July is over and completely forgot to post my monthly update, so here I am!! Before recapping what happened in July, the big news are that The Last General just hit 75,000 wishlists on Steam yesterday!! Thanks everyone for that, it's incredible!! Ok, back to July!
The month started with the aftermath of the last trailer video going viral, so I spent a lot time answering comments and messages all over the place until things calmed down a bit.
In the first few days I also implemented and improved some gameplay features around the dominant force criteria for conquering towns and cities, making it much more robust and enabling small forces to hold a city for a while against a surrounding larger enemy force.
I also worked on the consequences of towns/cities changing hands, and the population support for the different nations changing over time and affecting production levels for factories nearby. After that I took a little break to get married (yay!) and hang out with my family that traveled 7000 miles from Argentina for it! After that little staycation I was back in full force and did a ton of work optimizing particles and reorganizing systems for better CPU performance, clearing up job dependencies and utilizing all threads way better than before. For particle improvements I switched most of the heaviest particles to be processed on the GPU in one gigantic VFX Graph system, which also enables proper particle sorting by distance which doesn't work nicely with individual VFX systems (performance is also way better).
With those changes done, I was also able to make dust and smoke last much longer after explosions and strong impacts. Leading to this new and much dustier TLG:
In the last couple of days (in August already) I also worked on some rendering improvements for high count objects (like fences, grass or bushes) which drastically improve performance on the largest 400km2 islands, and also physics improvements for the terrain colliders which cut physics time almost in half.
I also spent a few hours to create a new collaborative Wiki, that will be hosted at https://thelastgeneral.wiki.gg and will go public in just a few days. Anyone can contribute to that wiki, adding or updating content, so if you want to help let me know here or in the Discord.
Overall everything is going really well and making progress to have a pretty optimized alpha test, remember to join the Discord to be in that alpha around the end of this year!