Game Dev Tycoon · published
This release should hopefully fix a bunch of odd issues we've recently seen Mac users report and should also have much better performance on Mac.
For Windows users the main change is that text-rendering is vastly improved and performance overall should be a bit better too.
We haven't updated Linux in this release, as it would not have made any significant changes.
If there are any issues, please get in touch with us at [email protected], by responding to this announcement, or by posting on the Steam forums.
Game Dev Tycoon was one of the first games on Steam to use node-webkit to run a HTML5 game on Desktops and because of that, we were using an ancient version of node-webkit by today's standards.
We often considered upgrading but every time we did, we experienced numerous new issues and had very little confidence that the overall player experience would be better than before. Newer versions of node-webkit (now known as nw.js) are also significantly larger in size and we didn't want to inflate download and install sizes for little gain.
Unfortunately, once Apple release Mac OS Catalina, it seemed that, while after a lot of work, we managed to get our version of node-webkit to work, the performance significantly degraded (for all versions of Mac OS) and when we released v1.7.0 we suddenly got all sorts of odd bug reports on Mac, none of which can be attributed to our own game code. Our only choice is to upgrade to a newer version of nw.js and hope that Mac OS supports this better.
This is a drastic change for the project hence the bump to version 1.8.0 - You'll notice that the game is now larger in size but the improved performance, Mac support and the vastly improved text-rendering on Windows should make up for it.