It's Sunday. One week past when we were supposed to get an update.
Think we'll hear anything from Inno today? I know her entire life structure and schedule is kind of fucked, so we won't hear anything from her until the middle of the night, but do you think we'll hear anything at all? lol
Unlikely, we aren't several months after Inno's last post. The pattern says Inno will go silent for several months and then come back with having nothing related to what they were working on in the last post done and working on some other thing being worked on just like what happened with the Nyan rework.
Oh, and she'll have done a bunch of work on Nyan's content even though she said she wouldn't.
Probably, just like in January, when this pattern, which I refer to as the lie pattern in reference to Inno having said something they are doing being done, first showed up.
I've actually identified one of the probable causes this slowdown happens and am working on a fix. Right now in the base game every single time you move, the game loops through every slave in existence and runs a check to see if they want to use you.
I.e., every time you move one tile in Dominion, the game loops through every single slave every single time performing these checks no matter what. And it happens pretty much everywhere.
The workaround I currently have implemented is the game takes a random slave from the pool and looks at whether it meets all the checks. If not, it dumps the slave from the pool and tries another at random. When it finds a slave, it immediately breaks from the loop.
Obviously this is not ideal, because if all (e.g.) 300 slaves don't meet the checks, it's still running through all slaves per tile. But I haven't found an efficient way of handling this yet. I'm probably going to have to rewrite how tile encounters are handled to solve this.
Thank you for your work, Zethin. Even if it isn't ideal, I'm sure it will work out just fine.
Wait, are you implying that hitting a JavaScript interpreter hundreds of times every time the player moves in order to fetch a bunch of text that won't be displayed is unoptimized?
Shit, is it really? I was honestly only thinking about WHAT was updated every action, not how it was being updated.
That's so much worse lmao
I know, it's not like there are ways to do this WITHOUT that mess...oh wait. The number of times a program hits something and then goes back through the process definitely has an impact with that impact proportional to the number of repeats, this is literally begging for a lag spike with how many times this particular program does this. This isn't even just Java, literally any language will have this issue. I used to have it happen in my early programs because of the way I implemented them, then I found more compact ways to do the same thing.
Good lord, another update that's not 0.4, and Inno saying that they're taking a break. I stand by my statement of Inno not actually wanting to make the game as they originally planned it. Since apparently anything other than making endless side content for Dominion just can't be done without endless delays and breaks.
I know, I think it is time to begin planning for anyone who wants to take over so the inevitable abandonment transitions as flawlessly as possible from Inno to whoever picks it up. It is going to be a little bumpy because of how bad the code likely is, but it shouldn't be impossible.
Pre-rolling everything only sounds like a good idea. If you have proper structure, it's significantly easier and faster to roll encounters when you need them.
The problem is this game doesn't have either.
The more advanced the game gets, it becomes almost impossible to properly pre-roll everything that you might need. And like, you have no way of knowing how many encounters you'll need. At most, you should only really pre-load a single encounter. Like, having your next random encounter loaded will allow you to quickly load it (which, again, you shouldn't need). Then during the encounter you can load the next one in the background.
But really, pre-loading everything is actually a really dangerous idea.
lmao
I set the bar *really* low with my prediction, and this went even lower. Is there anything new in this update?
Holy crap, I was expecting radio silence like in January, I do have to admit I am at least pleasantly surprised enough to give Inno that much. It seems the cycle of lies is broken...for now. Whether it will come again sooner or later remains to be seen. More likely sooner, as in next post, but it could be later. However, I am still fully expecting the same thing as what happened between September and January.
So after being a week late after the previous week long delay, which was already a week late after the pervious month long delay, which was already like two months late after the previous delay due to the unfinished Nyan rework, which was already around five months late because of a race rework...
The dev is now going to take a few weeks off.
Even if we ignore everything from before the "it'll be done near the end of February" date, which was when she nuked her blog activity, that means we're going to be getting the update a minimum of two months late. Assuming she comes back after a couple weeks off and has an update ready immediately.
I think the game might be unofficially dead with this one lol
Could you imagine being a new user and checking out the blog now? Like, the game looks abandoned.
And this is her full time job. Looking at those patch notes, if you take out the contributor work, does there appear to be anywhere near 40 hours of work in this patch? And this is like, three weeks for this patch.
There certainly isn't 40 hours of work FROM INNO in this update. That's the real kicker about all of this. Even what little Inno actually does isn't enough to be considered a full time job load. At minimum to be considered full time work, it has to have 40 hours worth specifically coming from Inno, not the GitHub contributors, from Inno. The GitHub has never counted toward the number of hours being put in because the GitHub is considered modding at best, not actual work on the game.
I agree that the game could be considered unofficially dead, which is why I suggest anyone who would pick it up to start planning now.
I've already started learning the code and I am practicing emulating Inno's writing style to prepare myself to assist in any revival effort or to start one myself. No, not the nonsensical and weak writing we see in the Nyan rework, or what I have seen in screenshots anyway, but the style behind it. What I write won't be nonsensical like that, it will make sense, but it will be in as close to the same style as possible.
