Hey guys,
just wanted to let you all know what we are currently working on.
When developing a game, there is a lot of internal work, that players don't see directly but which still benefits them indirectly. For example, we have recently added a better crash detection and automated reboot to our test server, which will help us speed up debugging and free up resources that were previously spent on manual reboot (both time and mental energy of developers) that can now be invested in more important tasks.
Something new we've been working on are asynchronous calculations of ship stats to increase the performance of the game when ships lose parts in a fight or are changed in build mode. So far this would cause stuttering when large ships were involved because recalculating the stats takes longer the larger the ship is. In the future, this calculation will take place in a separate thread, updating the stats as soon as the calculations are done. Using this method, we were able to reduce the time it takes to place a block on a large ship of more than 75 000 blocks from roughly 800 ms (> 50 frames) to about 70 ms (~ 4 frames).
We're also adding two new types of factories for producing raw oil and coal respectively to complete the production chain for turret crafting (sorry for the oversight!). So far these goods needed to be obtained by trading but soon you can be self sufficient when building turrets for your empire!
While the Economy Update is on the Beta Branch, bug fixing and testing takes up a large portion of our time right now.
Have fun!