Just over a week to official graduation!
On Tuesday, Kepler 17318 was promoted to default. By player reports, the game is in very solid shape with few bugs, so barring any surprise serious issues I've decided this will be the Release Candidate. It adds full, professional German translation, plus fixes a dozen or so minor issues and typos.
With the Release Candidate up, I'm now starting work on what will hopefully be the first post-launch update.
One thing that I've wanted to tackle for a while is image loading. When the game first launches, it loads some of the most common image assets. Then, when the player first starts a story (a "story" in the game's logic is a content chunk) or loads a save, it loads any image assets that it knows that story needs. Loading a single image doesn't take super long, maybe 10-20ms on my computer. This only ever needs to happen once per application start, and at the start of Early Access there were maybe 100 images, mostly anomalies. But now there are around 500 images, which equates to 10 seconds of loading. Again, this is just once per application start, so not terrible, but if it could be reduced that would be preferable.
An obvious solution would be to wait until an image is needed before loading it, but there are areas in the game the game where many images might suddenly be needed all at once, such as in the ship log or cargo bay, which would produce an unacceptably long stutter mid-game.
After some investigation, I determined that the time to load images and create their sprites was roughly linear to the size of the image. Since the size of an image is the square of its resolution, and anomalies are 1024x1024, I could load a 64x64 thumbnail of every image in the game in the time it took to load 2 full anomaly images. Maybe not exactly that many, but in that ballpark.
Earlier this week I created an editor script that generates 64x64 thumbnails for every image. Now where previously the game loaded images, it will load the thumbnail. Specific UI elements can tell the game that they need the full resolution version of an image and the content system will load the full version only then.
A side effect of this change is that preliminarily it looks like this reduces the baseline memory footprint of the game significantly.
It's possible this change may have some unforeseen negative consequence (for example when first testing it I discovered some areas where images looked super jaggy because the appropriate full sized image wasn't being loaded), which is why I'm not going to try to rush it into the launch version.
Until next week!
- Kevin