Finally! After two grueling months of technical work version 3.6 is ready to play. This is an unusual version. It contains very little gameplay additions. You can read about them in this March post: http://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/483414098550226384 So what happened in the two months since that post was made? A massive rewrite of all the gameplay code in order to port it to LuaJIT, from a completely different programming language. After version 3.5 was released it was clear the game performance was bad once your station grew a bit. This was specially relevant in 3.5 since it added enough content and fixed enough balancing for players to build a bigger station. At that point I decided to stop adding new features and concentrate on fixing the performance. Otherwise the game future viability and quality would suffer a lot. It was a gamble since there's a lot of abandoned half finished games in Steam and doing this would make Galactology look like just another one, even while I was working my hardest on improving it. But I decided to take quality over appearances. Version 3.6 is the result of that work, and I believe it's successful. Moreover it also means mods can now be written in Lua, making it much easier for moders to work on our game if they desire so.

Technical details

40K lines of code have been rewritten (some manually, some with the help of a custom transpiler tool developed just for the task) from Scheme to l2l, a Lua-based language similar to Lisp. This allows the very sizable scripting side of Galactology to be based on LuaJIT, for the maximum possible performance for this kind of programming languages. sol2 provides the C++ binding layer for Lua. The performance improvement is roughly 4x to 6x. In addition GC pauses are dramatically shorter thanks to Lua(JIT) incremental collector.

Missing Linux build

Sol2, the C++ binding layer for Lua, requires a GCC version which is too new (4.9) for the default GCC installation of the Linux Steam Runtime (4.8.1). The clang version is recent enough, but it uses the same C++ library as GCC (libstdc++), so it's also not possible to compile the game with clang (libc++ would solve the issue but it's not bundled with Steam RT). I'm running out of options. My next step is to try the beta version of the runtime, which in theory has shipping support in the normal client, and bundles GCC 5.

Next version

Version 3.7 will be a return to our feature roadmap, and you can bet I missed it!

[ 2017-06-02 21:51:20 CET ] [ Original post ]