Dev Log -2: Optimized and Packaged
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2012-08-08
I've got the remaining audio stuff done rather quickly. I've added a few more atmospheric drones so that each area type (caves, lake, metro...) has its own now. They are not perfect fits, but they'll have to do until I get someone to do a real soundtrack. The only thing that is sorely missing is the main theme music, though I guess it's forgivable for an alpha version.
Next, I cleared up that pile of minor bugs that was sitting in the corner, and I also did significant optimizations in couple of areas in the engine:
- I optimized the isometric renderer so it works a lot faster now and should have no problems rendering at higher resolutions where there's a lot of tiles on the screen
- I've optimized the way the processing time is distributed between sight, lightning and pathfinding components; the major CPU hogger, the pathfinding, should now properly use the time unspent by the other components; this, coupled with freeing up more time by optimizing the renderer, should have game running smoothly at all times
- The NPC now move near-instantly while out of sight of the player during turn based combat, so this should speed the combat up a lot in areas where there are patrolling NPCs
I've also got all the deployment stuff out of the way:
- I've got the release build running once again and did some smoke testing. It works just fine and I only found a couple of bugs, which makes me a bit uneasy because I was expecting more problems considering how long it has been since I last ran it (my release config looks quite a bit different from the debugging one).
- I've also made an installer and tested it on a clean WinXP SP3 install and it works (downloads and installs all the .NET prerequisites automatically).
Now that I've got all this technical stuff out of the way, I can get back to finishing that last bit of content for the demo which includes:
- one more creature
- couple of more quests
- some AI stuff
This should be done by the next weekend (17th) when I have dedicated testing marathon scheduled. By the end of that weekend the alpha demo will be ready, but it will not go public until later that week.
In any case, it's on the home stretch now.