Patreon Weekly #18 - Oct 5th, 2019

Hey Patrons!

This has been a bit of a slow week for new dev work with the release of 0.7.5 and then 0.7.5a right after. I likely will also be doing a 0.7.5b, but I'd like to wait a bit to get some analytics numbers so I can include some balance changes with it.

For the remainder of this week, my focus has been on more technical work. Late in the development of 0.7.5 I successfully decoupled android-based text input from the core of the project, and for 0.7.5b I hope to re-implement text rendering in a platform-independent way using LibGDX's freetype library.  Once that is done the core of the project will be 100% rid of android-specific code!

There are a lot of rough edges to smooth out still, but so far the new text rendering is looking very promising:

- It's much more memory efficient. From initial testing the memory usage of text is reduced by ~67% at 720p and ~90% at 1440p! This leads to a total app memory usage reduction of ~20% at 720p and ~40% at 1440p. Note that this was tested with Latin and Cyrillic languages, Asian languages will likely see a lesser (but hopefully still significant) improvement.

- It also has much better rendering performance. While very old devices may still stutter a bit when rendering lots of text, those half-second freezes encountered when opening a window with lots of text are totally eliminated.

- It generates text which is very similar to the current system, but slightly bolder and crisper. The text also has a slightly smaller and more rounded border, instead of the current square border. This does mean the new text is very slightly different from the current text, but it's still in the same overall style and is much more readable.

Here is an example screenshot at 480p, where the rendering changes are most noticeable. Old text is on the left, new on the right:

(full size direct image link)

Once these changes to text rendering are done the game will be able to compile for desktop! The next step after that is to add some important desktop features such as keyboard input, and then I can start officially offering the game to desktop users! A steam release is still a ways off, but I might try to get the game onto itch.io in the relatively near future.