Save Our Ship v2.5 for RimWorld 1.3 is Out Now!

First, for our new Patrons, welcome, welcome!

Link to Steam is here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1909914131  

Thank you to all our test group members on Discord!

Invite Link: https://discord.gg/GK7nqgu

Not only does this update to 1.3 of RimWorld (which was a bear and a half for Kent, who worked on the mod for probably 60+ hours over the last week) but it also adds all the updates we had underway for 1.2 before that got hit by a train when 1.3 was announced.

SonicTHI, who is maintaing Save Our Ship while Kent and I try our best to stick to Project Morningstar full time, has added new Imperial ships, the ability to color walls using 3rd party mods which enable that feature, and tons of refinements and adjustments, such as allowing ships to push debris and trees out of the way when landing, rotating ships in the SOSCK, and fixing the radiator bug that required a game reboot.

User K also dropped by to optimize our AI pathfinding in a vacuum, and prevent our pathing code from breaking mods like Path Avoid or Biomes! Islands. 

The big one in this update is an XML serializer we call "speed loader," which takes the boot time of Save Our Ship from a painfully slow 39.9 seconds, to around 6.

This is actually a development from Kent's study for Project Morningstar, on our own Symbol System, which is comparable to RimWorld's Def System. 

Save Our Ship, along with all your other mods, use XML files to handle items and features. Most of those files are only a few kilobytes, but SOS comes pre-packed with 189 ships that count as enemies and event locations, the biggest of which were gigantic at 9MB before we found ways to optimize and compress that data down to just 714kb for the biggest of all ships. 

For 2.4, people were reporting that in combination with other mods with similarly big XML files that add dozens or even hundreds of items, SOS could add 60+ seconds to their load time as RimWorld struggled to load all those individual files, for totals ranging from 90 to 600 seconds! (10 minutes! Holy crap!) 

For Project Morningstar, we've learned from this and decided that when you load our game with mods, all that data from all those loose files with be serialized as a machine-readable binary that loads in just a few seconds, no matter if you have 5 mods or 300. 

SOS now does the same thing for our ship defs, and loads in just 6 seconds. 

Other improvements include a new way to manage your heat, such as a Heat Manifold that rapidly pumps heat from your network of heat sinks to the room it is in, allowing radiators to carry it away faster. This unlocks two new ways to plan your heat management: use the purge device to expel heat to space using silver, or drop shields as your armor absorbs damage and rapidly vent heat for free using advanced radiators and heat manifolds. 

The advanced radiators and archotech radiators now pull directly from the heat network, reducing your stored heat and getting your ship cool when shields are down in a span of time that means you can put up a defense after taking some damage, instead of being totally trounced as soon as shields go down. A buff to hull health also means ships last longer in combat and AI might even try to retreat rather than stick around for a wallop.

Weapons have also been re-balanced in favor of longer combat events that aren't over as soon as shields drop.

Our shuttles previously looked like trash. Now they look amazing thanks to some updated art assets. 

We have a new power source for achotech-tier players as well, which turns those excess antimatter particles into a sudden burst of incredible power. It's extreamly high consumption rate means it can only run fora few minutes, but but it can provide a staggering 1Million Wd of power, enough to full recharge your capacitors even under heavy combat conditions, or let you power the JT Drive and make the hop to another planet in minutes.

These, along with fixed radiators and stealth which now correctly turn off and don't require a game reboot to jog their memory after a save & load, and new pathfinding which doesn't break that found in other mods, should give SoS2.5 a long and stable life in your load order for years to come. (months, if a damn 1.4 update for RimWorld comes out!)

At this point, SOS has enough work put into it that it could very well be its own DLC, or even a new game. So after this, getting back to work on Project Morningstar armed with new knowledge on how to handle our own architecture and avoid the pitfalls we found in RimWorld should give us a huge advantage. 

We'll be implementing our own item XMLs via an editor hat works in-game and in Unity, so we can edit the values of items on the fly. It's a very cool system, and will empower us and future modders of Morningstar to test the balance of different weapon damage values and item pricetags, and see the changes happen in realtime, then save them out so they can be pushed to version control. 

I hope all you SOS fans stick around and enjoy Morningstar updates as we build that massive machine. :) 

============

Changelog--
-- RimWorld 1.3 Compatibility!

--  A brand new "Speed Loader" XML Serializer and Symbol system borrowed  from our game Project Morningstar, which cuts load times from 39.9 to  just 6.9 seconds!

--Implemented a  new, optimized format for loading EnemyShipDefs, resulting in over a 90%  reduction in load times in some cases, to the 1.3 and 1.2 versions.

--Added archotech-level antimatter engine and reactor, as well as new types of radiator and solar panel

-- Rebalanced Combat and Heat Mechanics -

- Upgraded Ship Combat & Marine Boarding Party AI

-- Move the ship in Orbit!

-- New Starting Ships and Stations (and a chooser in the Scenario Editor!)

---- Fast Attack Destroyer

---- Skylab

---- Colony Ship

---- Asteroid Mining Operation

---- Lithobreak Starship

---- Insect Infested Station

---- Derelict Shipyard makes its return

-- New Enemy Ships

---- Royalty Imperial Fleets (works without DLC, but DLC adds items to Imperial crews)

-- Ships can now have faction specific art and crews

-- General updates to AI ships to fix issues

-- Rotate your ship in dev mode!

-- Colorable walls!

-- Vanilla Power Armor & DLC Cataphract act as light space suits

-- Land your ship directly on trees and chunks for easier landing

-- No longer pick up geothermal vents into space (mod added vents will probably still get stuck however.)

-- Countless bug fixes and upgrades all across the mod

-- Significantly improved performance in and out of combat

-- Fixed Pathfinding that no longer breaks other mods and is lightweight (thanks to User K)

-- Much more clearly defined Difficulty Settings (Intensity and Frequency settings)

-- Improved Shuttle Graphics

-- Improved shuttle balance & behavior

-- SRTS should no longer be prevented from entering ship maps as ship maps are no longer on non-traversible tiles