Week 13 Update

by ⚡ Shockk on 2019-10-13

It’s been what feels like a very long week and we’re finally making headway on a few fronts.

Debug Console

Progress with the debug developer console has been really, really slow and unfortunately I haven’t yet been able to get it to the state I’d like it to be at. A lot more has been involved with expanding the capabilities of our action system than I originally imagined, and debugging issues with these new capabilities has slowed me down considerably.

At long last, however, the action system now fully supports both prioritized bindings (i.e. bindings can take higher or lower precedences over other bindings to the same action) and interception (i.e. a binding can prevent other bindings from executing after it).

The upshot of all this is that we can now type into the console—layered on top of the world so as to preserve the current state—and none of the movement keys will trigger any movement.

Needless to say, this is huge and the rammifications are greater than that of a mere debug console. For example, we can now implement stuff like pause menus, nested menus with state that can kept alive while navigating sub-menus, etc.

64-Bit Windows

After a long time of putting it off, we now fully support building the game for 64-bit Windows. What does this mean in practice? Probably not a whole lot, but in general the game should use a tiny bit more memory than before but also be significantly more optimized in terms of CPU usage in certain tight areas of code.

The reason for this is actually really simple; x64 just has access to a far greater number of CPU hardware registers, allowing the compiler to make greater use of these and avoid passing or allocating values on the stack in memory. Overall, we should see CPU usage decrease just slightly, everywhere.

Patreon

We now have a Patreon for the game! We dedicated some time to thinking about what the scope of the Patreon should be, and we’ve fleshed out a bunch of tiers with what we believe to be proportional rewards.

We thought about pledging to offer game merchandise at some of the tiers, but at this stage we don’t feel comfortable making such a commitment, as we don’t even know what that would entail, what kind of merchandise we would even offer, etc. Maybe an idea for the future, but not right now!

Please do check out the Patreon page by clicking Support Us at the top right of the site navigation bar. We’re also setting up a Discord server for Patreons to join our community—check out the Patreon tiers for more information on this.

Thanks for sticking with us, and, until next week, 안녕히 계세요!

⚡ Shockk, Lead Programmer