Having done the first Relic story quest, everything worked fine with the dialogue of the ParcX delivery guy. 
However, I've just started and completed the "Dangerous Exchange" story mission, and there was no dialogue at all through it. This means that the sector Dr. Xian is supposed to reveal never happened, despite having completed the story mission by acquiring the ring. The hostile NPC also said nothing before and after spawning. I have all comms channels open and set to display on-screen:



Can provide a save with the story active if needed

No Doors In Preview
Designer preview of a building blueprint does not have doors or turbo lifts. They are present and functional when previewing a spacecraft.

Fixed.

Scenario Column Widths
Asteroid scenario window has bad column spacing on Windows. Information text is smashed into a narrow column at the left. This looks fine on Linux.

Fixed.

Auto Save
Auto save of the game was requested.

Game now auto saves hourly. This save does not create a check point; it just updates the current saved game. This avoids creation of zillions of check point saves.

Kicked From Designer
If the game is minimized for a bit while in the designer, you are kicked out to some uninhabited world.

Fixed. This was caused by code whose purpose was to prevent people from remaining in a design studio after logging off of the multi player game.

Crash Empty Handed
Game crashed because I pushed the wrong button while walking around with nothing in my hand.

Fixed.

One Way Intergalactic Wormholes Broken
It was reported that one-way intergalactic wormholes do not work. They are found at stellar black holes.

Fixed a bug that made them not work.

Traversed a one way intergalactic wormhole.

Destination in new galaxy is the same distance from the core as the wormhole was in the originating system. The destination galaxy was much smaller than the origin galaxy. This left my ship far out in deep space, viewing the new galaxy from afar.

I made a change to scale the destination location according to the size change in galaxies. If you are near the edge of the origin galaxy, you will arrive near the edge of the destination galaxy.

Rotation around the Z axis of the galaxy is consistent. That means a one way intergalactic wormhole will always arrive at the same location in the destination galaxy, wherever that happens to be.

This change affects all one way intergalactic wormholes, including the ones that already exist.


Blueprint Description Contains <br>
Blueprint descriptions contain <br>. I thought all html was removed.

Fixed.

Mating References
I saw references to mating in tool tips and avatar controls.

Fixed. Removed all references to mating I hope, including some off hand comments by npcs.

Gliding Flyer Crash
When riding a flying animal that cannot hover, the game locks up if I hold the brakes until the animal comes to a stop. This also happened if your avatar was a gliding flyer and you held the brakes to stop.

Fixed.

Riding Animals Broken
Riding on animals doesn't work at all. There are all sorts of control issues and the animal won't move.

Fixed.

Later...

Stuck In Time Bug
A problem was reported when a ship entered a new solar system and time seems to stop. Nobody can move or do anything.

Fixed.

On very large building sites, the edges are rendered incorrectly. See the images below:




The reason it seems to be a rendering issue is because I can still walk on the "empty" triangles between the jagged peaks, as if it was a smooth line instead. 



Here's what the problematic sites look like in the designer:




The sites in question are set to the following settings:
Grade: Level
Blend: Flat
Pavement: Asphalt/Concrete
Rocks: Remove
Grass: Remove
Shrubs: Remove
Trees: Remove

The site in the first image is aligned to the south.

Can also see that they're meant to be smooth while placing:


Vid of the behaviour:
https://files.catbox.moe/0es89d.mp4

Stack Size
A crash was reported due to a stack overflow.

Stack size was increased in the Windows builds, both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Save Game
Partial save of current game on exit reported to break saved game files.

Game saves are now performed using a QSaveFile object. It is intended to handle the issues involved.

Game Save Files
Recently it was desirable for a player to send a copy of their saved game, to debug an issue. Unfortunately there is no obvious way to do this. He ended up sending the entire 'Hazeron Starship' folder, which is overkill.

The list of saved games at the beginning now has an option to save a game to a file and to restore the current game from a file. You pick the file.

In doing this I found it helpful to add an entry for the 'Current Game' to that list. In the player's case, there were no other saved games except the current game. Previously no list was shown when that was the case, making it impossible to save the current game to a file.

On windows build designer sometimes teleport you into primeval world when it's left unattended for some time.
Steps to reproduce:
- Open any design
- Minimize designer completely
- Do any tasks on PC for 5-15 minutes (web surfing, watching videos, playing games)
- Open up designer. Most of the time it will load primeval world
Designer just did that while i was writhing this post. Debugger remain silent

Designer can crash, usually randomly. I had most crashes while using face mode and/or texturing parts close to camera (1-2 meters or closer)
One time debugger catch exception "std::bat_cast at memory location". Dunno what that means and i don't know how to use debugger anyway

Save game became corrupted after one day of playing. I recall saving manually then exiting the process normally. When attempting to reload the save the game simply crashes to desktop seconds after clicking play also unable to create another character without removing the save files entirely due to same crash on character creation. if the save file is of any use for your debugging I can send it to you.

I believe a "simple" solution to the issue for now is making the game able to recognize file corruption instead of crashing along with an option built into the game to enable a certain number of automatic save backups by simply pushing the previous save file into a backup folder.

I think this will would help significantly when the game goes live as loosing hours of work can be extremely frustrating if we don't manually backup game saves and would result in a negative play experience

Exchanges now show the rating for blueprints, based on the thumbs ups and downs on a blueprint. The overall rating is provided by steam as a floating point number in the range of 0 to 1. It is described as, "The bayesian average for up votes / total votes, between [0,1]." The game translates that into a 0 to 5 star range, with halves. The tool tip on the rating shows the total number of votes.

To rate a blueprint, select it in the exchange and press the button to view it in the Steam Workshop.

There you can give a thumbs up or thumbs down, post comments, give awards, and other kinds of things.

Several people reported a crash when the current list of items in the Steam Workshop was requested from the building exchange.

Debug traces showed some insanity going on when getting that listing, in particular when requesting the preview images for the items, which have to be requested and downloaded separately.

I reworked some of the code involved.

Please give it another try.

--

Sorry for the slow response on this. I lost a day this week when we had to go out of town for the day.

In the construction menu, selecting a blueprint that has a high resolution preview image forces the window to accomodate the full width and height of the image. On a 1920x1080 monitor, this causes the construction window to be unnecessarily wide, and taller than the vertical resolution of the screen itself.

This seems to be happening with the default blueprints and custom blueprints finalized after the latest update.

With custom blueprints finalized before the latest update, the construction window behaves "normally", and can be resized down to a manageable size.

Screenshot:


Construction menu with one of the new building previews. The window cannot be resized smaller than this.

Steam Workshop
The big change in this update is integration with Steam Workshop. At risk of repeating what was already posted, I'll summarize the entire workshop integration here.

Steam Workshop is a feature of Steam that enables users to post content for a game that other users can share. This is a perfect fit for sharing building and spacecraft blueprints created in the game.

The connection to the workshop is handled entirely through the in-game blueprint exchanges, both for buildings and for spacecraft. Existing functionality of the exchanges was not changed. A few buttons were added to integrate with the workshop.

Publish to Steam - Uploads a blueprint to the workshop that was created by you.

Unpublish from Steam - Deletes a blueprint from the workshop that was uploaded by you. All subscriptions to the blueprint are canceled.

Subscribe - Downloads a blueprint from the workshop to your computer. After the download is complete, the blueprint is added to the appropriate library and an exchange entry is created for the library entry. If a subscribed blueprint is updated in the workshop, your game will automatically download the changes.

Unsubscribe - Stops keeping a blueprint in sync with the one in the workshop.

List - Gets a list of blueprints from the workshop. It attempts to associate workshop blueprints with exchange items that appear to be identical. Things can get out of sync if you restore an old game, for example.

Workshop blueprints are added to the exchange with a special type of item that looks slightly different (gray text color). When you select one of these items you see the preview image, design report, and terms of access, just like when you select a regular exchange item. Then you can subscribe to workshop items that you want to use. The item is downloaded to your local library and added to the exchange.

Access terms for a blueprint were simplified. There are only two possible options now: Full and Restricted. Full access grants full unrestricted use of the blueprint. Restricted access enables you to only build using the blueprint; you cannot open it in a design studio. The "view only" option was nerfed. The architect of a blueprint can always open it, regardless of the published access terms.

Workshop items can be monetized through Steam. I'm not sure how this is done yet. It may be possible right now since it is all handled through Steam. There is an API response when subscribing to an item within the game that requires me to open a certain web page. Perhaps purchase options will appear there when an item is monetized. We'll see as I find out more about this topic.

Blueprints with an association to a workshop blueprint are tracked for playtime stats. All ships and buildings trigger playtime tracking when they exist. A given blueprint, though it may be in use by several spacecraft or buildings in your game, is only tracked when its usage starts and ends. Tracking doesn't count each and every instance of the blueprint in a game so ten ships using the same blueprint won't increase the playtime by 10x. Playtime tracking begins when the first game object uses the blueprint. Playtime tracking stops when the last game object stops using the blueprint.

Architect Id Snafu
Exchange items show the architect of the blueprint. That architect information was previously your avatar name and id. Those things have no correlation to anything on Steam.

The architect id on blueprints and exchange items is now the Steam Id and Steam Name of the architect.

That means that any exchange items created by you prior to this update will no longer be recognized as yours. You won't be able to publish them in the workshop until that is fixed.

You will have to finalize your designs all over again, so the proper architect id is stored with the blueprints.

Then you will have to republish those designs into the exchange, again so the proper architect id is stored in the exchange.

Then you will be able to publish those blueprints to the Steam workshop.

Your current Steam name is stored as the architect name. You can change your name on Steam. That will not change the name that was stored in blueprints. Simply having the id is not sufficient to query Steam for a name. The only way I can show an architect's name is if I store it when I have it.

Blueprints Folder
Blueprint .SoH files are no longer distributed with the software. That reduces the game software download by about 80MB. All of those blueprints are available in the Steam Workshop if someone wants them.

The .SoH files are not required to play the game. The game startup data already includes those blueprints, finalized and ready for game play.

I'm not sure that the Blueprints folder was easily accessible when managed by Steam.

Finalize Preview
When finalizing a blueprint, you can now select the preview image from a file. Previously you just got a screen grab of the designer when you started the finalize process.

I found the preview mode of the designer worked well for getting screen grabs of things before finalizing. The appearance is more like how the thing will look in the game environment. I noticed that doors on buildings in the preview do not appear; I logged it as a bug.

Finalize Result
Finalizing a blueprint used to remove things that were not needed to use the object in the game, things like door jigs. That also meant removing crucial states of turbo lifts that left them broken and unable to create more lift stops. This made a finalized design unsuitable as a design drawing.

When finalizing a blueprint now, nothing is removed from the design automatically. You can still mark parts that are to be omitted from the final design; only those things are removed.

Design Description Bug
In the properties of a design is a box to let you type in a description. While working on the workshop I discovered a bug that caused that description text to be stored with html encoding. This is hardly noticeable except that the text always seemed a bit small. Unfortunately, that html encoding appears as raw text in the description that appears on the item in the Steam Workshop. It's very ugly.

There is a simple fix. If your drawing has any text in the description field, simply open the properties dialog and press Ok. This cleans up the text if you do so using this update.

Steam Overlay
The Steam overlay does not work in the game. There is some discussion about it on line; it sounds like games based on Qt do not support the Steam overlay. I've tried getting it to work to no avail.

Relic Story Ringworld Sector
The Relic story gets to a point where you must go find a sector that contains a ringworld. This has perplexed players in the past when they have searched countless sectors without ever finding a ringworld.

A slight change was made in a previous update. I think I mentioned it in a previous post. When a homeworld system is located for a new avatar, the code was changed to insure there was a ringworld in one of the 27 sectors (3x3x3 box) centered on the homeworld sector. Note this is not done if the "Remote" starting proximity option is selected.

In this update, the storyline finds a nearby ringworld sector by performing a radial search out from your location. In most cases, this will be within one sector distance of your current location. Xian reveals this sector as the Dangerous Exchange story segment ends, when she implores you to find Dr. Millford.