v0.1.49 (Early Access)

Multiplayer stops stuttering the moment your connection has any distance in it, big saves are joinable, and Intel Macs start. Most of this release is repair.

Fixed

Multiplayer

• The world keeps moving on a distant connection. Past a very short round trip, the client skipped collecting updates it had already received, so the game lurched every few seconds however good the link was.
• Joining a large save works. Every action any player took resent the entire world to everyone, several megabytes at a time, which a joining player could never finish downloading before the next one arrived.
• The host stops stalling while someone joins. Same cause. The host was rebuilding and sending the whole world far more often than anything needed it.
• A guest that falls behind can catch up. Past about ten seconds behind, a player was sent the whole world on every update forever, which is the one thing guaranteed to keep them behind.
• Other players stop vanishing during a hitch. If your own game paused for a couple of seconds, everyone else's character was retired as if they had left. They had not; you had stopped looking.
• A join that fails now says so. A dropped connection during loading used to put you in a world that looked real, never updated, and gave no sign anything was wrong.
• You get told when you fall behind. A player being served perfectly but running a second or more behind produced no warning at all, so nobody knew why the game felt late.
• Robots stop jumping between positions. Anyone not driving saw a machine freeze, then snap forward twice a second. It now moves smoothly.
• The waiting room takes keyboard input. Joining a friend who had not started yet opened a room you could not navigate.

Hardware and cabling

• Cables reach the ports on a fitted network card. A card's new ports never reached your screen, so the cable had nothing to attach to and went undrawn until you reloaded.
• Freshly patched switches stay usable. Cabling one switch port could leave the rest of that switch refusing cables and its console refusing to open until a reload.

Other

• The game starts on Intel Macs. The simulation engine quit a fraction of a second into launch and no window ever appeared, on every Intel machine and no Apple Silicon one.
• Uplink use on the Network page reads your actual uplink. It summed what every server pushed out of its network card, traffic between your own machines included, so it sat above the wallboard and Connectivity.
• The Network page keeps up again. Its throughput and traffic figures could sit still on a quiet site, because the readings arrived without anything telling the page to redraw.

Notes

• Saves work in both directions with v0.1.48. Nothing about the format changed.
• Multiplayer spans v0.1.48 and v0.1.49. No message changed shape, so players on either version can share a game.
• A joining player fills in over a few seconds. Large worlds now arrive in slices rather than one huge piece, so a panel may be briefly empty while it loads.
• Your log now names the build. Bug reports are much easier to place when the log says which version and Steam build produced it.