Friday, April 3, 2009

Plague 3.28

I've finished the new LOS algorithm based on squares as opposed to sims. Plague is faster now in general, and realtime calcs can be made pretty small by precalculating the majority of the level (as level geometry is relatively static in comparison to the number of movings sims). Theres also more options in the menu options and some other minor tweaks.
  • New LOS algorithm that is more speedy and much more flexible (bug reports welcome!)
  • Weapon recock bar now only shows for "manual" weapons.
  • Shotgun is now more like a double-barrelled shotgun to provide weapon differentiation.
  • You can now pick the screen resolution you want (yes, you can enter non-integer values...)
  • You can now pick the volume you want (only in the options menu though for now)
  • Shrubs now only partially block sight as opposed to rock which fully block sight.
  • Added an option in the options menu to pre-calc Line of Sight (takes some initial time, but Plague is fast after that).  
    1. A max sight radius of 15 takes 30 seconds on my computer, max sight radius of 30 takes 386 seconds (youch!). Theres still an ocassional slowdown, not sure why, help tracking this down would be appreciated. 
    2. I've just done a bunch more precalculation, now the LOS pre-calcs takes 74 seconds for a max sight radius of 15. Hmmm. The precalc time is kinda annoying now.
    3. Further improvements around precalculation to come like pre-calcing all combinations and storing results in a file. 
    4. Suggestions welcome!

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