Hello fellow engineers...
...might be the correct intro at this point in time given how many new players are coming in from the RCE video from last week :D
But also - I need to talk a bit of actual engineering today, because of how many people report their game becoming a freeze-frame-fest once their tower reaches some critical threshold. So I'll briefly explain why that is, and why it's not fixed yet:
Reasons for poor performance:
The number one reason is that I've been advancing this game from prototype to demo fairly quickly, which has meant a fair bit of poorly (but speedily) written code survived too long. I didn't have some standard practices in place (for the nerds: only partial object pooling, too many unfiltered NxO situations...) because frankly it was never a problem.
But I also didn't expect every YouTuber under the sun making a video about the game and folks building absurd monster towers that take over the whole screen. Which is honestly the best problem in the world, as it simply means I wasn't prepared for the success, like every single company that made an MMO in the late nineties :P
The good news:
On my dev build, I have fixed all of this by now. I've been testing with towers twice the size that is currently possible in the demo, have spammed massive enemy waves - and my little MacBook didn't break a sweat. There were lots of different issues going on, the biggest one being that projectile code was too complex and when you have 200 arrows checking all enemies for collisions, that's gonna be a problem.
Proof that it's working now - 200+ weapon blocks from a 1500 block tower firing at 250 enemies while they eat through the tower, while screen recording on my laptop:
The bad news:
It's not super straight forward for me to push these changes into the live demo - so I decided to eat this for now and fold it into the next larger demo update. There's a bunch of exciting news coming soon, but in order to make all that work I can't really justify spending a ton of time on the current demo. And I think in the end we all want the same thing - the full game to get here as soon as possible!
Sorry for the inconvenience folks and I appreciate all of you who reached out to let me know about this <3
Stay tuned for what's to come, really looking forward to sharing more news soon!
Ben