Hey Folks!

Ostranauts v0.12.1.15 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our recently released "Rate My Ship" update, which includes some performance improvements, helmet and airlock fixes, and some other bug fixes.

Saves from v0.12.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

• Fixed a bug that caused AI to put helmet on when considering a task in the void, even if they have no airlock permissions.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused AI to be gasping for an instant when donning a helmet.
  
• Changed AI to ignore helmets and airlock rules if player manually orders them outside.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause NPCs spawned in off-screen ships to have zero atmo in their helmets when that ship became on-screen.
  
• Added code to prevent multiple AIs from doing costly decision-making and pathfinding in the same frame. Instead, they will spread their cost over time.
  
• Added pathfinding optimization to pre-check origin and destination pressures against airlock permissions, to cut short any invalid attempts.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused accessing the fridge to use a point too far away, sometimes causing strange pathfinding/airlock issues.
  
• Changed AI to only tell player they will find a suit if they add the pledge to do it.
  
• Fixed the food carts on K-Leg to use correct art for each cart.
  
• Fixed a bug that added extra O2 to charged EVA helmets every time they were put on.
  
• Changed several sections of code to use cached values, for better performance.
  
• Added RoomA and RoomB to all door objects in game, for consistency.
  
• Changed debug overlay to show more user-friendly names for rooms.
  

A number of the changes in this patch involve AIs, helmets, and airlock rules. There were some inconsistencies in the way those rules were applied, which could result in AIs not wearing helmets when they should (and wearing them when they shouldn't), as well as AIs going and/or not going through airlocks when they should.

Overall, the AI behavior surrounding airlocks and helmets should be more consistent now. Namely, if the player manually orders a task outside the ship, the AI will just do it, regardless of helmet status and airlock permissions. And if the AI self-assigns a task from the PDA orders (or otherwise), it will decide about helmets and honor the airlock permissions.

We also fixed a few issues that contributed to NPCs walking around OKLG with voided helmets, causing them to die. Hopefully, you should only see NPCs with voided helmets now when encountering them on a derelict.

This patch also includes a few more performance improvements, aimed at reducing the laggy framerate and framerate spikes.

One big change is to spread out costly AI pathfinding and decision-making processes so they don't all pile-up in the same frame. Instead, after one AI uses those code paths, any others that want it must wait 0.1s and try again. So if 10 AIs are all deciding what they should do next, it'll take a minimum of 1.0s for them all to get a turn. Framerate might still slow a bit if that happened, but at least it won't be a single paused frame.

A second optimization we added was to pre-check paths against airlock rules, so we can skip any potentially-expensive pathfinding calculations on paths doomed from the start. Not all paths will benefit from this, but in large, crowded places like OKLG, we found this could reduce the time spent pathfinding significantly.

We also realized the food carts in OKLG have their art swapped! So we fixed that.

And finally, there were a handful of smaller, less notable optimization and AI fixes. As mentioned before, performance tuning is mostly slow, incremental improvements. Rarely do we find a silver bullet to fix it all at once. So we'll be continuing to work towards better performance in 0.12 builds alongside our work in developing 0.13 features and content.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,
Daniel Fedor
Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC