Week 6 Update
Hey guys!
I'm about overdue for an update so I want to let you know about what my plans are for the next couple weeks.
In addition to normal routine bug fixes & Quality of Life improvements, I'm planning 2 major changes.
I apologise in advance if these get a little technical.
The first thing I want to talk about is the way saving/loading works.
There's a major issue with the way the save system works that I only discovered the day before release. Save files can only be loaded on the PC that they were saved on.
This happens because of an odd quirk of the game engine I'm using. There's a great little built in function to securely save grids to a data file that my game uses. Unfortunately what the documentation didn't mention is that these files an only be opened on the PC that saved them.
Meaning things like Cloud Saving is impossible and you can't copy saves from one PC to another. This is a huge issue for me too since I can't have users send me their saved files to help diagnose bugs.
My top priority is to not break current saves. So i'm planning to fix this in such a way that it will be invisible to users and all their saves will continue functioning as normal.
Once this is fixed, transfering saves from one PC to another will be possible.
The second major change is with an issue that causes a fairly big performance slowdown on large Rec Centers & having a lot of 'building plans' up at once.
The issue is that pre-built plans like walls, tiles & pools are very performance intensive.
Each unfinished wall/tile is about as performance intensive as a customer or piece of equipment.
Building a somewhat small 10 by 10 room creates 100x 'building plan' objects & has the same performance impact as an additional 100 customers in your Rec Center.
So if you're building a large 30 by 20 room, you're adding 600 objects to your Rec Center which causes a lot of slowdown until they're built.
I did this originally just because it was much simpler & faster to implement, without considering the performance impact it might have on mid-low range PCs or when you're trying to build very large amounts of walls/floors at once.
In the next week or so I'm going to overhaul the way this works, so that a pre-built floor will have the same performance impact as a regular floor tile.
This will result in a massive performance increase for many users.
I know both of these things aren't particularly interesting features but they're both extremely necessary changes that need to be done.
Having the game run smoothly for everyone who plays is my top priority right now.
Thank you for your patience!
I'm about overdue for an update so I want to let you know about what my plans are for the next couple weeks.
In addition to normal routine bug fixes & Quality of Life improvements, I'm planning 2 major changes.
I apologise in advance if these get a little technical.
The first thing I want to talk about is the way saving/loading works.
There's a major issue with the way the save system works that I only discovered the day before release. Save files can only be loaded on the PC that they were saved on.
This happens because of an odd quirk of the game engine I'm using. There's a great little built in function to securely save grids to a data file that my game uses. Unfortunately what the documentation didn't mention is that these files an only be opened on the PC that saved them.
Meaning things like Cloud Saving is impossible and you can't copy saves from one PC to another. This is a huge issue for me too since I can't have users send me their saved files to help diagnose bugs.
My top priority is to not break current saves. So i'm planning to fix this in such a way that it will be invisible to users and all their saves will continue functioning as normal.
Once this is fixed, transfering saves from one PC to another will be possible.
The second major change is with an issue that causes a fairly big performance slowdown on large Rec Centers & having a lot of 'building plans' up at once.
The issue is that pre-built plans like walls, tiles & pools are very performance intensive.
Each unfinished wall/tile is about as performance intensive as a customer or piece of equipment.
Building a somewhat small 10 by 10 room creates 100x 'building plan' objects & has the same performance impact as an additional 100 customers in your Rec Center.
So if you're building a large 30 by 20 room, you're adding 600 objects to your Rec Center which causes a lot of slowdown until they're built.
I did this originally just because it was much simpler & faster to implement, without considering the performance impact it might have on mid-low range PCs or when you're trying to build very large amounts of walls/floors at once.
In the next week or so I'm going to overhaul the way this works, so that a pre-built floor will have the same performance impact as a regular floor tile.
This will result in a massive performance increase for many users.
I know both of these things aren't particularly interesting features but they're both extremely necessary changes that need to be done.
Having the game run smoothly for everyone who plays is my top priority right now.
Thank you for your patience!