Steam Trading Cards have been uploaded and are now dropping while playing Galactology! Max finished the card artwork some months ago and I (Carlos) finally got around to write the copy and upload them for review and publication. One more step towards a finished game! And speaking about that...

Current development status

I've been quiet for the past months. As I mentioned in our last development update back in March, 3.5 highlighted an important performance problem once a game hit the mid to end game and your station grew up a bit. This was rooted in a very core decision to adopt certain scripting language plus its VM. While that language is very performant for its category (as a purely interpreted Scheme, it's probably the fastest non-JIT Scheme), it became clear it wasn't performant enough. And the remaining optimizations promised improvements in the order of a 20%, not the order of magnitude required to support truly big and complex stations. For this reason I decided to target LuaJIT instead. This requires a massive rewrite of 37K lines of code. Fortunately there's already a Lisp-like transpiler for Lua (l2l), and my own transpiler had a relatively easy job of transpiling from two different Lispy languages. This part of the work, statically translating from a language to other, is done. Now comes the part where that new code has to be loaded into LuaJIT and the game has to run from it. Just translating the source is not enough, since the scripting-facing API has to be rewritten, and many semantics are not the same (1-based counting in Lua, for example). This is the current development task, and it will still take some weeks to progress and then stabilize. But I can say that now I'm past the 50% mark! The details of these tasks are very technical (much more than the previous paragraphs) so I haven't keep a public log of the work, since my status updates are meant to highlight gameplay additions and changes, not techno babble. But rest assured that regular features status updates will resume when the translation work is finished and stable. This work is delaying 3.6 and thus advancement into our development roadmap, but it's required if we want the game to live to its full potential (and yes, it will enable Lua mods, making it much easier for modders). For this reason I may do a 3.6 pre-release after the translation is mostly working, to find out all the problems with the help of our players. We will see in some weeks!

[ 2017-05-01 13:44:52 CET ] [ Original post ]