This is a special update to wrap up the year, with a few thematic videos.
I hope you all enjoyed 2024, and I wish you an excellent new year!
All these videos are used to improve the Steam page quality. I am planning to create at least 5 more videos on different themes.
Are we there yet?
(The most asked question)
No, I am still not confident in having a private alpha yet. As a reminder, this initial alpha will be reserved for the backers of the Kickstarter campaign (hence "private"). There will be no exceptions.
Obviously, I am not holding a release out of malicious intent or over-cautiousness but because not everything in my professional life is under my strict control, and I have some duties. Additionally, a poorly timed alpha may burden my workload and consume the little free time I have to work on the game (actual dev time - the meat of "work done").
All I can say is that the game, the software, is in excellent technical shape, and I am very optimistic.
Bonus
A discussion on the Discord server pushed me into doing some benchmark tests. Antimatter has seen major code improvements in the past months and optimizations, so I tried some extremes:
This is a 15,132 stellar systems galaxy (737,252 planetary bodies) with 1,500 years of history simulated, a population of 57T (57,000,000,000,000) humans, and 757 colonized worlds.
It did generate and instantiate fine, but I haven't tried further, and let's be frank, this is probably unplayable.
It was a nice surprise though, and as a reminder, this isn't merely a usual procedural universe but one painstakingly built through accretion simulation, retained in memory, and continuously simulated! Each of the 757 colonies required a fully generated AND persistently simulated planet surface!!
On my second test, I tried a galaxy of similar size but with only 100 years of post-Antimatter crisis history.
And it is playable:
Let me get this straight, I am not teasing such a massive playable galaxy here, but that's the fruit of this continuous code structuring labor aimed at getting smooth gameplay, especially late into the game. I expect normal playthroughs to be more within the range of 20-2,000 systems.