Hello all!
Over the past week we've been conducting some stress testing of the game to see how large things can get.
While Chains of Acquisition is intended for small to medium sized maps, large maps can be fun when playing with lots of friends even if it pushes the balance a bit. We prefer 20x20 or 25x25 maps, but we have been seeing how big we can get, and have been using 100x100 as a reasonable test for a large map size.
Chains, like many simulation/strategy games, is a very CPU-heavy game, so our focus between 0.4.1 and 0.4.2 has been optimizing the CPU load, particularly when loading the map. Our primary optimizations in this update were to the collisions on the map grid and the nodes, reducing them to as few meshes as possible. We tested on a 100x100 map, totaling 10000 tiles with an additional 2000 nodes. The following results include FPS, CPU usage, RAM usage, and Approximate load times on the same map:
Surprisingly we didn't see much of an improvement in framerate at this size, but we did see a decent decrease in CPU load and loading times. In any case, these optimizations will allow for significantly larger maps in the future, though we have not been able to load a 1000x1000 map due to object limits. (though that is something we would like to improve) We do believe for map sizes under 100x100, this will keep the game more accessible to lower-end hardware, even if it doesn't result in much of a boost in high-end setups.
Additionally with this update comes a brush size tool for the Map Editor, just in time for larger maps to be viable. Alongside this, we have updated the modding UI for a smoother experience enabling, sorting, and uploading mods.
And finally, the Steam Workshop page is live! So once the game is available everyone will be able to start modding immediately. We think modding is the lifeblood of games like ours, and are very much looking forward to what everyone comes up with.
Just for fun, we have also uploaded the map we used to stress test for this update, and we plan to add a few more maps to our official unofficial big maps mod.
Thank you all for following! We are looking forward to our launch at the end of this week!