JAMs News

I made a toggle switch for loading the inventory with a different strategy --- loading one page at a time, it's much faster! You can find the toggle switch on the settings page. I'm getting rid of the resolution toggler for now (since that was only temporary as I figured out how to set up the UI recently) so this new inventory toggle switch will take it's place.

We still might need additional loading modes and some fine tuning, but you now have an option to load the inventory page in at least a faster way now. Memory can still get out of hand as you flip through the pages, but at least when you navigate back they load fast.

Hey!!

I've been tinkering away with building this inventory screen, it was pretty complicated as Unity doesn't support GIFs out of the box, and I wanted it to download the images only for the ones you own, so I don't have to keep patching in the new items every time.

This was a bit of a journey! It downloads them and brings them up from local storage if they are already downloaded, but it will load them all up every time you enter the inventory screen. I had it working where the images were loaded much faster, but the program goes into a 'not responding' state as it thinks too hard and overloads the thread, the way it is set up currently it does them one at a time slowly and just gets it done --- I like it this way since you can still navigate away once it's started to load.

Since we are decoding the gifs and playing them back, the system is basically breaking them apart into individual frames, and since we have tons of frames and if you have lots of items, your RAM usage might get incredibly high during the loading of that screen currently. This situation may not scale well as we keep adding items, so I might even make a toggle switch for different approaches of how the inventory screen loads or behaves, but for people with just a few items it's not a big deal, and when you navigate away from that page, it unloads all the memory so I think it's better that we don't have the images preloaded if it's that nuts on the memory already.

I will make pages with the details and tools of the items and I still need to do the tooltips, but lets just see how this goes so far!

Got a language toggle in settings now which will let you select 1 of 30 languages to have the tooltips presented in your language, and I changed lots of elements to use emojis (depending on tooltip for text) to make JAMs a lot more accessible internationally! I might make the panel titles change one day too, just as text instead of images but I think the tooltips should be good for now.

I also tweaked the FPS / Vsync settings and added an option to go unlimited FPS or however fast or slow you wanted to run the game, and added the option to disable drops entirely if you wanted. This is handy for me as I don't have an inventory piling up as I develop (and I'm sure not everyone wants a thousand hours of drops as they click/idle) so now that is a toggle switch in the UI.

More features coming soon! Starting to get the hang of it!

We now have tooltip messages to help explain what the buttons do! ːdreamokː

Hey! Switched to the newer Unity "Input System" and added some basic controller support for navigating the menus, and made it so that if you have the autoclicker and it's disabled you can autofire on the main screen at the same rate it would go at with it on. Since it is an active use thing versus an idle feature I could actually make it go faster, I was just setting it up for now, can sort out the details later.

I'll also add a toggle feature to disable gamepad support, I can imagine situations where you might not want it.

I have the settings only affected on the settings page still, and Start changes the Resolution, Select toggles the FPS, B toggles Autoclick. and the D-Pad, Right Stick, and shoulder buttons can be used for navigating around to the different pages.