Hi all! After months of work, the optimisation update is finally done! Before I go into details, I just wanted to give a special shout-out to my amazing test team who were EXTREMELY patient with me during this time, as I must have completely broken the entire game a good 20 or 30 times while getting this working.

So what is behind this update? You won't notice much in the way of visual changes, but you'll notice a big difference in performance and load times. As you may know, I'm doing a bit of polishing work on the visuals of the game, but while I was working on those changes I started seeing a lot of room for improvement in the loading routines and realised that those needed some serious work before I tackled anything visual. Those of you who are fans of the game will know that Malevolence is deeply procedural, and so the load routines aren't like those of a normal game - quite a lot of calculation and processing goes into loading each environment, which is what takes the time and makes it slower to load than other games - but despite that complexity it could be faster, and many of you have been going and making snacks between load times and using the time in other ways, but I wanted to get that time down.

Now don't get too excited. All of those calculations still have to be made during the load sequences for Malevolence, but they should now be noticeably faster, and performance should have a noticeable shift towards being better. Mainly a lot of groundwork has been set to bring the game up to a better standard for future work.

While optimisation was the main goal of this update, it did require HUGE swathes of code to be totally re-written, which brought into the light a lot of bugs, which myself and the test team have tackled and squashed. So overall the game is much more stable.

Apologies for the time this one took. Aside from my dog passing in the middle of the update, which was not good, the optimisation routines needed total re-writes to get them faster and more efficient. Many late nights poring over literally thousands of lines of code. Lots of fun, though. I do enjoy making the game better.

Next up will be a bit of a graphical overhaul to make things look prettier - particularly shaderless mode, which is kinda ugly at the moment (in towns and countryside at least - pretty happy with dungeons) and then it's back to the relentless bug-squashing march to the finish line.

If you'd like a full list of what I've done, you can find it here on the dev log blog:

http://msoaupdates.blogspot.com/2018/08/major-update-015483-august-23rd-2018.html

But otherwise I'm going to take my customary week away from the code before diving back in. Enjoy!