Dev Diary - A Tech Lead's Life

In this diary I'll tell you more about our tech, give some insights into the programmer's job, what we've been up to for the past year (and some change) and offer you a chance to ask any question you may have about tech.

Saying old platforms goodbye

First, with the upcoming 1.11 patch we will be retiring some old Linux and Mac platforms that aren't maintained by their own developers anymore. This means that starting next update the minimum OS version to run HoI will be Ubuntu 18.04 (on Linux) and macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) on Mac. There shouldn't be much to worry about though, as the previous versions are older than HoI itself at this point and our telemetry shows almost all of you have upgraded long ago. For those on Windows who look anxiously at their aging Windows 7, keep calm and carry on, we have no plans to drop support for it (although as a friendly tech person I'd still suggest you consider upgrading ;)).

Why do we make those decisions you may wonder? Two reasons: one maintaining old tech comes with a cost that we would rather spend on improving the game for 99% of the users, and two sometimes it blocks the adoption of new tech that would make our programmers job easier and more efficient. Without going too much into details, the general idea is that we can only use tech that is supported on all platforms, so basically we're only as modern as the oldest thing we support. If you take the case of Linux for example, the previous Ubuntu release was from 2016, meaning HoI could not use anything released since then (and probably a bit before, as Ubuntu LTS releases usually don't ship with the latest shiny goodies). Some time we can work our way around it, but not always. Speaking of new tech...

DirectX 11

That's right, the next HoI4 release will join Stellaris and the other more recent PDS games by adding DirectX 11 support. DirectX 9 will still be the default for now, but you will be able to select another renderer in the launcher settings.

There shouldn't be any visual difference between DX9 and DX11 (and OpenGL for that matter), we have been working on making sure the experience will be the same. The game should load a bit faster however, especially if you use a lot of mods that bring extra textures and models. Working remotely for more than a year, we also noticed less issues playing with remote desktop and the like, which might not be a big deal for most of you but was quite appreciable for our devs during development. Finally it did help us tweaking & fixing the new railways & trains graphics (as most graphics debugging tools have dropped support for DX9).

Performance

We know that performance is always at the heart of every discussion about our games and as a Tech Lead I have been keeping a close eye on it. So far it looks like our release candidate is roughly on par with the current 1.10 patch, performance wise.

Why not better, I can already hear you typing? The main reason is that the game on 1.11 is a different beast 1.10 (which itself is quite different from the original 1.0 release). Namely, the supply simulation is now much more deep and complex, and needs to account for all those railways across the world and the fact that now