Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Gratuitous Tank Patching

cliffski

Another, and possibly the final pre-release patch has been released for Gratuitous Tank Battles. I put more emphasis this time on the whole topic of stability and performance, rather than squeezing in new features. The full list of changes in 1.007 are as follows:

version 1.007
=============
1) Fixed bug where the deployment icons on the battle screen were no longer showing their popup windows.
2) Fixed crash bug when using very high amounts of muzzle smoke.
3) Increased minimum range of missile modules.
4) Fixed bug in displaying certain bonus effects on the design screen, notably for missile launchers.
5) Replaced 'gratuitous shaders' option with a toggle for the distortion effect.
6) Sped up the drawing of unit shadows.
7) Fixed yellow-screen corruption bug
8) Fixed bug where the progress bar for the score would not always draw correctly.
9) Performance improvements allow for higher quality visuals when zoomed out on higher spec PCs.
10) Infantry do not now talk as frequently when onscreen in large numbers.
11) Some variety introduced in the placement of tiny props next to certain turrets
12) All turrets now have surrounding 'splats' to merge slightly with the terrain.
13) Special props can now be hidden from the editor.
14) Fixed bug which displayed an empty unlock dialog on certain occasions.
15) Some optimisations to speed up drawing of drifting smoke, and reduce particle effects when framerate drops.
16) Fixed unit design bug preventing ammo loaders being selected if a rate of fire aug was already fitted.
17) Fixed bug where a map would not tolerate starting supplies being higher than the mid-game supply cap.

The ones that really matter are 5,7,17 and 17 which were pretty critical functionality related things. I still have a bunch of purely aesthetic improvements I’d theoretically like to make, but they can wait. I am hooping that what is currently in the game represents a big list of features to attract buyers, and at the same time is also pretty fast and stable. Modding support is the next big thing to get my teeth into, but that is all under-the-hood stuff which won’t really affect 90% of the players.

The only thing (barring reported major bugs) between now and release is going to be making a new launch trailer that shows stuff like the extra maps and the airstrikes etc. Making trailers always takes an absolute age, and I’m never happy with them, but I should put some time into it because GTB looks so much better moving than as still images. I plan to capture and record a fairly high res trailer this time so it looks as good as possible. the trouble is Fraps can only record so big before it slows down the actual game and makes performance look bad when it really isn’t. That, plus the nightmare of uploading and rendering out massive video files.

I might try and take half a day off tomorrow. Yay!

6 thoughts on Gratuitous Tank Patching

  1. What happened to your RSS feed? It doesn’t give full content anymore :( If you want to stand out in RSS readers amidst all the other information flying around, this might not be a good thing.

  2. It was never meant to show the full content. This is a deliberate choice, otherwise it just ends up repackaged on other sites with nobody actually visiting the source of the blog.

  3. So every post from now on, I have to decide whether to click through from my RSS reader based on the first two or three sentences. Are you sure it’s worth it to punish some aggregators?

  4. I don’t think it’s uncommon for people publishing a site to want people to visit the site.

  5. Indeed, I rarely read articles directly in my reader, I just pop them open in tabs so I can easily read through everything and comments and whatnot.

    Anyway, sounds great Cliff! I look forward to buying it once life stops the flogging for a few minutes.

  6. But we do visit your site, cliff ;) I’ve often clicked through to read comments on your most interesting posts. Or if you mention a new product or website feature I will gladly click through.

    But do your regular subscribers really need to load up your title image and sidebar every 2-3 days? (Figure from Google Reader). You don’t change it that often, do you? If I’m reading on my iPad in my down time, for example, having to drop out of my RSS reader interface makes it take a lot longer to see what you have to say! (Plus I have to be in WiFi range.)

    On the other hand, you do look rather dashing in that boating photo :P

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