Rocket

The latest update post on steam outlines the changes, being a celestial simulation.

Previously there was no simulation for the sun. It was just a light slapped onto the sky that rotated in one fixed direction. A rudimentary geocentric model.

Now we have a heliocentric model simulation using Kelpers laws of planetary motion. This means the position of the sun is based on your celestial bodies position in the solar system.

In addition, “north” in the game is an arbitrary direction that simply points towards “0,0,1” in the game world. It is like a grid north, it’s not necessarily where the body rotates around. It was never intended as a real value in the game and was added to the display simply as a convenience.

These forums are a place for you to interact with the developers and other players. That requires a high level of civility, understanding, and respect to maintain. What this space is not is a place for you where you are entitled to broadcast whatever opinions you may have without consequence.

Think of this space like the front of house in a Restaurant. While we welcome feedback, even when negative and passionately so, if you “speaking your mind” becomes disruptive or unwelcoming; then you may be asked to leave.
This our studio space and we actively moderate this area and encourage our staff to frequent it and interact with you. As such, we are legally obligated to protect our staff from harassment and unwelcoming behaviour.

Posts that are derogatory towards staff members will result in bans. Harassment or threats will be reported to the police
As an example saying “The spelling for the backpack description is terrible, whoever wrote that should be f... Read more

These forums are a place for you to interact with the developers and other players. That requires a high level of civility, understanding, and respect to maintain. What this space is not is a place for you where you are entitled to broadcast whatever opinions you may have without consequence.

Think of this space like the front of house in a Restaurant. While we welcome feedback, even when negative and passionately so, if you “speaking your mind” becomes disruptive or unwelcoming; then you may be asked to leave.

This our studio space and we actively moderate this area and encourage our staff to frequent it and interact with you. As such, we are legally obligated to protect our staff from harassment and unwelcoming behaviour.

Posts that are derogatory towards staff members will result in bans. Harassment or threats will be reported to the police

As an example... Read more

I was just in Prague visiting a video game studio, and I was asked by some other developers why we didn’t have a Czech flag!

There are Stationeers players all over the world!

We will try get more markings in

There is not currently any overall damage invulnerability in creative.

When you start a new world, it will tell you what impacts the difficulty setting will make on your game

Note for me the day length on Venus is 20 minutes. But a bug makes this not so for you.

So we have already solved it, and I explained how above. However due to a bug somewhere, it is not working for you.

In game (and software development in general really), there are often bugs that only appear for some users. This is the source of a common programmer meme “it works on my machine”.

Such bugs are often harder to solve because the first step of solving a bug is getting a “repro” I.e being able to reproduce it. Then you can test the fix to ensure it is fixed.

The day length is supposed to be 20 minutes. Any deviation of that is a bug.

Additionally, we plan to allow you modify the length of day at some point in future as well

The simulation speed is scaled so that a day is 20 minutes for each world. So on venus the celestial simulation is sped up. You can see these values, such as the sidereal year, on the new world info screen.

For Venus the sidereal year (which is the same as a Venusian year as it orbits the sun) is slightly less than 20 minutes.

Originally posted by dan.racke: So I am unsure what you are referring to on the single player side.

As it says above, bugs in the worlds would be baked into the save. Note that it says "and single player" in what I posted twice above.

There were 238 tickets relating to map bugs that had been fixed, but those fixes would not be applied to saves that were started before they were fixed. That was only people who reported the bugs.

Any world issues that were fixed, would not be applied to world saves. This is because the world saves took the base template, and would never pull it back in. So me saying "baked into the save" is not a subjective statement, it would be impossible for the fix to have appea... Read more

Originally posted by MrBigras: @Rocket, you should have said, that in effect, by being Heliocentric, it's the first time in the game that the sun is actually "fixed". 😂

yes actually, that would probably have been a helpful way to describe it.

As you noted, there was no simulation before - just a light strapped to the ceiling. Now there is a simulation.

We moved from a geocentric representation of the universe, to a heliocentric one where planets follow Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion.

If you would like to play on the old version, change your beta branch to "prerocket" and you can continue.
Additionally, we have no DRM in the game. So you could copy the files anywhere and continue playing forever, even if steam and our studio goes away.

If you would like to play on the old version, change your beta branch to "prerocket" and you can continue.
Additionally, we have no DRM in the game. So you could copy the files anywhere and continue playing forever, even if steam and our studio goes away.

Originally posted by dan.racke: That's fine but what about us people who don't care about multiplayer?

You missed the following:

Originally posted by Rocket: The old system...baked a lot of bugs into worlds for both single and multiplayer.

If we fixed a bug in the world data for the Moon, for example, it would not propagate through to your custom world save.

If you would like to play on the old version, change your beta branch to "prerocket" and you can ... Read more

The sun previously followed a Geocentric model. In other words, the planet was the center of the universe, with the sun following a predefined path around that with only an angle against the horizon being changed.

This became considerably harder to maintain, at the same time as providing additional functionality. For example, the location of skybox objects such as Jupiter when on Europa, or Earth when on the Moon - were completely wrong and totally in contrast to what would make even a modicum of sense in real life.

So we have moved to a simulated Heliocentric model, where the sun is the center, and bodies in the orbit around that following Kepler's Laws of Planetary motion.

Not only does this allow us to do a lot of cool things, it also solves a *massive* amount of bugs and problems with our existing skybox objects. This somewhat parallels real life, where it became increasingly hard to justify the geocentric model - with very elaborate and complex exp... Read more

The international markings pack was based entirely on sales order, with New Zealand only added because it is where the game is added.

Please remember we typically lose money so we do need to have a chance to recoup costs for DLCs and the game.

If we can make back the cost of making it, we will be able to add more uniforms

Originally posted by WarStalkeR: Hmm... If this is an approach, then it is justified and I will buy DLC to support you, even though Israel isn't in DLC.

P. S. You actually can release 3D model template (or a couple of them), with template textures and instructions on how to do it, so I can add it on my own.

That’s actually a fantastic idea. I will have to make a system to load the textures, but this should absolutely be possible.

Nevertheless, we will try to expand the pack as time and cost allow.

A great idea thank you!

Originally posted by Jackson: does anyone know if the new orbital sim means that the sun will rise and fall in different places over an ingame year or if it will just vary the height of the sun. also does this affect temperatures?

Yes the sun position will be different through the “year” of the body you are on. It will affect solar irradiance, following the inverse square law based on distance from the sun.

We are looking at extending this to more season changes as well

The old system caused a lot of desync issues in multiplayer, and baked a lot of bugs into worlds for both single and multiplayer.

If we fixed a bug in the world data for the Moon, for example, it would not propagate through to your custom world save.

Now the game save records an ID of the world to use, and looks that world data up. So if we fix a bug with the Moon, that propagates through to your save.

Now instead of trying to send all the data to clients when they join a game, we can just tell clients to find world "Moon" and load that. This solves the desync issues and dramatically reduces the download size required to join a game.

if you type:
orbit view into the console, you will see orbital simulation details

if you type
orbit debug you will enable debug keys. Using the numpad up/down, you can change latitude, and left/right will change your longitude, which will change how the sun rises and sets.

Note now the sun will be positioned based on the position of your planet in its stellar system - so that means the motion of the sun will be based on your position using Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_laws_of_planetary_motion

Originally posted by casperorillian:

Originally posted by Ghost: I just put a brief guide up to show how to edit your difficulty's in the base game. This includes your hunger. If you have a save just edit it there

Thanks. Although sadly this really shouldnt be needed. The old system having the menu option was perfectly fine. There was no reason the devs removed it.

We covered why in the steam announcement:

Previously, it could be defined as ...

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