0.187.5 - Lords of the Ring

A brand new rings

When looking from telescopic distance the Rings of Saturn appear to be flat and monotonous, but they are not such up-close.

I took a good look at the map of the rings the game uses, and I found it quite bland. This release fixes that, with brand new map of the rings. You will now encounter different, distinct regions - places where there are veins of minerals and quite barren, regions of tiny ringroids and huge concentrations big rocks. There is a lot of variety now and you should find that regions are different, even when they made from the same water ice.

Gravimetric scanner will be now much more useful - at least until you learn how to distinguish the field just by observing the movement of the ringroidroids. You can also now spot and visit huge, hundred of kilometres long features of the rings and see them up close

Soak tests to ensure stability

Nothing breaks the game as much as unexpected crashes. Games are, ultimately, complex pieces of software and many things can go wrong on many levels. To ensure that game is stable I'm running soak tests - rigging the in-game NPC AI to players ship and let it mine on hours on hours. Current version went through over 20 hours of testing without crash, so I hope we managed to find all the problems.

More bugs fixed

As with every release, I try to patch up every problem you come across and report. Here is a list of what's fixed in this one:

• Phage stations won't get hostile anymore if you burn them a bit with your thrusters while docking.
• Fixed pixel doubling setting to not require game restart.
• Fixed adrenaline booster to work again.
• Gravimetric scanner had much too many noise, making the readings unusable in some regions of the rings.
• Fixed a bug in maintenance drones that caused them to be affected by your mechanic jury-rigging the ship.
• Fixed some visual glitches.
• Improved collision detection and AI path-finding, so ships will not ram so readily.
• Key prompt for comms and accompanying chat bubble would disappear or appear at wrong moments.
• You found couple of conditions that caused crashes, and I patched them up.