GitHub Pulse summary for January 28 - February 28
Excluding merges, 6 authors have pushed
226 commits to master and
391 commits to all branches. On master,
134 files have changed and there have been
18,506 additions and
15,899 deletions.
We're still pushing!
Since the last Development Progress update, we've added 2 Devs (Snopy Dogy, and se5a).
But wait Rod, those people were already working on it!
Not really. Most of us had gone into hiding, and had in general abandoned development. But we're all back now, and working hard!
To show you how hard we've been working, here's a pretty graph courtesy of GitHub. Click for full size.
The dotted line is February 1st. The graph shows number of "Commits" or changes that we pushed to our Source Control.
So Alpha 4 must be right around the corner right?
Actually no, we've made a lot of progress but it hasn't culminated in a lot of gameplay development.
No gameplay development? What have you been doing all this time?
Mostly drinking coke and playing Skyrim.
But seriously, here's a basic list of things we've done since last time:
- Jump Engines Implemented
- Jump Sickness Implemented
- Made a really bad Windows Installer
- Large number of JumpPoint bugfixes
- UI Minimum Resolution tweaks (1024x768)
- Complete overhaul of System Generation
- Complete overhaul of Orbit calculations
- Complete overhaul of Atmospheres
- Backend Shipyard work
- Several Orders fixes and implementations
So how does this get us closer to our Alpha 4 goal of a single player empire that's... functional?
Well our remaining goals for Alpha 4, that have not been realized yet include the following:
- Building Ships
- Colonization
- Mineral Generation on New Planets
- UI support for all of this.
So you'll be done with it in like, 2 days right Rod?
No, sorry. I'm sure I'm missing stuff and none of this is actually our main developmental focus.
As we came back into development of Pulsar, we found that as we continued to implement more features, we had little actual foundation to stand on.
Most of our work the past month has not been on implementing new features, but simply creating a foundation for features to stand on more reliably.
New System Generation and Orbit Calculation code is all a direct result of this work. Our old models were limiting us, and frankly, were a bit slow. Go download Alpha 3 and try to Generate 1000 systems from the "Gen Galaxy" SM option in the System Information tab. Let me know when it finishes. I stopped mine after 10 minutes because I was trying to run a profiler on it and it was making a huge file.
New System Generation, and Orbit Calculation code takes 4.3 seconds on my (fairly powerful) computer to generate 1000 systems.
But now we're looking at the larger game library, and we're looking at a fairly major overhaul of the architecture of the game. We're looking at multithreading and optimizations the whole way though, but our main focus is on code maintainability. Improving our code maintainability is a large task that unfortunately does not provide new shiny features. It does provide the framework and support to make those new shiny features much quickly and more reliably once we do start to focus on them however. Alpha 4 might not happen in March. I hope it does, and I think we can, but we have to stay realistic. Pulsar is honestly starting to come along in a way that it honestly simply hasn't before. I have high hopes for Pulsar, and I really want to play Pulsar. Donate to my "Keep Rod fueled with Coca-Cola" fund* and one day, we'll play it together.
Fair winds and following seas, my fellow space-addicts.
*"Keep Rod fueled with Coca-Cola" Fund only accepts kind words of encouragement, European donations require additional VAT tax on all kind words.