vrengames

v0.14.0 Release Date! 2 Days to Go!

Added 2019-02-27 10:02:05 +0000 UTC

Just a quick post tonight to remind everyone that Lab Rats 2 v.14.0, will be released the night of Feb 28th, two days from now and right on schedule! For the last few days I've been busy writing a few new pieces of content, chasing down bugs, writing new tooltips, and otherwise polishing things up. All things considered I'm very happy with how the update shaped up! As normal v0.14.0 will be released to $5 and up patrons for a week of bug testing. After that week the improved v0.14.1 will be released to everyone completely free and the cycle will begin anew.

One interesting thing that I sat down and addressed tonight was the general unresponsiveness of the map screen. When opening it the game would hang for about a second, which was ridiculous considering how simple the screen should have been to display. After some testing I discovered that the simple blue lines connecting map locations were causing the problem. Figuring out why was took some reading, but it turns out Ren'py doesn't support hardware acceleration (ie. using the graphics card to draw things instead of the CPU) when you dig deep down into the displayable system. I was using PyGame functions (PyGame is the low level library Renpy uses to draw things to the screen) to draw the lines, but they would force software rendering mode and significantly slow things down. The lines have been removed and I'm likely to do a complete visual redesign of the map in the next update cycle.

That's all for tonight, unless something goes horribly wrong my next post will be the v0.14.0 release!