Hey Space Travelers!
I would normally make a dev update post when there's more to talk about, but the following message had to be made to give everyone a heads up.
Attention! Many Mods will break next Monday, June 12th!
This update will break a lot of mods, if you want to keep playing your save with old mods working, please switch to "v0_8_x" in Steam Betas. I will keep the v0.8.x in main branch for a few more days, if you want to try the v0.9 early, switch to "experimental" branch right now.
How to change the branch
- In Steam, click on Library > Games.
- Find Stardeus.
- Right-click and select Properties.
- Go to the BETAS tab.
- In the dropdown, select the branch you want to play.
- In that same Properties window, go to the Local Files tab and press "Verify Integrity Of Game Files."
- Your game will be updated to the new branch. If it's not "default", you will see the branch name next to the game name, i.e. "Stardeus [experimental]" or "Stardeus [v0_8_x]".
- Launch the game and play it.
Electricity Rewrite
With that out of the way, let's talk about what changed. Right after releasing the Complex Planets update I shifted focus towards rewriting one of the biggest performance bottlenecks for large late game ships - the electricity system. It was an extremely difficult task, as the old electricity architecture was the backbone of the whole game. The rewrite involved changing the code and configuration of every single electrical device in the game, and it was so big that I had to bump the game version from v0.8.x to v0.9.
Unfortunately this rewrite also broke all the mods that interacted with electricity in any way. However this had to be done sooner rather than later as in order to support smooth electricity grid simulation on large ships, the old architecture relied on a few hacks that had various side effects that other systems had to deal with. The new architecture is data oriented, based on the wonderful Unity Job System, and about 500x faster than the old one.
The changes shouldn't affect the gameplay much, but you may feel that the game is smoother and runs faster at 10x speed with large ships. There will be a lot of little subtle changes in the electricity system though, you will now see how much batteries consume when they charge, all reactors will share the workload evenly, some confusing features like customizing electrical device consumption and production priorities are gone, connectors now have an on/off switch, etc.
If you're interested in more technical details, subscribe to Kodo Linija on YouTube - I will be making a devlog video explaining more details behind this rewrite, showing some code, etc.
The next big rewrite will target AI behavior - task assignment and execution. This is now the single biggest bottleneck the game has (after growing your colony to hundreds of beings). Just like the electricity rewrite, this will be no small challenge, but I have to tackle it because it's aligned with the next major content update, which will be about... Oh wait, let's keep it a secret for now.
See you in the next one!
Spajus
Follow the Development
- Official Website: https://stardeusgame.com
- Join Stardeus Discord
- /r/stardeus on Reddit
- @StardeusGame on Twitter
- @dev_spajus on Twitter
- @KodoLinija on YouTube (devlogs)
- dev_spajus on Twitch (live development streams)
Get Stardeus
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1380910/Stardeus/