Tag: Code

[devlog] Stability Fix

EsKa

rtitle05Hey !

It’s going to be a very short but very important devlog. I spent the last week fixing the stability issues people were experiencing with Unending Galaxy. The main reason why the game wasn’t stable in the first place was because it’s fully multi-threaded (able to use all your CPU power) and because I wasn’t able to make it work 100% of the time until now. Before labeling me as an incompetent coder please look at the CPU usage of your favorite AAA games, yeah not so good either, hey :). Multithreading is hard to get it right, and the more complex your game is, the harder it is. Anyway, after a whole week of debugging, I finally managed to make it work properly. It took its toll on the performances and nearly nullified the benefits of last week‘s improvements, but it was worth it. I’ve been looking at the same game for hours and hours trying to make it crash and it simply doesn’t. More to the point, there’s tons of “please don’t crash” code that I can safely remove now, which should in theory improve performances again.

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Devlog: Trading System (mostly)

EsKa

title07My apologies for the delayed devlog, it has been a busy month for me, but don’t worry the development is still going as it’s used to. Beta 4 is even going to be released later this week barring any last minute major problem.

Back on topic, the last two weeks were spent putting the finishing touches on the general user interface, fixing a bazillion small issues, improving things left and right, and more importantly finalizing the trading system.

Let’s get to it 🙂

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Devlog: Free Traders, code optimization and stuff

EsKa

Snap1427Hi guys !

My apologies for the delayed update, life got in the way and it’s likely that next week will be problematic as well. When I have to make a choice between coding and writing here, I favor the former. So don’t get alarmed by the erratic schedule, development goes on as usual.

Anyway, I made a fair bit of progress toward the release of the Beta 3 with a massive performance and stability boost, the new “free trading” AI module for your ships and multiple smaller other changes i made to the game.

Let’s get to it, shall we.

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Critical bug in 0.6.0 being investigated

EsKa

It has come to my attention that a bug in 0.6.0 prevents the game from loading properly on some machines. The issue is being investigated. I am going to publish a build featuring a proper bug report system, this build will also have a potential fix for what I suspect to cause said crash.

Stay tuned.

State of the Development

EsKa

Snap693I think it’s a good time to summarize what has been done and what’s left to do regarding Unending Galaxy. This is going to be a long post, but hopefully more interesting than usual, that will go through all aspects of the game. Note that this is about the current in-house build and not the 0.5.5 demo. If it’s your first time on the website, you may want to check the product page first to know what I am talking about.

Feel free to comment and post ideas before we are out of the stage at which I still may consider new features and major changes. You don’t need to register to do so, I know most people don’t like Disqus but that was either that or wasting my time erasing loads of spam every day.

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Devlog: User Interface, Building, and random stuff

EsKa

Snap678I am currently overhauling the user interface so you can access all the ship commands that were until now only accessible to the AI factions while improving the general ease of use. It’s still a bit clunky, but we are slowly getting there. There’s many changes including a darker theme for better visibility, various popup menus, a few new windows / improvements to existing ones.

Apart from the user interface, I also made several changes and improvements to the game engine, and ship behaviors. It’s quite hard to fit all of them into categories like usual as it was a fairly unfocussed coding week (GUI aside, of course). I will try to detail the important bits in the full post.

Also don’t forget to check out our new gameplay video

Enjoy  🙂

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Devlog: Ship menu, friendly fire and coding

EsKa

This one is going to be shorter than usual. I had to re-install Windows completely and, of course, everything that goes with it (drivers, updates, settings, most programs, my dev environment…), and it took quite a bit of time. But don’t worry, no data was lost and I still managed to make some important changes and additions.

I rewrote the Ship Info menu, which will allow you to setup and give order to your ships more easily. I also implemented different friendly fire settings so you can attack enemy assets without worrying about hitting neutrals. As usual, I will explain these changes (amongst more technical ones) into more details in the full article.

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