November 2024 Update

Greetings Everyone,

This month's news will be quick because I want to put the time into working on Milestone #5.

FBS Fundraising

As you probably know, I have paused FBS fundraising until next year. Patreon charged a handful of people on November 3rd. This is because I can only pause fundraising monthly, and I missed the 8-hour window to repause the system. Nonetheless, if Patreon bills you while the system is paused you will still get your FBS points, and the amount will still go toward the next Milestone. Sorry for the inconvenience.

GearCity: 2nd Gear

Work continues on Milestone #5.

As of this writing, I am working on the new sub-component rating ranges. It's shaping up to be a pretty cool feature.

I have already completed the Customer Financing Unlock memo and Removing Relative Ratings.

I've also added the backorder system, which is working quite well. However, I may need to balance the drop-off rates some.

Additionally, I've completed Bottom Bar "Accounting Profits," and added "Accounting Profits" to the monthly report for free. Personally, I don't find this an interesting metric, but you suggested and funded it!

Finally, both Buyer Rating Caching and Speed Up Hash Map bounties are complete. These two bounties resulted in roughly a 10% reduction in turn times against v2.4.0.2. Against 2.0.0.13. It's probably closer to 15-25% improvements. The Buyer Rating Cach dropped initial sales processing times by 75%.

I had to drop plans to move to Parallel Hashmap because of GC's architecture. Most of its performance benefits are in larger multithreaded maps. That concept is what I am designing AM around. GC, on the other hand, was designed and heavily optimized for C++03. So, Parallel Hashmaps ran slower in GC than standard STL C++17 hashmaps. Instead, I opted for em7hashmaps, which gave us about a 3-4% performance boost after some refactoring of the maps. Against 2.0.0.13, this is likely around 5-6% gains. I also made a few more micro-optimizations to new features since I hadn't done optimizations since the start of 2nd Gear.

With more and more features added to the game every milestone, it becomes unfair to compare performance to the base game. We're doing more and more stuff every turn than before. In any case, I will do a final benchmarking at the end of Milestone #5 to see where we are in relation to v2.4.0.2 and v2.0.0.13.

AeroMogul

Work on AeroMogul is paused until the completion of Milestone #5, at which point it becomes my sole focus for several months.