We're squeezing in an important update before the combat update to add a feature that has been long requested and has been more than overdue: Out-of-sector-catch-up.

Basically, the way it works in Avorion is this: Since sectors take up a lot of memory, they're unloaded onto your hard drive when they haven't been visited for a while or when there are no players or player crafts in them.
The major problem that is created by this system, is that sectors without players or crafts are basically frozen, meaning they will be in the same state when they're re-loaded into memory as they were when they were unloaded.
You could visit a sector after hours and it would basically still be in the same state.
In order to tackle this issue, we've introduced a callback to our scripts that will enable scripts to get a notification for when a sector has been loaded from disk, and how long it has been since it was last loaded.

We've equipped the most important entity scripts (ie. factories and similar) with this kind of callback so that the economy isn't frozen every time you leave a sector.

The out-of-sector-catch-up will be available for all stations in existing savegames, while the new stocking mechanic will only be available to newly discovered factories, due to technical reasons.

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Time passed is now simulated for most important stations when players are not in the sector and it gets suspended to disk
• Habitats now buy books

"AI factories with no products available are basically useless to the player, and too many empty ingredient slots make the factory unable to produce. So we're changing the way that factories are initially stocked, giving them more overall interactibility with players. At the same time we've toned down the profit margin for highly stocked or understocked factories, since these cases happen a lot more often now."

• Factories can now have an initial stock of either medium amount of ingredients and products
• Factories can now have an initial low stock of ingredients and high stock of products
• Reduced impact of shortage and abundance of stock on prices from 20% to 10%

• Added a sector callback "onRestoredFromDisk" that will receive the amount of time in seconds that the sector has been suspended to disk

• Removed X-Mas Contest fighter tag
• Craft destruction is now logged for all players, not just logged in players

"As usual, bugfixes marked with UBR are user reported bug fixes. Thanks everybody for reporting!"

• [UBR] Fixed an issue where the area of jumpable sectors wasn't drawn on the galaxy map
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where the "build" option wasn't available in the interaction menu for alliance ships
• Fixed an issue in build mode where the block size could get too large and even NaN
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where organize goods missions weren't saved correctly
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where Bottan didn't jump away when receiving collision damage
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where ships duplicated after server crashes
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where trading ships would get stuck and block docking ports

We're squeezing in an important update before the combat update to add a feature that has been long requested and has been more than overdue: Out-of-sector-catch-up.

Basically, the way it works in Avorion is this: Since sectors take up a lot of memory, they're unloaded onto your hard drive when they haven't been visited for a while or when there are no players or player crafts in them.
The major problem that is created by this system, is that sectors without players or crafts are basically frozen, meaning they will be in the same state when they're re-loaded into memory as they were when they were unloaded.
You could visit a sector after hours and it would basically still be in the same state.
In order to tackle this issue, we've introduced a callback to our scripts that will enable scripts to get a notification for when a sector has been loaded from disk, and how long it has been since it was last loaded.

We've equipped the most important entity scripts (ie. factories and similar) with this kind of callback so that the economy isn't frozen every time you leave a sector.

The out-of-sector-catch-up will be available for all stations in existing savegames, while the new stocking mechanic will only be available to newly discovered factories, due to technical reasons.

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Time passed is now simulated for most important stations when players are not in the sector and it gets suspended to disk
• Habitats now buy books

"AI factories with no products available are basically useless to the player, and too many empty ingredient slots make the factory unable to produce. So we're changing the way that factories are initially stocked, giving them more overall interactibility with players. At the same time we've toned down the profit margin for highly stocked or understocked factories, since these cases happen a lot more often now."

• Factories can now have an initial stock of either medium amount of ingredients and products
• Factories can now have an initial low stock of ingredients and high stock of products
• Reduced impact of shortage and abundance of stock on prices from 20% to 10%

• Added a sector callback "onRestoredFromDisk" that will receive the amount of time in seconds that the sector has been suspended to disk

• Removed X-Mas Contest fighter tag
• Craft destruction is now logged for all players, not just logged in players

"As usual, bugfixes marked with UBR are user reported bug fixes. Thanks everybody for reporting!"

• [UBR] Fixed an issue where the area of jumpable sectors wasn't drawn on the galaxy map
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where the "build" option wasn't available in the interaction menu for alliance ships
• Fixed an issue in build mode where the block size could get too large and even NaN
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where organize goods missions weren't saved correctly
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where Bottan didn't jump away when receiving collision damage
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where ships duplicated after server crashes
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where trading ships would get stuck and block docking ports

We are happy to announce the winners of our X-Mas Fighter Building Contest:

Christmas Tree by Fichom
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1244056544


STCL-01 'Giftbringer' Light Attack Fighter by aots
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1243846876


MEC 'Polar Express' Cargo Vehicle by Velvet
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1243566137


All entries to the contest can be viewed by selecting the "X-Mas Fighter Contest 2017" tag in the workshop. Make sure to check them out! There were so many amazing builds that we had a really hard time selecting the winners. A big thank you to all the participants for sharing those beautiful fighters with us!

We are happy to announce the winners of our X-Mas Fighter Building Contest:

Christmas Tree by Fichom
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1244056544


STCL-01 'Giftbringer' Light Attack Fighter by aots
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1243846876


MEC 'Polar Express' Cargo Vehicle by Velvet
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1243566137


All entries to the contest can be viewed by selecting the "X-Mas Fighter Contest 2017" tag in the workshop. Make sure to check them out! There were so many amazing builds that we had a really hard time selecting the winners. A big thank you to all the participants for sharing those beautiful fighters with us!

Hey guys,

We hope you all have a great 2018! We’re back from spending the holidays with our families and are now putting the final polish on part I of the Combat Update. We’re also working through a stack of bug reports that has piled up over the break. Thank you all for playing, testing, reporting and helping us to improve the game!

In addition we’d like to thank everyone who participated in the X-Mas Fighter Building Contest. Your builds are creative, funny and beautiful and we’re having a lot of fun testing them! It’ll be a few days until we announce a winner because it’s a really tough decision.

Have fun!



Featuring:
Top image: Xmas Light by ᖷ⅃0ᗡUUႱ

Bottom image:
Schneeflocke by hmun
Skiing Santa - Fighter Blueprint by FriXioN
Blitzen by William the Bat

Hey guys,

We hope you all have a great 2018! We’re back from spending the holidays with our families and are now putting the final polish on part I of the Combat Update. We’re also working through a stack of bug reports that has piled up over the break. Thank you all for playing, testing, reporting and helping us to improve the game!

In addition we’d like to thank everyone who participated in the X-Mas Fighter Building Contest. Your builds are creative, funny and beautiful and we’re having a lot of fun testing them! It’ll be a few days until we announce a winner because it’s a really tough decision.

Have fun!



Featuring:
Top image: Xmas Light by ᖷ⅃0ᗡUUႱ

Bottom image:
Schneeflocke by hmun
Skiing Santa - Fighter Blueprint by FriXioN
Blitzen by William the Bat

It's time for the first ever building contest in Avorion: Build the coolest holiday themed fighter!

- Build a fighter
- Upload it to the workshop between 0:01 December 25th, 2017 and 23:59 January 1st, 2018 (CET)
- Use the X-Mas Fighter Contest 2017 tag
- Make sure it’s public and not only visible to you
- Add awesome screenshots to catch our attention!

The Winners will be announced mid January on the official Avorion forum and on Steam.

Fighters can only have a maximum of 200 Blocks. They don’t need engines, thrusters or any other blocks needed for flight so you can put all the 200 Blocks into the visual design.

- Only original work, no reposting of other people’s work.
- Fighters have to be submitted with the contest tag between 0:01 12/25/2017 and 23:59 1/1/2018 CET
- We will be featuring the winners on our social media platforms.
- By submitting a build to the workshop with the contest tag, you grant us permission to post your screenshots of this specific build or screenshots we take with your build on our social media sites, websites and forums.

It's time for the first ever building contest in Avorion: Build the coolest holiday themed fighter!

- Build a fighter
- Upload it to the workshop between 0:01 December 25th, 2017 and 23:59 January 1st, 2018 (CET)
- Use the X-Mas Fighter Contest 2017 tag
- Make sure it’s public and not only visible to you
- Add awesome screenshots to catch our attention!

The Winners will be announced mid January on the official Avorion forum and on Steam.

Fighters can only have a maximum of 200 Blocks. They don’t need engines, thrusters or any other blocks needed for flight so you can put all the 200 Blocks into the visual design.

- Only original work, no reposting of other people’s work.
- Fighters have to be submitted with the contest tag between 0:01 12/25/2017 and 23:59 1/1/2018 CET
- We will be featuring the winners on our social media platforms.
- By submitting a build to the workshop with the contest tag, you grant us permission to post your screenshots of this specific build or screenshots we take with your build on our social media sites, websites and forums.

Over the last weeks, we've been working hard on the Combat Update, and it's taking great shape! We did realize though, that there's a lot of content that we want to add, and it would take us a lot longer than anticipated to finish everything that we had in mind. Since we told you before that we want to do more frequent, but smaller updates, we're going to split this update into two parts:

Along with the usual bugfixes and QoL changes, this part will be containing one big new feature: Torpedoes! Since the purpose of this update is mainly to make combat more interesting and engaging, you (and the AI as well!) will be able to equip your ships with this high range, high damage but also high price weaponry. Torpedoes can be shot down, if you react fast enough, but if you don't, prepare yourself for some serious damage.

Alongside torpedoes, we're adding the specialized ships that we already announced in the last update. There will be ships that are especially strong against shields, hull, fighters, and so on. In order to be successful in combat you'll have to make sure that your strategy includes getting rid of these specialists first, before they take advantage of your weak points.

The last big features with this update will be more specialized weapons, giving weapons more specific roles, as well as improved control over your ships that are far away. You'll be able to visit sectors where you have ships or stations, so that you can give orders more effectively and don't have to warp all the way back to just tell your miner to change sectors.

In part II we're going to address more visual issues. You can, amongst other things, look forward to coaxial weaponry and player-created turret visuals!

Have fun!

[Screenshot: All of the reworked weapons firing. (Workshop ship by TESLA)]

Over the last weeks, we've been working hard on the Combat Update, and it's taking great shape! We did realize though, that there's a lot of content that we want to add, and it would take us a lot longer than anticipated to finish everything that we had in mind. Since we told you before that we want to do more frequent, but smaller updates, we're going to split this update into two parts:

Along with the usual bugfixes and QoL changes, this part will be containing one big new feature: Torpedoes! Since the purpose of this update is mainly to make combat more interesting and engaging, you (and the AI as well!) will be able to equip your ships with this high range, high damage but also high price weaponry. Torpedoes can be shot down, if you react fast enough, but if you don't, prepare yourself for some serious damage.

Alongside torpedoes, we're adding the specialized ships that we already announced in the last update. There will be ships that are especially strong against shields, hull, fighters, and so on. In order to be successful in combat you'll have to make sure that your strategy includes getting rid of these specialists first, before they take advantage of your weak points.

The last big features with this update will be more specialized weapons, giving weapons more specific roles, as well as improved control over your ships that are far away. You'll be able to visit sectors where you have ships or stations, so that you can give orders more effectively and don't have to warp all the way back to just tell your miner to change sectors.

In part II we're going to address more visual issues. You can, amongst other things, look forward to coaxial weaponry and player-created turret visuals!

Have fun!

[Screenshot: All of the reworked weapons firing. (Workshop ship by TESLA)]