Release 237: Oortmas!

News Releases
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Update will be live once the downtime is complete:

Overview

This release focuses on getting good stability over the Christmas and New Year period. We don’t want to release anything that could potentially contains issues as it’s not possible to make any new releases on PS4 during this period.

We’ve fixed a range of issues around the presentation of beacon fuel and Gleam Club duration.

Finally the update includes an expansion to Oortmas for 2019.

Release 237:

Engine:

  • Changing the way clients receive the expireTime of beacons so that network packets cannot be analysed/injected and memory cannot be read (aka “hacking”) to determine the expiration date of any beacon that you do not have permissions for.
  • Only allow closed-storage blocks to be broken by users when the contents are empty. An action-log message will be shown when breaking a non-empty closed-storage, and a general tip has been added to the game about this shown when hitting a closed-storage block. This helps accidentally breaking a storage full of items, as well as guarding against performance implications on the server of having hundreds of large stacks of block-drops all in the same location easily achieved by AOE breaking full ornate closed storages with hundreds of stacks of items.

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed the colouration of projectile meshes which could be incorrect if the slingbow/bag-of-bombs wore out during firing, and also making them lodded meshes where appropriate.
  • Fixed the colouration of some projectiles which were not using the correct palette leading to gem slingbows not having the correctly coloured projectiles.
  • Reduced scale of panes in Shop Stands so that their size matches the other items.
  • Fix leaking of details between adjacent particle-assets causing lines to appear on the edges of particles at times, such as in the new effect used for the Gleambow sanctum.
  • Fixing presentation of Gleam Club auto-fuelling to look at the beacon “owner”'s Gleam Club account, and not the current users account.
  • Fixing presentation of Gleam Club auto-fuelling in cases where a beacon is expired to stop it claiming that the auto-fuelling is enabled.
  • Fixing the coloration of the beacon lifetime in the Fuel tab to be consistent with the beacon-details section where a beacon that is low on fuel will show the duration in red.
  • Changing the “Auto-Fuel: enabled” line in the beacon menus to just show the actual duration of the Gleam Club membership that the beacon owner has to be more explicit. The Gleam Club duration will be coloured red the same way as the beacon duration when running low here.
  • Making presentation of beacon-lifetime consistent so that in all cases it will show “(Gleam Club)” after the duration if being fuelled by Gleam Club automatically, eg looking at a beacon console in the HUD or from your beacons list, or from the beacon list of a guild.
  • Making presentation of beacon-lifetime, and ability to fuel a beacon consistent so that whenever its possible to fuel a beacon, you will also see the duration of the beacon in the HUD and GUI of the beacon; was previously only shown to a non-owner user if worker permissions were granted, but will now be shown if any kind of (non-surveyor) permission is granted and also to any member of the guild a beacon is aligned to.
  • Fixing a bug where when Gleam Club automatically refuelled a beacon. It was often adding extra time to the beacon beyond the expiry of the Gleam Club account.
  • Fixing a bug where Gleam Club expiry date was being parsed as a 32bit signed integer; this wouldn’t have been a problem until a few years down the line however, so no corruptions were caused by this. Don’t try replicating this or you’ll end up with negative Gleam Club duration.
  • Fixing the presentation of beacon items in a Guild list to be consistent with the Places menu in showing whether it is the current destination or your home beacon.
  • Fixing a minor issue where tracking a beacon that is also in your places list from the guild screen or vice-versa required you to click “Untrack destination” twice if you tracked the beacon from the guild list, then untracked from the places menu instead.
  • Fixing the presentation of smoking beacons to correctly account for the Gleam Club of the beacon owner.
  • Fixing removing a beacon from the beacon options menu not removing it from your places list automatically; this was an oversight when the option was added as removing a beacon manually via unplotting and removing the master beacon console as well as breaking the campfire has always removed it from the list automatically too.
  • Fixing issues with the presentation of expires vs removed beacons in the places menu; the system that determines this is not exact as we don’t keep track of all beacons that have ever expired or been removed by player-action, but as long as you log into the game before the beacon was supposed to expire naturally, it will correctly mark the beacon as removed from the world instead of expired appropriately. (This only really applies if tracking a beacon that you do not own, but have permissions on as removing your own beacons will automatically remove them from the list in all cases other than your Home beacon anyways).
  • Fixing some issues around the beacon list not updating correctly (it would update eventually, but sometimes flip back to old values for a while in the GUI presentation) when someone else fuels a beacon or changes permissions on a beacon in your list.
  • Fix for a crash on PS4 with partially repaired machines (in particular, those where components have produced a negative durability from being fully worn out particularly easy with the Chrysomiter / Dyemaker/ Buff Helixes where the coils wear out faster than the machine).
  • Improve the combined-durability display to deal better with negative values ensuring that durability wont ever show 0 unless the machine itself is worn out (and continue to never show 100% unless all components are fully repaired), and that it’ll never show weird behaviour like the bar decreasing as you repair before it increases again etc.
  • Fix a server crash if drag-dropping multiples of 256 items into/out of shop stands. (Shift-clicking did not have any issues).
  • Fix dropping items (whether drag-drop or with X) out of closed-storages not working correctly.
  • Fix the new plot-visualisation shaders swapping the red/blue colours of beacon plots.
  • Fix not being able to set prices in request basket for natural blocks. Was inadvertently broken by a change to enforce being able to set prices only for items that would be able to appear in the knowledge (To discard items that have been added by designers but are not available in-game).
  • Fix recently introduced gaps in the voxel geometry where certain slope shapes butt against one another due to changes for translucent glass blocks, forcing these cases to disable terrain distortion to ensure closed geometry.
  • Fixed dropped item locator on pane items.
  • Present the location and portal tokens in the knowledge screen, and allow setting prices for them in a request basket.
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Oortmas! :evergreen_tree: It was only a year ago but been getting nostalgic watching old Oortmas videos :nerd_face:

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Already have an idea for your Oortmas gift @BabyCookie \ ^_ ^ /

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Possibly the best thing, thanks for addressing this issue and coming up with a solution :grinning:

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Oortmas O.O I don’t understand this stuff lol but fixes yay lol

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Was never able to attend Oortmas last year so pretty interested to see what will happen, i finally get to buy my beard lol :stuck_out_tongue:

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Trickyy’s first Oortmas too :partying_face:
Got some presents building up for people :smiley:

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Can’t wait for Oortmas, thanks dev team! :grin:

I’ve tried to be a good lil Oortling! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Well, sort of… best I can… oh, go ahead and drop my well-earned lump of soft coal on me… :smiling_imp:

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Good to see this hit. It is time we stop those that continue to use memory reading/injection to cheat and take advantages of game systems for their benefit over other players. It really is unfortunately that various people in this game choose to cheat.

If people know of other cheating or things that people do to take advantage of game mechanics especially via memory reading and other hacking techniques, please PM James directly with information (he will keep it private) and hopefully the devs can put fixes in.

Boundless will be a much better game for us all when it is fair and an even playing field for every person.

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It’s worth adding that there has been no evidence that anyone was snooping beacon times and abusing it.

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I do understand you hadn’t directly seen it but I don’t think anyone was doing a sting or replayed beacon expiration and how fast new plots showed to prove it didn’t. Additionally, it came out that it could be done which means people were clearly looking for that ability. So the incentive to cheat or take advantage of memory reading in all ways possible was likely based on behaviors of some.

There were many situations where it was very questionable how some people were always at beacons upon expiration as well as plenty of discussion in select groups about people doing it as well as expansion of the memory hacking toolset that was available. I wouldn’t have pushed it had I not heard it from trusted people. Of course that stuff would be kept quiet and only discussed among certain people because people didn’t want it to come out.

Whether it was done or not it is for the betterment of the game to stop this where we can. People can use it to create X-ray type tools to find all resources as well as map out where the resources sit. Advantages like this only make things worse in the perception of the game and how new/casual players might react. It isn’t good for the game on any level to have a lax agenda around cheating on any level. It should be a strong clear signal from the development team that any direction in this area is not tolerated on any level. Even if it was just “perceived to happen.”

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Then we have very different definitions of evidence.

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Is there a date for when this period ends? I infer this is a Sony thing, why the lockout?

Keep up the good work!

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I dont know if its the right place to mention, but my emerald grapple’ projectile is purple (amethyst?) while shooting. I havent noticed it before so maybe it came with the new update.

grapple
grapple1920×1080 640 KB

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Yay update!!! Booooo Sony!!! No time off Sony!! Work for your coins!!! Whip! Whip!! :joy:

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Make a separate post under the “support” category, I think the dev who deals with bugs sorts through posts via the support tag :slight_smile:

Edit: I did it for you, I’m getting the same thing happen to me :slight_smile:

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@james will we get some new things in the exchange for xmas? :smiley: new paints or something? :smiley:

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Some sneak peeks in the event thread :drooling_face:

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