Day 81: 8 May 2013

RB Whitaker

8 May 2013

1 Comment

It’s been another really good day. Somehow, I’ve been finding plenty of time (and motivation) to work on this game, and it has been progressing really well lately.

Let’s start here: new update – http://100experiencepoints.com/daily/100XP-Setup.exe.

Improvements in the latest build:

Lasers can now only shoot as far as their specified range permits. Somehow, I missed this, and lasers have had essentially an unlimited range. It’s still a long range (too long) but not infinite any more.
When you hover over radar components, a purple ring appears that shows how far the ship can see.
When you hover over weapons, a red-orange ring appears that shows the weapon’s range.
When you hover over a ship, you see the range of the radar, as well as the maximum distance of all weapons on the ship. Just because an enemy ship is within this ring doesn’t mean you can actually it it, depending on where the gun is located on your ship.
When a target is too far away to see, but still within range of a laser, the laser still shouldn’t be able to fire at its target. Now it can’t. (That is, if a fleet can’t see you, it won’t be able to shoot at you either. There’s still a separate bug where a ship that can see you, and is within range, but that is out of range of what you can see, the laser is invisible, but still damages you.)

Screenshot of the rings:

Weapon and Radar Range Rings

I still have a number of yesterday’s bugs to fix still, and a couple more that people emailed in. I think tomorrow is going to be primarily dedicated to bug fixing.

Perhaps it’s time for another question for you guys, though. How is the loading time for you? In debug mode, it’s unbearable for me. I mean, it takes minutes for the game to get up and running. So basically, I’m in a situation where I don’t want to restart the game unless I absolutely need to. It seems like for me, in release mode, it’s taking 20 or 30 seconds. Are you guys seeing this too? Considering how little its actually doing, this seems unreasonably slow. Is it time to address this?