Commander,
Apologies for not posting this sooner - the compressed Christmas week caused a delay in getting our FFD out.
The week of December 22-26 delivered the performance gains we’ve been working toward, along with expected challenges from such a major overhaul.
Mission Development - The Good News
Unity Developer Dustin Weitkunat continued breakneck work on the performance refactor. Thanks to extensive weekend efforts, he delivered a new build right before Christmas Eve with massively improved performance. Internal testing showed 25 ships fighting simultaneously maintaining a stable 150-200 FPS on high-end systems. He also reached internal goals for much lower-end systems, which will soon allow us to recompute minimum and recommended specifications—opening SCOS to far more players. Dustin also integrated numerous bridge officer voice “chatter” lines and will continue this work.
Mission Development - The Unexpected Challenges
Such a large overhaul brought unexpected graphical regressions. Dustin spent most of this week addressing those issues and is currently reworking bridge lighting to make it better and more performant. Additional bugs from internal QA must be resolved before external QA can test the demo.
Right now, we’re hopeful that Monday the 29th sees resumed work on mission polish, bridge refinement, and voice-over integration.
Ship Construction & Media Production
The art team released the Ajax-class destroyer in-universe introduction video this week before the Christmas break. Next week focuses on more lore videos and a new dev blog walking through our game-wide improvements.
Literary Progress & QA Testing
Daniel Gibbs reached 80,000 words on Deep Strike—book 6 of The Iron Fleet series where the SCOS campaign takes place. He also performed extensive internal QA testing and provided detailed issue reports.
Performance goals achieved. Regressions being eliminated. Mission polish (hopefully) resumes Monday.
We can’t wait to share more information this coming week.
v/r
Daniel Gibbs
Military Science-Fiction Author and SCOS Producer