The new content in this one is mostly incidental, to be honest. The big focus for us has been performance, performance, performance, and that's something that is still heavily inwork. It's coming along, though! I'm getting a somewhat choppy 25-50fps during heavy combat where I was in 0.201 getting a hugely-halting start-and-stop 20fps at most, and where in 0.200 I was getting even more halting 5fps.
What has been surprising is the various techniques that have NOT worked. Matrix math is something that I figured I could shortcut in a variety of ways, but that didn't work out so hot. The Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced route actually had a variety of issues, and then Graphics.DrawMesh doesn't avoid the culling problem after all -- frustum culling just won't die unless it takes efficient z sorting and transparency sorting down with it.
There are still a variety of other changes that I'm working on, though, to reduce CPU bottlenecks that presently exist. It's all about moving gameobjects around and the expense of the matrix math that entails.
That in turn leads to a variety of required changes relating to the hierarchy of objects in the tree, throttling and pooling of updates on more distant objects, and so on. Thus far my focus is almost solely on shots, because they are relatively simple compared to squads and ships and gimbals, but I'm going to be after those other things next with my findings from shots. Shots are no longer the largest slowdown on the CPU except when there are north of 5000 of them at once, so that's a big win. I need to get that even lower, though, and then I'll be happy enough to start in on the squads. That way I'll be confident in the results there without having to then take yet another pass on all this stuff too soon from now.
