Technical Dev Log #1

First of all, happy new year! Our latest post is more than a couple months old now, and we want to show you how things are progressing. In this post, we will mostly talk about a lot of technical stuff we've implemented and that will be out in the next update!

Some new things...

Before we get into the technical parts, we want to show you and tell you about a couple of flashy new things we've added. Things that have been already added are new flora variations for planets, the new technological advancement tree with technologies that can be evolved, new animations for units, impact frames, dash-attacking, auto-saving and more! We're not gonna go in-depth about them all yet, but here's a sneak preview:

Handling Data

In the prior and current version of Nettle, data is saved in the game's save file directory. To access it via code, the game would need to, for example, open the file containing all object data and manually search through it, line-by-line, until it found that one object. This file can be thousands of lines long, which takes some amount of processing power.

With the new system in place, all relevant object, level and planet data is saved on your RAM memory, taking about ~2-4MB per level. This allows near-instant access to the exact piece of data needed.

Other than that, the data was unorganized and even if it was meant to be a number, it was saved as pure text. This would also use unnecessary processing power in converting text into numbers, and vice versa.

Due to changes mentioned above, the system also now supports time passing while you're out on an expedition!

Hitboxes

Another thing we've reworked is the way hitboxes function. Previously, each object had only 1 universal hitbox that would be used for basically everything, from collision checking, to world generation and mouse button selection. The large singular hitbox made it so some resources could not generate behind others, even though they should by all means be able to. Here's a couple images to showcase the changes.

Graphical User Interfaces

The code for basically all GUIs used in Nettle, from the space exploration to the escape menu, is code that's between 1 and 2 years old. It was long overdue an update, and now almost all GUIs have been re-written and incorporated into a singular system that will not cause headaches.

The Build Tab has also been reworked, and now buildings are categorized.

Physics Calculations

Talking about 2 year old code, here's one crucial bit. Before, to calculate if a point is considered "within vision (of any player unit/building)," the game would go through every single unit and check if the distance between the unit and the target point is less than the view distance of the unit. Now that we are more knowledgeable about Unity's physics system, all checks related to physics are now waaaaayyyy faster and don't go through 100-1000 objects.

The update is still some time away, but we're working hard to deliver it in the best possible shape. Stay tuned!