Hey people, Luke here.
Performance Overhaul
I doing a performance overhaul of VA's system internals. I have literally gutted the entire project's ship, block, weapon, and rendering handlings systems, splayed it's bits out on a table and have begun rebuilding it completely. Huge operation. It's been a massive 14 hour a day journey and it's showing incredible fruit.
I've gotten entirely new block-cluster handling code, entirely new rendering generation and transform stuff. A completely new weapon and systems pipeline, and my own 2D physics implementation.
FPS Benchmarks
My test case fleet-fight throughout has been Dusk Fire Regiment vs Alpha Remnant. Two big fleets, with a lot of blocks, a lot of smaller and larger ships, and it used to run horribly.
v0.88: 25 fps average across my tests. Terrible.
v0.89: 112 fps average across my new test!!!!!
That is a 400% increase in rendering, combat, and physics performance.
How?
VA was made in a rush to prevent my bank account from hitting zero. As such it's a bit of a messy and poor project. Principally I used Unity's default Object Oriented architecture. This is very common in Unity games, is very easy to setup, but runs horribly slow.
On the flip side we have the relatively new Unity ECS/DOTS architecture. Which is blazingly fast but very complicated and time consuming to setup and get working right. Since I now have cash from ATS, and time to work on VA, I could finally get down on my elbows and crawl inside this engine with a wrench and a Masterclass.
What's left to do?
Alright, I'll get you guys something cool to look at soon. But I now have to overhaul the Constructor to handle building ships with this new tech... thankfully I already had a lot of premade fleets to test out during this overhaul work.
Cheers.
Luke AP