Things are going well...
Overall there's been a lot of me tuning things to really get them feeling right, and that's slowed me up quite a bit. Getting performance in an area that I felt was acceptable, with the new borders and whatnot, has been a huge time sink. I've gotten that to the point where it doesn't cause all that dramatic a slowdown while still looking awesome (and we're only talking slowdown of any note when you're at max zoom, incidentally -- zoomed-in this thing still flew from moment one). There are a couple of more optimizations that I have planned for the borders in the next few weeks, and those will really make a 10+ fps difference on the largest maps at max zoom on a midrange rig. Right now on the new largest maps I'm still getting 60+ fps on the furthest zoom, though, so I'm pleased about that. The map size shifts were not remotely all due to performance.
Anyway, also just trying to get the feel of the territories the way that I wanted took a lot of time earlier this week, and then more recently I just couldn't put my finger on why they still didn't feel right in terms of my need to capture them and the way that they affect attack adjacency, etc. Turns out that the territories were just vastly too large, and that having them be about a third the size I previously stated is a lot more fun. And I don't mean "fun" as in more difficult, but literally it feels more interesting and there feels like it's a good balance of goals for me to capture and buffers between me and the AIs, etc.
Pulling out the districts was surprisingly time consuming, and I did some other performance improvements while I was at it (unrelated to graphics; all CPU-side, and hopefully to help with RAM turnover a bit), and so that ate up a lot of time, too.
I actually ported the game to Unity 5 briefly to see how that would affect things performance-wise and if that made any difference in terms of garbage collection in mono, but no benefit on either side.
I also lost a fair bit of time to researching stuff about a specific kind of cancer that we now know one of my uncles has. It's a less common sort, so I had to do some digging around for figuring out much. That's had me in a down mood the last couple of weeks in general, but only in the last few days did we really find out any details about it (biopsy results), and there's still a lot to be found out later. So anyway, I was trying to I guess get ahead of that process and see what I could guesstimate about what his prognosis might be. From doing that with my mother in law, who also had (even more) unusual cancer, I did a really accurate job of that, actually. Her situation turned out super well and against the norm, and she's now in remission, which is awesome.
Anyway, between some depression at that, and anxiety about the summer sale coming up and the time schedule here (I'm not going to have the usual volume of time to work this weekend, and then I'm going to be out next Friday through the middle of the following Tuesday) and just in general what I'm doing, I don't feel like I've been at top mental form this week. I really thought I'd have all this wrapped up by yesterday, and really I should have in most respects. But things are getting done, and coming out really well; it's just in slower motion compared to my usual pace with it, which is another source of fairly deep frustration for me.
So basically the work itself is going really well, but I've been getting in the way of myself when it comes to actually getting it all done. I'm not sure on an ETA. I might be able to do a release tonight, and we'll see what all breaks for you over the weekend.
Or I might have too many unfinished things and need to do it Sunday afternoon. If I'm overlooking more than I think, it might be Monday -- hopefully no later than that.
Anyway, I'm heading back to it now. A lot of the biggest variables have been properly figured out now (region size was a huge sticking point),so that's good.
