Part of this week one of us is unexpectedly away (family reasons) - the PR guy behind pipliznl. So here comes a programmer blog post!

This week was almost entirely spend on optimizing various parts of the game. There were some obvious parts of the game that were woefully inefficient (monster AI, network use, some client parts), and the more obvious ones have now been fixed. All in all this improvement leads to a >80%-ish improvement in network traffic, a up to 60%-ish boost in client fps depending on the world, and (depending on the colony as always) +50% up to ~+300% (!) server performance.

These improvements won't add new content, just like the previous patches, but help build a foundation for the game which will hopefully be worth it for the long term.

Think of it like building a sky scraper. This is the first game I've programmed. Some of the first floors of the sky scrapers have glaring issues - like 1 of them blocks the elevator and only has stairs, then 1 has only an elevator. For the early access release we hastily build 10 dodgy floors on top of our sky scraper. Before adding another 10 floors with dodgy foundation, we're fixing the skyscraper to be of decent quality, so it won't be a hazard to build on top of.

TL;DR: Fixed some of the deeper issues, causing significant performance improvements all over.