We’re back!
Our first update was released some days ago! While it may not look like much on the surface, bellowing beneath the game visuals is a new modular package of goodness infused into the long running Supremacy engine which we have built the CoN foundations upon.
Internally this package is colloquially known as 'Update intake'.
To understand this, we need to take a trip down Stillfront-lane. I promise we’ll take the express lane.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
When Bytro built the Supremacy engine way back when (most of us still had hair), they expanded the engine to accommodate the games they developed. Supremacy, Call of War, Thirty Kingdoms, New World Empires, and later Iron Order.
A whole new world
Between New World Empires and Thirty Kingdoms, Dorado Games entered the scene tasked with a mission; We kill th Use the Supremacy Engine and take it on for the next project. To get our blades sharpened, we used the ongoing Thirty Kingdoms game taking it apart and putting it back while applying our company touch. This, of course, meant getting very familiar with the Supremacy engine, along with all its quirks and supremacy.
Blitzkrieg to end 2016, after a very intense number of seasons, Dorado packaged and released Conflict of Nations into the stratosphere (take that Tesla) through an open public Beta. During this time and to this day, Bytro and Dorado work on separate codebases but still maintain very close contact including (but not limited to) cross-company support across departments.
1984 2023
Fastforward again some years, (some? It’s been almost 6 years - oof I’m getting old)
My existential crisis aside, the two companies lived happily ever after diligently, and with great fervour worked on their games in an unrelenting manner with the aim of utmost dedication. (Seriously, I’ve been in those meetings.)
Over time our codebases grew very differently from one another. Now, for the technically inclined of you, this probably rings some alarm bells. But for sake of the normal folk, this means that one company had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, while another had a pineapple pizza (I’ll let you be the judge of who has what). The problem here is; we somehow had to merge the two dishes while making it work.
And here we are! What? I said we’ll take the express lane, I only kind of lied.
What were you talking about again? I’m hungry now.
Yes! Update intake. Thanks for reminding me. For the better part of last year one of our developers had the monumental task of merging the two savoury dishes that have no complimentary qualities. The peanut butter and sandwich is the base, as is the pizza with sauce and mozzarella. The Jelly and Pineapple? Well, you see the problem here.
More technically speaking, update intake adds in some modernised code on the underlying engine of our game. Another way of thinking about it is in this way: We took the engine of a car from years ago, and infused the engineering of progress made over the past years.
You will not see visual changes, and may not perceive any changes at all, but the intake allows us greater flexibility in improving the underlying code. Oh! Also, it fixes a fair bit of bugs and optimisation issues which were causing headaches. It’s one of those black magic things which touches on so many areas that it isn’t so clear cut as to what is fixed and improved.
Here Be Dragons
We spent quite some weeks and months making preparations for Update intake, in past week having the beta testers mercilessly break our beta environment (with consent). But, alas, such is the nature of development, we cannot know the full effects until live release. Thankfully, with 2 days since release we haven’t seen very many bugs, actually, it went much better than expected!
The team scrambled together 3 Hotfixes since then, and things are looking delicious! We aren’t out of the kitchen yet, tracking down pesky bugs as they make themselves known. Given sensitivity of the situation we’ve been very quick to identify and fix said bugs. Even they couldn’t resist the allure of PBJ pineapple pizza.
Believe it or not, yes we made PBJ & Pineapple pizza work. If you ask how? Honestly, the dedication of everyone at Dorado. We’re monitoring very closely but internally this is considered a success all things considered.
It’s been 87 years
I think that concludes this lengthy rant post for devlog 23. As it stands, we’re finalising the roadmap for 2023 which I will gladly share with you once we have. We have some other interesting things in the short term pipeline which I’ll be showing soon.
Also, we’re looking for another sacrificial dev for the next update intake. Now excuse me while I prepare lunch.
- Yak