Hello there.
After the recent patch with Inland Sea I felt dissatisfied with how the map performed on my (admittedly outdated) pc. I wrote about it in the patchtext and added a notification text to the map description warning players with weak CPU from playing the map.
However, this has never felt quite right, so I started digging for causes of performance-loss.
A lot of game logic is handled by the Unreal Engine, which is one reason why I have often felt like I couldn't do a lot to significantly improve performance of basic things happening, such as pathfinding, unit movement and other things.
One thing, for example, that I kept noticing was that the engine spent a lot of computation time just checking each frame against the floor units were standing on, even if they were standing on the very map bottom. This has led to investigative work on how to remove this unneeded computation. Eventually I figured that I could just set a value in the configuration of the movement component of units to achieve this. I have also been able to achieve further optimizisations by tweaking other movement settings.
Apart from that game logic responsible for drawing little symbols on the minimap or doing periodic AI player behaviour seemed to lead to significant slowdowns. I went and moved a lot of it from to native c++ code or did some caching where possible and needed. As a result Inland Sea and any other map turned out to run a lot smoother for me.
^ The mini map in a spectator game with four AI players. ^
Unfortunately I did not record exact figures of FPS or frame time to provide you people with a comparison chart, I hope you'll forgive. However, I don't think it hurts to put this update online now and let anyone benefit from the results of my efforts.
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This update contains a second thing: A new, medium-sized map:
Fields and Forests
With this addition there is a total of 12 maps to choose from now.
I hope you like this update.
Take care!