Hello everyone!
Happy New Year, we're still in January so I'm allowed to say it, it's the law!
I know there's some really crazy stuff happening in the world, so I'm burying myself in work to avoid thinking about it too much. And the result is a new little version with quite a few changes!
This Week's Recap
I was supposed to work on notifications, but I didn't do it the way I thought I would. Actually, I got tons of feedback over these past few days and it allowed me to prioritize essential elements that will greatly improve your gaming experience. First, the emails, I added colors to help you distinguish them better. It's not much but it makes a nice difference, thanks for the suggestion!
Then the devkits. Until now it was a somewhat hidden menu, but that was without counting on your feedback that pointed out this state of affairs. So now, sending devkits is part of the game's main interface, and it's much easier to find this essential panel when you're manufacturing consoles.
Other important details like the fact that the game will now remember the sort order of consoles and genres so you don't have to make the same gestures over and over again. But I want to tell you about the bulk of the work.
I spent a few days reworking the game launch. Actually, I came across feedback from 2019 that mentioned City Game Studio taking a long time to start. And when checking on my machine, it took about 15 seconds to launch. Let's just say an eternity, so I worked on that.
Instead of loading everything at once, loading now happens on demand. This might introduce some bugs, but that remains to be proven because I think I tested the changes thoroughly. I took the time to delete over a hundred textures that were no longer used, while reworking the management of a thread (there are still a few in the game) that was running all the time for no reason. And I also closed all the I/O that weren't properly closed, which could cause a small memory leak indeed. And with all this work, the game now launches in about 7.5 seconds on my machine.
I wanted to see what it would do on an older machine, and we go from 31.5 seconds to about 13.2 seconds on average. All without blocking the operating system. So it's a small victory and I'm pretty proud of myself for that!
What's Coming
I still plan to rework in-game notifications to make them more effective. So that's not changing. But I also plan to work on the save system. Last time I worked on it I focused on optimization, meaning loading a game is faster than before. And today I'd like you to have a more modern autosave system.
I'll tell you more when it's done, and I don't think I'll have time to do everything in a single week.
So, in these uncertain times I wish you good health, take care of yourselves, for real! And if all goes well we'll catch up next week!
Xavier aka Binogure