Unity) to switch over.