Devlog
Posts tagged “performance”
Every devlog post tagged performance.
EngineSkipping pixels and tearing down a 4K frameWe took the largest step of a 4K frame apart term by term, then made each pixel skip the small lights that can't reach it, saving 2 ms.Engine note · 3 minWreckwing0.15.5 and since: wave defense and the city at nightRelease 0.15.5 and the work since: a wave defense mode, the city at night, a new ship death, an enemy roster, and a wide city that loads in 3.1 s.Release notes · 10 minWreckwingDrawing each ship's own textured modelThe game now draws each ship's own textured model, part by part, where it used to rebuild ships from convex blocks. What that took, and what it costs to draw.Dev journal · 4 minWreckwingRelease 0.15: city depthPonds, a community pool, trees, parked cars, garages, hotels and an industrial zone fill out the city, and large cities stopped stalling after big blasts.Release notes · 3 minEngineFinding 1.4-second stalls by replaying playLarge cities froze for up to 1.4 s after big blasts. Replaying a logged play session headless reproduced an 836 ms step and led to fixes, one at a time.Postmortem · 4 minWreckwingReleases 0.12 and 0.13: sandbox city and explosionsThe game's sandbox became a seeded 200 m city with billboards and gas stations, and explosions got a staged fireball, a shockwave and debris thrown outward.Release notes · 3 minWreckwingRelease 0.9: pressure testingProgressively heavier scenes found where the engine gives out. Release 0.9 fixed what they found and added new weapons, water, and buildings from photos.Release notes · 3 minEngineCheats we measured, and the ones that didn't helpWhen 25 collapsing offices overran the physics budget, we looked for perceptual cheats. Four helped, four did not, and one is still on trial.Engine note · 4 minEngineChoosing the engine's stack, in Low Power ModeNumbered gates decided the engine stack, run with the Mac throttled. Four failed, three were fixed, and our first diagnosis of the slow collapse was wrong.Engine note · 4 minEngineRubble with weight, and rubble that staysWe set two rules on September 29. Fallen rubble loads the floors it lands on, and resting rubble stays where it lies. This is how the engine pays for both.Engine note · 3 minEngineStage 1 in one day: releases 0.1 to 0.8Eight releases on September 29 took the project from an empty repository to a building that comes down under its own weight, with every gate measured.Release notes · 3 minStudioWhy we started overThe first attempt at a building-destruction game failed at about six buildings. This is what we scoped for the restart and what carried over.Postmortem · 3 min