Here we are:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Stars_Beyond_Reach_Beta_Release_Notes#Version_0.824For the most part, the release notes speak for themselves. I've been very absent from the forums, and I have a lot of catching up to do with them tomorrow. A replacement window is being installed in my office tomorrow, so I won't be able to use my main machine much. I'll instead be using my laptop, which is lower powered, and that will be really useful for me in getting some solid testing done. I can also take care of some writing and design and other bits that need doing.
Anyway, today has a huge number of changes to pieces of the guts of the game, mainly in terms of just taking existing things and making them cache or bake together or run on another thread. So it's not really a matter of changes per se in anything you would see, except a vastly superior framerate. All of these changes are CPU-side issues, not GPU-side ones, so the strength of your graphics card is irrelevant here. The strength of your CPU is rather what matters instead.
Keith is still hunting down interturn performance slowdowns, and getting the interturns where we want them is definitely a short-term priority for his work queue. We have a lot of other things to do as well, ranging from addressing specific mantis items you guys have logged to continuing to deal with some of the larger issues you have brought up. We're kind of taking a mixed approach to that at the moment, because we don't want all the performance work to try to sneak in at the end and then possible cause late-stage bugs. Like you might see with this release, who knows. Fingers crossed not; I've tested everything I can think of and it's looked good. But I also was continually making changes, so I already found one case right before this release where I had broken something that was working earlier today; I fixed that, but it's hard to say if there are other similar things.
Anyway, I also took the collective advice about the building adjacency bonuses from the prior version, which were 100% way too high, and now they are a lot more tame. I think they're high enough at the moment to be worthwhile, but they're not something so high that at a novice level you have to pay attention to it. Which is very much a goal of mine. And then of course the natural wonders and resources retain their much higher adjacency bonuses, which make capturing them and using them extremely important, just as much as in the prior release.
I'm signing off for tonight, but I'll be around tomorrow a lot more in terms of catching up on some threads here. Goodnight!
