Nintendo Switch port improvements are coming to Steam

Since game consoles typically have lower hardware capabilities, substantial amount of work was needed to make the game run smoothly. For example:

• significantly increased loading and saving speed (about 20 times faster on average)

• drastically reduced the save files size, going from around 200MB to only about 70kB for a typical scenario

• loading and saving now streams directly to disk buffer instead of unpacking and packing in memory

• save files are zipped

• saving and loading uses a temporary buffer to read and write disk in smaller number of bigger chunks

• temperature changes are now computed in real time and you can see the heat slowly spreading. This means that some operations that require heat recalculation for the whole facility can now be completed instantly instead of you having to wait for the game to update all tiles and equipment

Beside all those improvements, some important bug fixes were made.

Also, the UI was redesigned to be more optimal when playing with controllers. Racks and rigs automatically position to get placed next to the already placed ones and the game automatically behaves like you were holding SHIFT and CTRL in PC version. I'm also considering making a special build for Steam Deck which would use that UI. If you would be interested in something like that, please comment below.

The Nintendo Switch version is now released and complete, so I can focus on port all these changes to Steam.

All these changes are coming to Steam version in the next few months.