Update 61: Optimizations And Far Zoom
[p]Whew, I've been away for 10 days, in terms of builds. That seems like forever to me! I've been hard at work that whole time, working on the really mind-numbing work of detailed performance optimizations.
This build also includes a new "far zoom" mode that lets you zoom out from the city view to have a map-like view, although it's a bit different from the actual map view. The far zoom mode is meant to bring together the best of both views in one, and to be an additional way to engage with the world, rather than outright replacing the map.
I wanted to get all my performance improvements done in one batch, so it took the whole time since the last build. I'm seeing polygon reduction tools in my sleep, lately. It got very boring near the end of this stretch, but I think the results were well worth it, and I feel really satisfied by it.
Cybercratic Ambitions needs some more tuning, but is still on the beta branch. I've left a lot of player feedback to the side while I was doing this performance-optimization sprint, but this week I'm going to get back on that. The localization for that one still isn't fully ready yet, so it might be early next week before that leaves the beta branch. We'll see.
Anyway, other than that and working on general fixes, that's pretty much the full set of stuff for 1.0! We're getting very close now.
This build might not seem that exciting, but I really love the far zoom mode. And all those performance optimizations really pay dividends in terms of how the game feels, especially for people on weaker hardware.
If you’ve spent time with Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, that’d be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if you’ve been meaning to write one, I’d be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this — developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.[/p][p]Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. It’s a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.[/p][p]Thanks for reading and for playing.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 61 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Camera Updates[/h3]
[/expand][p]Full notes here.
[/p][h3]Connect with the Machine[/h3][hr][/hr][p]Want to stay in the loop or share your thoughts? Join the conversation across these platforms:
💬 Discord – Best place to share feedback, get direct responses, and to talk about Heart of the Machine.
📜 Reddit – Discuss strategies, share ideas, and exchange tips with the community.[/p]
This build also includes a new "far zoom" mode that lets you zoom out from the city view to have a map-like view, although it's a bit different from the actual map view. The far zoom mode is meant to bring together the best of both views in one, and to be an additional way to engage with the world, rather than outright replacing the map.
I wanted to get all my performance improvements done in one batch, so it took the whole time since the last build. I'm seeing polygon reduction tools in my sleep, lately. It got very boring near the end of this stretch, but I think the results were well worth it, and I feel really satisfied by it.
Cybercratic Ambitions needs some more tuning, but is still on the beta branch. I've left a lot of player feedback to the side while I was doing this performance-optimization sprint, but this week I'm going to get back on that. The localization for that one still isn't fully ready yet, so it might be early next week before that leaves the beta branch. We'll see.
Anyway, other than that and working on general fixes, that's pretty much the full set of stuff for 1.0! We're getting very close now.
This build might not seem that exciting, but I really love the far zoom mode. And all those performance optimizations really pay dividends in terms of how the game feels, especially for people on weaker hardware.
If you’ve spent time with Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, that’d be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if you’ve been meaning to write one, I’d be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this — developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.[/p][p]Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. It’s a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.[/p][p]Thanks for reading and for playing.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 61 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Camera Updates[/h3]
- Bending Zoom To Not Be A Sniper: As you zoom the camera out, it now bends the view inclination to look more downwards. This prevents you from being at a crazy high zoom just laterally. That was probably not something many people did, but it made the camera work in a really funky way if you tried it (since you're seemingly low to the ground but actually on the end of a giant gimbal, for example, so the lateral rotation would be amplified).
- Far Zoom (Like AI War): At the point where the camera would previously stop you from zooming out any further, it now swaps to a "far zoom" mode that is kind of a hybrid of the map view and the streets view.
- Building Visual Style: A variety of buildings have been tweaked a bit to be more attractive while I've been in there optimizing them. For the most part, not being overly bright in a way that clashes with the rest of the game view.
- More-Numerous Time Adventure Juice: A number of the side goals now give Aetagest in addition to Daring. People were overall coming up more short of Aetagest than desired in recent builds since I shifted things to give more Daring.
- "Groves" For Out Of Bounds Buildings: All of the out of bounds ruins around the edge of the city are now handled completely differently from before, baked into clumps. The repetition is hard to see even if you're looking for it, and it makes savegames about 7% smaller than before, and most importantly the cpu and rendering load of these is dramatically less (90% reduction from before). This is particularly important for the far zoom mode, but it helps performance on the regular streets view, too.
- Background Math: A variety of math to do with the rendering of buildings and other objects has now been moved to a background thread that runs almost every update, but may take longer than an update. This allows the main thread to run faster when under heavy load (due to an older CPU or drawing tens of thousands of things at once), while taking more advantage of cores that are less busy.
- Mech Draw Distance: All of the human-created mechs now have increased draw distance and LOD counts, so that they are both lighter on the GPU load, and also no longer have any pop-in when you're scrolling around on the streets view.
- Vehicle Draw Distance: Optimized various large flying vehicles with extra LODs, also increasing their draw distance in the streets view while doing so. The overall effect is removing pop-in while also improving framerate.
- Save And Load Window Performance: Greatly improved the performance of having the save and load windows open, most notably if they had a huge number of savegames in them.
- Escaping The Matrix: Implemented a pure-C# version of the TRS matrix calculation. This is a notable speed improvement when a large number of objects are being drawn at once. Unity's built-in version involves calls to some C++ code, and it's slower for no benefit.
- The Bit That Took The Longest: Updated hundreds of buildings to have LODs, creating thousands of new models since the last build. This uses 60mb more of RAM and disk space, in exchange for a 93-96% reduction in number of polygons rendered.
- Doom 8 Actually Arrives On Misery: Fixed an issue where on misery mode, in international scrutiny, the timing for the 8th doom was not set correctly and would happen way after the final doom.
- Calling Heron Early: After doing certain decryption, the ability to contact Heron early is now possible. This doesn't actually open up much, but it's fun to be able to do.
- Network Flicker: Fixed a longstanding issue where when you swapped between map view and the regular view, the network borders would flicker for a moment as they had to be recalculated.
- Achievement Oversight: Fixed an issue where "How About A Nice Game Of Chess?" was never actually completed, so did not work. To get this in the new build, if you should otherwise have it, you must launch a single nuclear ICBM, and then you should have it after the turn changes.
[/expand][p]Full notes here.
[/p][h3]Connect with the Machine[/h3][hr][/hr][p]Want to stay in the loop or share your thoughts? Join the conversation across these platforms:
💬 Discord – Best place to share feedback, get direct responses, and to talk about Heart of the Machine.
📜 Reddit – Discuss strategies, share ideas, and exchange tips with the community.[/p]