We're squeezing in an important update before the combat update to add a feature that has been long requested and has been more than overdue: Out-of-sector-catch-up. Basically, the way it works in Avorion is this: Since sectors take up a lot of memory, they're unloaded onto your hard drive when they haven't been visited for a while or when there are no players or player crafts in them. The major problem that is created by this system, is that sectors without players or crafts are basically frozen, meaning they will be in the same state when they're re-loaded into memory as they were when they were unloaded. You could visit a sector after hours and it would basically in the same state. In order to tackle this issue, we've introduced a callback to our scripts that will enable scripts to get a notification for when a sector has been loaded from disk, and how long it has been since it was last loaded. We've equipped the most important entity scripts (ie. factories and similar) with this kind of callback so that the economy isn't frozen every time you leave a sector. The out-of-sector-catch-up will be available for all stations in existing savegames, while the new stocking mechanic will only be available to newly discovered factories, due to technical reasons. # Gameplay * Time passed is now simulated for most important stations when players are not in the sector and it gets suspended to disk * Habitats now buy books # Balancing "AI factories with no products available are basically useless to the player, and too many empty ingredient slots make the factory unable to produce. So we're changing the way that factories are initially stocked, giving them more overall interactibility with players. At the same time we've toned down the profit margin for highly stocked or understocked factories, since these cases happen a lot more often now." * Factories can now have an initial stock of either medium amount of ingredients and products * Factories can now have an initial low stock of ingredients and high stock of products * Reduced impact of shortage and abundance of stock on prices from 20% to 10% # Scripting API * Added a sector callback "onRestoredFromDisk" that will receive the amount of time in seconds that the sector has been suspended to disk # Misc * Removed X-Mas Contest fighter tag * Craft destruction is now logged for all players, not just logged in players # Bugfixes "As usual, bugfixes marked with UBR are user reported bug fixes. Thanks everybody for reporting!" * [UBR] Fixed an issue where the area of jumpable sectors wasn't drawn on the galaxy map * [UBR] Fixed an issue where the "build" option wasn't available in the interaction menu for alliance ships * Fixed an issue in build mode where the block size could get too large and even NaN * [UBR] Fixed an issue where organize goods missions weren't saved correctly * [UBR] Fixed an issue where Bottan didn't jump away when receiving collision damage * [UBR] Fixed an issue where ships duplicated after server crashes * [UBR] Fixed an issue where trading ships would get stuck and block docking ports