It's been about three months since I started working on the upcoming major update, and while I'm still far from done, there's a lot of progress.
I have reimplemented most of the basic needs like Hunger, Sleep, Eating, Hygiene, Fun, Electricity (for bots) and a better half of the AI behaviors for tasks like Construction, Hauling, Refilling, Repairing, Demolition, Moving, etc. And the most important feature of the game - cats riding cleaning bots - is already there!
https://twitter.com/dev_spajus/status/1754883175384252852
To get a feel for the scope of this rewrite, here's how much the code has changed:
For perspective, this is how big the whole project is:
The impact of this update will be far greater than just AI and beings. Since I'm touching so many parts, I am taking a critical look at every mechanic I touch, and I'm axing things that are confusing and aren't fun. For example, the controversial "Device Wear" is completely removed.
On the technical side of things, I had a chance to rewrite some core parts of the framework that runs the whole simulation. This yielded significant performance boost at high clock speeds, the simulation is now able to run at a mind blowing rate that was never possible before. 10x speed will be truly 10x for everyone, and in my tests I can simulate a day of game time in just a couple of seconds.
Talking about tests, I'm rewriting them all too. Hundreds of tests were obsolete due to the changes, so I took the liberty to rethink the test architecture completely, focusing on their stability and speed. If you're interested to learn more about how automated tests work in Stardeus, I have a video about it here: https://youtu.be/043EY6H5424
The current focus of development is on body parts and their installation / removal / harvesting, also damage, wounds, healing and various conditions. That involves adding new devices, tons of various body parts, defining the abilities and status effects those parts provide, and figuring out how to tie it all together.
While there's certainly some complexity involved, I love how flexible things are getting due to the new mechanics. Here's an example:
https://twitter.com/dev_spajus/status/1755632007177003049
There's a bit of bad news too. I won't be able to keep my promise of old saves always working for this update. The game has changed too drastically, and trying to make the code backwards compatible with old saves would complicate the development and delay the release of this update by a few months, so I made a choice to break the save file compatibility. This also allows me to clean up some hairy parts of the old code that I had to keep just for ancient save files to work.
There will be a transition period for testing the new update, which should give some time for mods to catch up, and you will have plenty of time to finish your current run.
As of when the new update will be ready, I can't predict that yet, all I can say is that the development pace is increasing, as I'm learning how to use the new AI efficiently, and more and more parts are coming together. I'm doing my best to get it done as soon as I can!
That's it for now, see you next month!
- spajus
Follow the Development
- Official Website: https://stardeusgame.com
- Join Stardeus Discord
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- @StardeusGame on Twitter
- @dev_spajus on Twitter
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Get Stardeus
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1380910/Stardeus/
