Hotfix v0.9.4 — Smoother Long Sessions, Un-Stuck Paramecia

Salty Demo v0.9.4 is live — a performance hotfix, plus a few tweaks

Small update, big difference if you play for a while. Thanks to everyone who told us the demo got choppier the longer they played.

The fix: the game no longer slows down with every New Game

If you played for 20–30 minutes and restarted a few times, you may have noticed the frame rate sliding downhill and your fans spinning up. We found the cause. Every time a new game loaded, the invisible "avoidance map" that keeps creatures from swimming into rock was being added on top of the previous game's map instead of replacing it. After three restarts, every creature was checking three copies of the reef, every frame. The map is now rebuilt clean on every load, and the check itself is much cheaper, so even a fresh game runs lighter than before.

While we were in there, creature-to-creature bumping (which every cell does to avoid stacking) now only looks at nearby cells instead of every cell in the water. Same behavior, a fraction of the work. Busy chambers should feel noticeably smoother.

Paramecia no longer get stuck at the walls

Some Paramecium bursaria were pinning themselves against the rock near the green plants, twitching but never swimming away. They were trying to graze algae dots that had grown too close to the rock for them to reach. Algae still grows where it did, but the Paramecia now only go for dots they can actually get to, and any grazer that stops making progress toward a dot gives up on it and moves on.

Tell us how it feels

If anything still stutters after a long session, or a creature gets stuck somewhere, a note in the comments or the demo's discussion board helps us find it.

— Garrack