Your comments

Yeah, I was actually thinking the same thing right after I posted my response. The player could always re-edit the filename to have them viewable in-game again, but I'm not really that concerned about it. I could definitely implement this pretty easily.

As much as I agree with you on the aspect of it being unrealistic, I don't think I like the idea of deleting photos after death. I want the photography mechanic to be something where players are encouraged to take interesting photos that they want to access later and share with others. I don't want shots that they might want to share be deleted just because they died. What I could do though is make the game skip photos on the datapad that have a date and time that are after the current date and time.

This is currently a side effect of using two different types of light rendering for the interior hab and exterior hab. There are a few little hacks that I could try to implement in order to make them more similar. One would be to quickly fade the ambient lighting of the exterior hab airlock as the door closes, but I haven't tried this yet. 

Yep. Similar cause. Thanks. Fixed for next patch update.

Yeah, this was an order-of-operations that resulted in the character controller thinking that it was falling even though it was locked in place. I've fixed it for the next patch update. Thanks for catching it.

It looks like the scanner markers for all Remote Outposts may have been deleted accidentally. They should be back in the next patch. I also fixed the visibility collider for the pop tents so that they are discoverable from all sides when approaching. The markers not appearing on your map should also be fixed. 

The delay before repeating the input of a held down button has now been increased. Not sure about the audio clicks happening twice occasionally. Still looking into that bit, but hopefully the overall functionality of the inputs should feel better after the next patch update.

Thanks. I believe I have this fixed again. I'll probably put out a patch with some other fixes soon.

I'll be putting this live today. Going to mark this topic as completed even though the topic expanded well beyond the original post. Any new changes/suggestions should be in a new thread.

I'm going to address each of your points from your original post first.


A few specific issues I've noticed:

  • Systems appear to charge the battery even when they are turned off. I don't think this is how it should work, since it means that all the panel slots effectively belong to Electrical, not to their respective systems. When a system is turned off or has component failures, it should not be able to send charge to the battery, and its charge should be reported as zero on the hab status screen.
    • RESPONSE: I noticed this as well and it is fixed now for public release of 0.61.
  • The Reoxygenator power use line is "stuck", it always reads as 50 even when turned off, and it's added to the total drain on top of the screen. However, it doesn't actually drain power when turned off, only the display shows it all the time.
    • RESPONSE: Found and fixed for 0.61 public release.
  • When Electrical is turned off, the charge side of the total charge/drain line should drop to 0, since there's no actual charge happening without Electrical. The systems do produce those units, but at that time, without Electrical, it's not charge as such.
    • RESPONSE: Found and fixed for 0.61 public release.
  • There was one time when the hab status display completely broke: most of the text disappeared, and a single line of text (the charge/drain line of the Heater) started to fill the screen first upwards fron where it normally is, then also down to the bottom, and after a few seconds the normal status text returned. It was during a storm, so I'm not sure if it was just some intended but very rare display corruption related to that, but didn't really look like it.
    • RESPONSE: I noticed this happen a few times during testing before I put out the public beta, but obviously I didn't quite get it fixed it you still saw it. I'm hoping the changes I've made since public beta of 0.61 should now have fixed this for the public release of 0.61. I will likely revisit this display and redo it completely in the future. For now I kind of retrofitted it quickly just to get the new functionality in.

A few notes on balance and possible improvements/changes:

  • The Reoxygenator could switch to the low power state when there's no water available for it (nothing to break down so that part of the system powers down).
    • RESPONSE: Good idea and implemented for 0.61 public release.
  • The water and oxygen production rate is way too high. Since systems are now running constantly, unlike before when they throttled down for the night, they are producing probably close to twice as much as before. Their base production rate should be lowered significantly to compensate for this.
    • RESPONSE: I agree and I've reduced the production rate to be about 60% of what they were before. Might still tune them down lower in the future.
  • Power production vs. use feels a bit high currently (I got about 40% left morning to morning with all systems running and suit charged up), and in part because of that, and in part to make choices between what to turn off a bit more interesting, I think the power use of the three producing systems could be tweaked a little as follows: Water Reclaimer: 60/45 Reoxygenator: 50/40 Heater: 55/35 The increase is not as significant as it looks, since the Heater is practically always in low power mode (and the Water Reclaimer is also likely to hit cap after a while and power down, in which case it can even be turned off if you want to save power), so while previously the "nominal" drain from these 3 systems was 50+50+40=140, it would be 60+50+35=145 with these values. I think this would be just enough added drain to make the power budget a bit tighter.
    • RESPONSE: I've decided not to make any changes to the power use just yet. I like the simplicity of the 50 cost max and the 100 charge max per module. Also, in the hopefully near future there will be a new thing to expend your reserve battery on (*wink* check the control options screen *wink*).
  • Because of the offline systems still providing charge, I coouldn't get really good info on how the power holds up during a storm, but in may be necessary to raise the minimum panel efficiency from 15% to 20%. as changes in the panel efficiency now have a different impact on the power balance than they had with the percentage based implementation.
    • RESPONSE: I haven't had time to test this more myself, but I want to get out the 0.61 public release in the next 24 hours before I leave for a short weekend trip. I'm keeping the minimum at 15% and unless it is literally impossible to wait out the Big Storm scenario with that minimum efficiency then it will probably stay that way. In the future I'm planning to add battery items that you can charge and stockpile for use in the case of a dust storm which would make a normal dust storm easier to survive than it is currently.

Concerning all the other changes you have come up with for the hab status screen: I agree that it could use some improvements. And in fact your suggestions may serve quite nicely. But I will have to wait on that until later. I want to move on to a larger feature implementation that I teased above.