Thanks to everyone who reported frame drops and stuck haulers on the forums. Your reports pointed straight at the problems. This update fixes both.
Performance
- Claw cranes no longer tank your frame rate. A crane with nothing left to grab kept looking for its next bite many times a second, and each look was far more expensive than it should have been. With a few hundred balls left and a handful of cranes, this could drop the game to single digits. Looking is now much cheaper, and a crane that finds only bare floor takes a short break before trying again.
- Long belts with brushes are cheaper every tick. Brushes and side hoppers now remember which belt they serve instead of searching every belt again and again.
- Cranes, trampolines, ziplines and chutes draw faster. Their models are now made of far fewer pieces (a crane went from 117 to 15), so a busy pool with many machines is lighter on your CPU.
- Bots steer more efficiently. A full fleet of sweepers and haulers now costs about half as much to run.
In our heaviest late-game test (extreme pool, 20 cranes, 40 bots and every other machine), a frame went from about 106 ms to about 10 ms. With only a few hundred balls left it went from about 169 ms to about 9 ms.
Fixes
- Hauler bots sent to a cannon or hopper no longer drive in little circles doing nothing. Haulers only swept close to their delivery spot, and once that ground was cleared (which happens fast next to a cannon by the hole) they circled forever. Now, when the ground around them runs dry, they deliver whatever they are carrying and widen their search, out to the whole pool if needed.
- Walking on cleared floor is full speed again. The bean slowed to wading pace anywhere inside the pool walls, even on floor you had already swept clean. Now it only wades when there are actually balls around its legs, and eases between the two.
Your saves carry over as they are; nothing needs to be restarted.
If you still see slowdowns, please post in the forums with your pool size, roughly how many balls are left, and which machines you have running. It helps a lot. Happy digging!