This past week I had to make some hard calls regarding the immediate future the game’s development. Don’t worry it’s not all bad.
The first decision is regarding multiplayer. Multiplayer was always something that I envisioned the game having. Something along the lines you and a few of your friends could play together in the same world and all build together. No crazy 200+ player worlds but a max of like 4-8 or so. Now as you may have guessed making a game multiplayer is not a simple task and requires a lot of work. Because of this I have decided to push multiplayer functionality back a while. I want to be clear that the goal is to still have multiplayer in the game eventually, it is just going to have to wait a little while longer.
So now you should be wondering, if no multiplayer for a while, what is the good news? Optimization! I have decided to instead go the road of making the single player game as good as it can be. The reason for this is because Engineer Alpha is in many ways a “simulation” game. Which means lots of things are happening in the background outside of the player’s direct influence. And as there can, and should be, a whole lot of background actions the game needs to deal with them as fast as possible. Now some of my code for some things is ok and doesn’t really need to be any faster. On the other hand, some of it executes at the speed of sloth. So, there is definitely room for improvement.
Multiplayer and optimization were at odds with each other because they are both learning things for me that take up a lot of nights and weekends and I didn’t want too many things going on at a time. Don’t worry nothing else has been cut for now and all the same things are planned for 0.3.
I have decided to start with inventories as they are relatively simple and can involve a boatload of looping so making them execute as fast as possible can be very important. Initial results are good and I am figuring it out. If the stars align inventory 2.0 will make it into 0.3 which would likely come out sometime late spring.