Status

V0.805 - Crashing Fixed!! New Selection System

Starblazer · published

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IF YOU'VE CRASHED BEFORE - TRY THIS PATCH. Trust me. It's better.

Brandon and I just got back from PAX East, an event filled with lots of avid gamers and VR enthusiasts. One of the best things that we got out of the event was the chance to talk to people more experienced in development and the VR industry. It was through these conversations that we were able to get to the bottom of the crashing seen by a few of our users.

I made countless changes in the code to optimize for performance, including:

  • Bullets have a more finite life cycle to prevent memory leaks.
  • Ships are removed from memory more immediately after explosion.
  • All pathing functions are removed immediately with ship death.
  • Only the ends of the pathing functions are updated each frame to keep up with target. The inward paths are keep static.
  • The hand / map function is updated via event system, not per-frame update.
  • The AI function will ignore all previously destroyed ships are soon as health goes to zero.
  • Medic and Spectre requests are all removed after death.
  • In general, memory management for all textures and models is improved so that less is stored in the memory over time, creating better frame rate and crashes.
  • On Icarus, I removed most of the dynamic lights and replaced with baked lighting.
  • On Icarus, I removed FX that were performance consuming - i.e. solar flares, sparks on ends of lasers.

In addition, we got really good feedback on the way the selection system should work. I changed the selection so that every time a ship is selected, it creates a new path, rather than adding on to the original path. This is a common mechanic in RTS games, so it makes sense to pull in here. Why did we not think of that before..? Hrm... dunno. That's what we have you all for. :D

That said, we definitely hear your feedback and make changes as soon as possible! Please join our Discord to help give us some more tips!
https://discord.gg/jDKWnmX

What else?
Small tweaks as always. We're perfectionists and we're here to give you the best RTS strategy game.

  • Flagship now pairs with enemy ships (to eventually attack) instead of getting stuck on Allies.
  • Improved the radius of ship selection to make it more snappy.
  • Enemies are now highlighted red instead of white to make the targeting clearer.