Update v0.2.5259.23818

In World Water

v0.2.5259.23818
Type	Big Update
Release	11.10.2024 (Fri) UTC
Hyperlink	SteamDB
Adjacent Updates
Subsequent	Short Circuit: Liquid Device Interactions (v0.2.5284.23867)
Previous	Hotfix (v0.2.5225.23702)
Back to overview of all updates

Stationeers now has in world liquid simulations. Because of the phase change update, liquids became a major part of the game. They were allowed to exist in the world, but they were represented by a foggy steam effect, and they moved around in all dimensions just like a gas. The motivation behind adding realistic fluid movement is an expectation that the game created for itself. Stationeers has the best atmospheric simulation in gaming, and the game deserves to have fluid simulations accompanying it.

Flowing Water

Liquids now flow horizontally and preferentially pool downwards. Lower areas of your base will be prone to flooding when liquid pipes unexpectedly break, or conditions for phase change causes gas to condense around you. Fluids in world have an exaggerated volume, to allow for meaningful interactions with in world liquids to happen. It turns out, it is difficult to collect enough ices to create thousands of litres of water while on a barren lifeless world.

Stationeer's atmospherics operate as 2m*2m*2m cubes that update every half second. This presents limitations in terms of first person fidelity, and propagation speed. For liquids, we wanted to make sure they felt fluid enough to not feel too gamey. We got around many of the issues with grid based spread and flow by utilizing a new physics based solver.

We use a series of CPU driven particles to represent and test paths that fluids want to take. These Physics solver balls allow liquids to drop down ledges, or get sprayed out diagonally, to allow fluids to move multiple squares at a time, all without the same limitations as our .5s tick grid atmospheres. We'll also soon be utilizing this system to better implement smaller liquid interactions such as pipe bursts, sprinklers and ice melting.

Visual effects

All this time, we've been saying liquids instead of water, and thats on purpose. All gasses in Stationeers can condense into liquids. Other fluids such as Liquid oxygen and liquid volatiles all look different in world. Unlike other games, we even allow separate fluids to mix and we accurately blend their colors together to really inform you of the disaster that may be mixing underneath you.

We've also worked significantly on creating effects that make liquids look cool while still matching Stationeer's scale and style. Water spreading has droplets that represent the physics solver fluid simulations. When water is spreading throughout already connected tiles, we analyse the volume, displacement and directional mixing ratios to create flow effects on the surface of the water to represent its movement direction and rate.

Buoyancy

All dynamic things except for entities, such as players and chickens, are buoyant. In the future we might expand this system to have things have different buoyancy or make some objects not be buoyant at all but during this first pass everything behaves the same.

Making fluids meaningful

Interaction

Representing fluids is important in of itself, but there are more game play systems we want to tie into. Vents are currently examples of devices that are aware of the surface level of the water, and will only start mixing with liquids when submerged, as opposed to interacting with the whole grid as normal. In the future we'll be making more devices interact with the fluids specially; such as APCs, transformers, and Batteries shorting out.

Fluids do currently interact with terrain. However, there are lots of edge cases that might cause water loss, or unexpected behavior. Once the new terrain system is done, we'll revisit how liquids interact with voxels, and potential performance improvements. This could eventually lead to us supporting larger liquid structures such as lakes, or weather effects that reflect global condensation like rain.

Liquid Vac

Because liquids dont behave like gasses, small puddles often are left behind when draining areas. We've added the liquid vac as a way to allow players to manually interact with in world water. It has two modes, inwards, and outwards, so you can manually relocate water to another place in the world. We originally had it operate with liquid canisters that could be interchanged, the balance of canister sizes for other gameplay reasons prevented it from being super useful. In the future we plan at looking at a more solutions, such as a being able to attach to a dynamic canister, and having a gas vac variant as well.

Manual Floor Hatch

While testing fluids flooding many of our bases, we kept wanting something that felt like a horizontal version of the manual hatch door. So we've added one so you can unwittingly spin the hatch wheel and dump a flood of water on yourself.

Change Log

• [Added] First pass on in-world liquids and particle-based liquid solver.
• [Added] Modded worlds with invalid weatherEvent now fail to load on game data initialize.
• [Added] Liquid solver commands to support liquid profiling.
• [Added] Manual floor hatch to door kit.
• [Added] First pass on liquid visualizer particles.
• [Added] Ability for liquids in-world to have exaggerated liters per mole ratio.
• [Added] Liquid Vacuum recipe to tier2 tool printer.
• [Added] Liquid Vacuum tool with inwards/outwards mode.
• [Added] Different color visualization for various liquids.
• [Added] First pass on showing liquid flow direction.
• [Added] Camera effect for being under liquid.
• [Added] Buoyancy for dynamicThings (non-entities) with angular damping.
• [Added] Recache atmosphere mixing pressure values after liquid mix.
• [Added] Placeholder water footstep sounds and underwater ambience.
• [Added] Flow direction force and velocity damping to floating objects.
• [Added] Second pass for water footstep audio and ambience.
• [Added] Moles per litre in-world for liquids to Stationpedia.
• [Added] Max liquid render distance to liquid blocks and visualizer particles.

• [Changed] Condensation fog renders only when gases condense into liquids in an atmosphere cell.
• [Changed] Solar processing tick converted to unitask.
• [Changed] Increased speed when using drinking fountain.
• [Changed] LiquidFlow network update type from volume to grid, then to statechange.
• [Changed] Passive liquid inlet mixing behaviour improved for new sim.
• [Changed] Atmos tablet no longer shows gas volume values for liquids in-world.
• [Changed] All liquid volume uses now pass through scalar function.
• [Changed] Minimum liquid render height to 12cm; mole threshold for horizontal solver lowered to 500.
• [Changed] Passive liquid inlet now draws from up to 6 neighbouring grids.
• [Changed] Liquids mix sideways only if both grids have rendered liquid.
• [Changed] Active liquid outlet logic moved to OnPreAtmosphere.
• [Changed] Increased minimum gas volume for world atmospheres.
• [Changed] Liquid solver merge behaviour refined for ripe particles.
• [Changed] Liquid flow direction now uses absolute volume difference.
• [Changed] IC10 Sleep command uses GameManager.GameTime.
• [Changed] Updated passive liquid inlet description.

• [Fixed] Incorrect thumbnail for composite wall.
• [Fixed] Modded worlds with invalid GlobalAtmosphereData failing to load.
• [Fixed] Network message dictionary not regenerated in rev 23691.
• [Fixed] Critical game initialization error for German players.
• [Fixed] Solar panel collision mask layers.
• [Fixed] Solar panels not generating power on dedicated servers.
• [Fixed] Smelting ingot granting "oops" achievement.
• [Fixed] Hydroponics Larry not stacking hay from switchgrass.
• [Fixed] Drinking fountain prompt when hydration not full.
• [Fixed] Missing model for ItemKitRocketLaunchPad.
• [Fixed] Incorrect shadow distance on window shutters.
• [Fixed] Missing material on broken composite window shutter.
• [Fixed] Manual floor hatch animation alignment.
• [Fixed] Solar distance temperature offset applied twice.
• [Fixed] Missing/incorrect MAXPressure values in Stationpedia.
• [Fixed] Interaction issues with tools when unpowered.
• [Fixed] EVA DLC bobbleheads printing without ownership.
• [Fixed] Reading IsSeeding from Seedbag via proxy causing null ref.
• [Fixed] Prefab issue on ManualHatch breaking Tutorial3.
• [Fixed] Water pools spreading below threshold.
• [Fixed] Door animation speed mismatch.
• [Fixed] Liquid solver out-of-bounds errors.
• [Fixed] Missing hydrogen liquid color.
• [Fixed] Back face culling enabled on liquid renderer.
• [Fixed] Null ref when resetting liquid flow flags.
• [Fixed] Minimum liquid render threshold considers InWorldVolumeMultiplier.
• [Fixed] Water color alpha set to zero.
• [Fixed] Shader flickering with transparent objects.
• [Fixed] Liquid visualizer particles not taking liquid color.
• [Fixed] Index out-of-range when max rendered grids reached.
• [Fixed] Underwater camera effect not disabled on main menu.
• [Fixed] Wind sounds playing underwater.
• [Fixed] Pressure spikes when liquid solver particles resolved.
• [Fixed] Large pressure differences when filling multi-depth liquids.
• [Fixed] Liquid visualizer particles not cleared on exit.
• [Fixed] Breathing sounds play underwater with helmet open.
• [Fixed] Able to breathe underwater with helmet open.
• [Fixed] Liquid flow turbulence from opposite flows.
• [Fixed] IC10 Sleep command not respecting pause state.
• [Fixed] Liquid mixing oscillations from inconsistent gas volume calculations.
• [Fixed] Fake liquid pressure showing in pipes incorrectly.
• [Fixed] Passive liquid inlet not drawing from own grid.
• [Fixed] Blueprint for ItemLiquidVacuum.
• [Fixed] Liquid solver particles not spawning on dedicated server.

• [Removed] Unused rocket meshes and classes.
• [Removed] Slot filter type from autolathe.
• [Removed] Bobblehead from thumbnail scene.
• [Removed] Unused test liquid shader.
• [Removed] Empty OutlineEffect directory.

References

1. Update on SteamDB