Happy Saturday, Everyone!
I dug into the game's rendering and discovered a lot of room for optimization. Many of the models in the game were being rendered individually instead of in batches, causing the game to waste time on unnecessary draw calls.
To put the problem in perspective, before I got started I was seeing an advanced world with a population of 100 take about 25 milliseconds to render. After taking some time to make sure that GPU instancing was used to render as many objects as possible in single batches, that same world now renders in 4 milliseconds. I think I'll be able to improve performance more beyond this, but I figured I should push an update now because this should already be enough to make the game run at 60 fps on many people's machines.
That's it for now! I'll be back next weekend with more optimizations, and hopefully some improvements to art and effects, too.
-Pouchmouse