I had hoped to be out of beta a week or so ago, but we’re not quite there yet. On the plus side, we’re continuing to make some astronomical strides in general stability, performance, and so forth. This applies to singleplayer and multiplayer. We have a couple of dramatically-overpopulated huge savegames that would have ground to a halt in the past, and they now actually run at about half sim speed and 30fps; by simply adjusting the game speed up to 2x, you can run those in realtime, in other words.
I prefer that the game run at 60+ fps, of course, and at full sim speed; but in this particular situation, we’re talking about 9.5 hours into a game with 13 intensity-10 factions, 3 difficulty 9 AIs, and three other factions in addition. In total, under the hood, 49 factions in place, and about 550k ships in 40k groups. That is… really really extreme, and the fact that it’s quite playable now is something I’m really pleased by. Even better, the game now uses far more of your processor cores as of this version for these extreme sort of scenarios. It won’t use excessive CPU in a normal situation, but it does scale up as-need, even on 16+ cores.
There are some safety mechanisms in here that are new for various NPC factions, which allow them to force stacking when they start getting too many units spawned. This is useful even for modders, so that if they wind up with runaway unit counts on high intensities of their factions, they can have the game automatically adapt and get better performance out of it. In the event that the automated logic doesn’t get the job done, it now shows what is going over budget in a warning fashion, which should encourage people to submit savegame bug reports where more direct tuning can be done by the faction author. Overall I like giving people the tools to succeed and not shoot themselves in the foot, so this is a big step forward in that regard. These mechanisms only apply to NPC factions, not to player ones, incidentally.
Lots of bugfixes in this build, many of which are related to the recent “don’t reference a wrong unit” code that was put in. But also, this fixes a couple of notable multiplayer bugs, and so hopefully the multiplayer experience is smoother than ever, as well. I still expect some remaining small issues for a bit, but so far I’m really heartened by just how well it’s running on my test setup.
Civilian industries got some updates as well, and runs again (it was busted at the last moment in the prior build).
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
