End of January Update - Finally, The Bottom UI Is Actually Useful Now

Hello everyone,

While this month was mostly spent having to attend to some concerns unrelated to DORF, now that that has been dealt with, I can return to development. Thankfully there still was some progress made this month.

Firstly, we finally got around to making use of that seemingly pointless UI box in the very bottom of the screen. Selected units will show up in this section as icons, which will shrink dynamically as more units are selected to allow for more to be displayed.

 
These icons also display the team faction color as a border, as well as displaying HP and control group number. And speaking of control groups...



Control groups assigned will now show up in the UI at the bottom of the screen, indicating which control groups exist, which ones are currently selected, and also you can click the group number to select it. Double clicking also centers the camera on the group (this can be done by double-tapping the actual number key as well). While not super important, I've always found this to be a small but still helpful feature in RTS games.

Moving on, I've also returned to working on rebuilding existing assets to fit the new lighting systems, as well as tweaking small design aspects. I am focusing on further developing the resource and logistics system, since it would be ideal to get an actually complete picture of how a player will build up their base and economy.



Some buildings had to be modified to be compliant with things like the pipeline/conveyor system, and also have been given standardized "plugs" as part of the structure that indicate where these connections are supposed to go. In general, black plugs for crude oil, green for refined fuel, and yellow for refined materials. You can see some of them in the above GIF. Redoing these assets has been much easier with the inclusion of the lighting/Z-sorting system, as before those were implemented, sprites often had to be cut up and rendered in bizarre ways that required a ton of trial and error, and even then would often result in imperfect sprites that clipped over or under eachother nonsensically.

Anyways, I did want to have conveyors and some other structures included by the time of this update, but ran out of time. Next month will be focused on rebuilding the remainder of the Empire's base and economic structures, and all that should be complete before the end of February (among other things, now that I am going to be working as close to full time on this as I can).

Lastly, there's also been some further optimization work. The lighting and shadow engine - combined with an increased ability to zoom out - has presented a number of performance problems, with the game suffering from RAM usage from 6GB to as much as a ridiculously high 10GB. Thankfully, we've been able to whittle that down to about 1 - 2GB, although further optimizations are still necessary. Thankfully the fact that most objects will need to be paletted actually helps performance a lot, and performance will likely continue to improve as especially massive sprite sheets (such as those for the big derelict wrecks) are given proper paletted sprites rather than the RGBA sprites they currently use. This is actually a simple matter to implement, but in general it's preferable to finish a complete set of assets before creating a palette for them, so that way I have the full range of colors to be used from the complete set, rather than making an educated guess.

As always, thanks for the continued support. Next month should be much, much more dense in terms of content updates.