Hi everyone, First of all we'd like to welcome all of the new players who have joined us (both on Steam and Discord) while the game was featured on Daily Deal on Steam. Concurrent players has again been above 600, something we haven't seen since the Early Access release back in August 2017. In the last couple of weeks we've been busy, writing more complicated code than usually. Beta 19 is all about performance improvements and that is going to be visible in the devlogs the next couple of weeks/months.

The Research Tree

Beta 19 will introduce a brand new research "tree" which will replace the existing "Tiers and XP". We were never happy with the current unlocking mechanics as it was both scripted and impossible for the player to control. Now it will be entirely up to you how fast you unlock stuff (hiring more researchers) and which items you prioritize unlocking first.

Performance Improvements

Alright, this one is HUGE! Since the Early Access release Startup Company hasn't been the most optimized game and everyone who had 180 employees know what we're talking about. The main reason for the bad performance has always been the way the office was rendered (DOM elements). This was a decision we took early on, as Startup Company at the time wasn't that "big" of a game. People usually had 10-20 employees. Now as the game has progressed, it's time to move on to WebGL and something called canvas. This is all geek talk, but what it really means is the game is going to be incredible efficient compared to the latest Beta 18. Here's some early stats showing the improvements (all based on i7 7700K and a GTX1060): [table] [tr] [th]Test[/th] [th]Beta 18[/th] [th]Beta 19[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]30x30 office with 100 employees[/td] [td]84 fps[/td] [td]144 fps[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]60x60 office with 200 employees[/td] [td]27 fps[/td] [td]144 fps[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]150x150 office with 400 employees[/td] [td]Unable to load[/td] [td]102 fps[/td] [/tr] [/table] As you can see, Beta 19 is going to be insanely fast and it opens up brand new opportunities when it comes to office sizes. Obviously increasing the maximum workstation count is coming, but we are also looking into much larger office buildings. Do you have suggestions or ideas for the game? Check out our Conflux board. That all for this week. Thanks for reading! Best, Jonas & Robert [url=https://discord.gg/hovgaardgames]

[ 2018-10-28 18:05:03 CET ] [ Original post ]