Hey folks! This update was delayed somewhat by the necessity of ordering a Mac computer–I’d been borrowing Macs from friends to push all of the prior updates, but circumstances finally required me to secure (and then set up) a Mac of my own. The Mac mini just arrived yesterday, so here we go!
Pictured: what the game’s processor usage looked like at the start of a battle when nothing at all was happening, right after I generated a ton of particles.
This update is relatively small, but there are a few really important updates in it:
- fixed the primary remaining cause of game slowdown! It turns out that the issue was inside the third-party particle engine that Telepath Tactics uses. When the clock that determines how long particles last ticked down to 0, it seems that their emitters were not being removed; they remained present (and wholly invisible) on the battlefield, sucking up processor cycles. As battles progressed, more and more of them would stick around, and eventually they caused noticeable slowdown. Luckily, once I realized what was happening, I was able to hack together a workaround to clear these emitters every turn. It’s not elegant, but it works.
- fixed a bug where the game would not save changes made to individual character inventories on the reserve supplies screen.
- fixed a bug where the game glitched out when you tried to save manually during deployment.
- recoded a bunch of inventory management functions with copyArray() to prevent array entanglement.
- fixed a bug in which the rightmost door on the ground-level Coria tavern map was impassable due to improperly set elevation.
- the game now produces nicely formatted XML save game files. It doesn’t read them just yet, though–I’ll be transitioning over to the new XML save files in the next update.
- added a new property to one-shot sounds wherein they can be tagged with a string, and added an optional second parameter to the PlaySound script action that assigns a tag to the sound being played.
- new script action: StopSound. This stops a one-shot sound effect being played according to its tag. This can be used to support voice-acting that cuts off whenever the player skips through dialogue!
- added text about damage fall-off to the third part of the Tutorial that appears if the player takes too long figuring out how to destroy the altar.
That’s all for this time! Stay tuned for more fixes and improvements to come.
