HELLO!
Been a minute.
Where's update?
Not ready yet.
Bye-
... Ok, but really though.
v1.4.2 was planned to launch about a month ago, but I decided to go on a "side quest" of moving the entire game's scripting from Rhai to Rune, which failed, followed by what I'm currently working on, moving the entire game's scripting from Rhai to Hail (my own programming language).
The core, semi-logical reason for doing this is due to Rhai's performance issues, which have been causing me to have to go back and rewrite script based systems in Rust to have any hope of performance, where even then I had to add systems to bypass Rhai still. The player script in and of itself takes between 1/10th and 1/5th of frame time, it really shouldn't.
Could I have instead moved to using Lua?
Yes.
But I hate Lua.
I tried moving to Rune instead to avoid having to write my own programming language, as it was somewhat similar in syntax, but it didn't fit in in the way Rhai did, and had a number of limitations I couldn't work with, a big one being imports (bringing in scripts from your own / other mods).
The good news is that as of yesterday I've gotten to see the game's world again loading via Hail, and at the end of the whole rewrite I expect a minimum of a 5x increase in script speed, I'm unsure of the upper bound as in some specific cases it's not even close. The bad news is I'm not done yet. I'd like to at minimum put something on experimental again within a few weeks, but I can't make promises as I'm quite literally translating 30k+ lines of code.
In addition to all of this, my day job has been looking a bit... unsteady, with signs of the company doing poorly, so if you're able to support me on Patreon or spread the word about the game, I'd greatly appreciate the help, as I'd like to gear up for full-time VE development.
Anyways, thanks for the patience, I wanted to let ya know I'm not dead (yet), Steam Era soon, you can expect the Coke Oven, Blast Furnace, Boiler, Crusher, Liquid Pipes, equipment (WRENCH), Aluminium, Advanced Clockwork Drill, Stack Pipe, Turbo Pipe, performance improvements, a new scripting language, bugs, and bug fixes in the nearish future.
