Wow guys, what a wonderful response to Desk Space! We passed 1,500 wishlists which is awesome, THANK YOU so much everyone!
I've gotten some feedback that performance can chug as you buy more ships and your network grows. This is something I will continually work to improve, but here are some quick fixes:
UI Refresh Rate & Garbage Collection: Instead of updating every single frame, UI calculations are now on a throttled timer. This should be the same to the eye, but offers 90% less overhead and eliminates random stutters (especially when switching application windows).
Pathlines Optimization: Changed the math behind how flight paths are drawn, utilizing the GPU instead of the CPU. This should be way more efficient while keeping the same visual look. Pathlines are often the biggest performance bottleneck, especially when zoomed in on a base with many ships. It also avoids drawing them entirely if they are off-screen.
Better Frustum Culling: The engine now checks more aggressively if ships are on-screen, skipping rendering effects, engine flares, and trails for any ships that are out of view.
Background Memory Leak Fix: Capped popup numbers to prevent memory leaks and stutters when the game is left running in background browser tabs or minimized.
Ship Label Toggle: You can now disable ship labels globally for a solid performance boost. You can find this toggle in the settings menu.
Low Graphics Toggle: Disables nebulae background rendering, ship trails, and cargo load particles. You can toggle this in the settings menu.
Other Additions:
Settings Button: Some people didn't realize you could press Escape to open the settings, so I added a dedicated button directly on the UI.
Exit Button: There is now a dedicated "Exit Game" button in the settings menu... no more Alt+F4!
Consistent UI Zoom: Fixed an issue where the UI scale differed depending on whether the window was pinned or not. They are now completely consistent.
I've also gotten a lot of good feedback on balancing, pace and gameplay additions, I've avoided changing this for now but got some solid ideas for the future, I want to let the demo live as-is for a bit longer to see patterns.
Keep the feedback coming, and again, THANK YOU!