Wow its been a BUSY week, like crazy busy. I released build 1.07 for Production Line, and started on 1.08. The price went up to $11 today, and I also started laying out a list of coming soon stuff in the forums here. There has been a steady (and accelerating) growth in daily pre-orders for the game. 4,000 sales seems ages ago now, and I’m struggling to keep up with all the feedback. Anyway…here is the new blog video.
I shouldn’t really be surprised, but the pace with which people have got around to building REALLY BIG factories is kinda amazing. This meant I needed to do some optimisation for those cases, often totally revising my idea of how big I should make certain fixed size buffers. (640k is enough for everybody!). I know some programmers might say ‘but dude…variable sized data structures. Yup, know all about them, but they can be SLOW. Try comparing the performance of a list or vector and an array one day… its HUGE. What I tend to do is have fixed arrays of oft-used objects, and allocate extra arrays if I start to run out, meaning rare one-off frame skips, but silky smooth performance most of the time.
My day is just now a blur of checking email;, then twitter, then facebook messages, then reddit posts, then forum posts, then forum messages, and then going through my bug list and my features todo list until its time to sleep or blow off steam in Battlefield One. However…just in case you thought that made me sound lazy, don’t forget we are also publishing another game (Shadowhand) which is coming soon. Here is Jakes latest video about the game:
Before long it will be GDC, and before that I’ve agreed to speak at TWO(!!!) events, which means…holy crap. I should stop typing and get on with it.. I will leave you with the exciting changelist for Production Line build 1.07:
[version alpha 1.07]
1) Major performance optimization for large factories.
2) Much faster vehicle rendering when zoomed out.
3) Fixed bug where very high car output resulted in no market price for a car being low enough.
4) Fixed the 'No room to TrashLowPriorityResource from stockpile' bug.
5) Fixed the 'Route Pending!' bug.
6) Possible fix for corrupt efficiency graph.
7) Fixed bug where manufacturing slots showed as not connected to a stockpile until the first resources arrived.
8) Added game-clock to top right menu.
9) Quitting the new car design dialog now gives a unique default name and price to the design.
10) Fixed bug where the warning notices on cars would persist until they encountered an empty conveyor belt.
11) Fixed bug where right clicking on research screen could delete items in the factory.
12) When a car is unable to move to the next (connected) slot, the message now tells the player which requirement is not met.
13) Background sound FX in R&D screen reduced in volume.
14) Fixed bug where some conveyor belt placements resulted in multiple placement sounds on top of each other.
15) Fixes to the layout of some R&D and slot menu items.
16) The warning and error notices in the factory now shrink to icons when zoomed right out.
17) As a temporary quick balance measure, only 4 valves are needed for engines now!
18) Fixed bug where supply stockpiles would not always fill correctly.