Bugfix 1.018

I uploaded a bugfix for the prototype. If you want to try it, uninstall DwarfCorp through Add/Remove programs and re-install the prototype. I know this is annoying, so we will switch to an auto-updating system soon.

This time, I tried to tackle some performance problems. I did another round of aggressive profiling using SlimTune. I discovered (to my dismay), that most of the game’s CPU time was being eaten up by uselessly doing calculations for drawing … wait for it … little motes of grass! So I re-did the way grass was being created and drawn. Hopefully this causes performance improvements for some people. Here is the full list of fixes:

1.018

• – Setting GPU buffer for trees and grass only happens 1x per tick rather than 1x per render pass. Possibly 3x faster.
• – Moved Instance buffer rebuilding to update tick rather than render tick. Was causing severe slowdowns.

1.017

• – Telling Dwarves to guard something no longer results in a crash
• – Performance improvements for lighting and vertex calculations
• – Visibility frustrum checks now use heuristics rather than exact checks. May be faster on CPU-limited machines, and slower on GPU-limited ones.
• – Very large performance improvements for drawing grass motes
• – Added “Graphics II” options screen
• – Added options for turning on and off grass motes
• – Add options to increase or decrease the number of grass motes. If you don’t want grass motes, for the best performance turn them off, and reduce the number to zero.
• – If your graphics card cannot support the initial resolution and AA settings, it will silently fail rather than crashing.
• – Miscellanious AI crash fixes
• – Sounds use less memory now, and cache some more data. Will result in hang on the first play of a sound of 30ish milliseconds. Fixing that later
• – If the volume level is set to zero, the music player thread is not started at all, rather than starting silently.
• – SlimTune profiler no longer crashes when running the game.
• – Water updates more slowly
• – There is less mutex locking when rebuilding chunks (may result in graphical artifacts and flicker)
• – Pressing left CTRL + mousewheel causes the slice level to go up and down
• – Rare palm trees now grow in deserts.

In other news, now that we’re fully funded, we’ve been internally discussing what the next best steps are. I’ve also been talking with my PhD advisor about the situation. Long story short: things are not looking good 🙁 We’re not prepared to discuss this publicly yet.