Hi, fellow Porcos!
I though i'd share a bit about the next update and what i've been working as it could take some time before its ready...
Since the release there's been many reports of unstable connection for some users. I've been investigating this on and off since then, and especially now for more than a week non-stop.
After extensive testing it turns out the networking of the engine i'm using is... broken. It is buggy and as soon as there is a bit of strain or too much traffic, it simply breaks.
This game implies a lot of transfers as there is a lot of data such as building lists, resources, techs, worldmap etc, especially during the loading times.
So it turned out that was the main cause of why some users experience connection timeouts or infinite loading times.
This is very likely to trigger as soon as the connection between client and server is slightly unstable ( distant server, short lags, bad wifi, packet drops across the network etc... ).
Now these should not normally cause any issue, but something is broken somewhere in the networking engine and its causing a failure that i cannot fix myself: long story short the engine i'm using is pretty closed and i have no direct control over it. There is also no hope for any fix from its devs either.
Therefore for the past week i've been entirely focused on trying and experimenting to see if I could find any way to workaround whatever's broken in that networking engine, but i'm working blind here and its making this a very time consuming task. I have found ways to improve things, and i'm still working on it, and i hope the improvements to be significant in connection stability for players although it might never fully fix the issue, as the root of the problem is beyond my control.
This is just yet another issue i'm having with this obsolete engine, which has now been a constant source of issues and limitations.
That is why I've started looking and learning the basics of Unity, an engine much more adapted to the needs of this game, but this is a very long term goal and would be a HUGE task. I am merely learning the basics of it right now, on whatever free time i manage to muster which is not much! So its more of a wish than an actual plan, at this stage.
The second main focus of the next update will be a global update of how advanced starts work.
Many people are asking "when will there be a new server" while many servers have plenty of available spawns. The problem being that there are currently too many issues with it and players are not convinced to use them.
Rather than restarting servers who would always be doomed to end by the same decay, my objective is to improve late game starts so that a stale server may be able to regenerate itself with new players.
For that, many improvements and fixes are needed on how late game starts work, and the next update will bring many improvements about this so that hopefully new life can be brought to older servers, as the cycle of players and empires is simply a natural process that can't be avoided: if players can't be convinced of the validity of late starts, every server will always go stale after the majority of first wave of players leave.
So that's it, just wanted to give some news so that my apparent silence isn't interpreted as not being actively working on the project!