TaleSpire Dev Log 460

Hey all!

It's been a while again, and I'm really sorry for the long pause in logs. It's truly been a wild two months!

Performance Profiling

Ever since we released community minis, you've all made an absolutely wild amount of minis ready to be downloaded on mod.io (seriously, almost 5600?!), this is just incredible! Unfortunately, while the number of custom minis has continuously increased, we've also seen more and more issues with how TaleSpire handles large quantities of them. We've seen issues both ourselves first-hand and through several bug reports. The biggest one is that, at some point, TaleSpire starts eating a lot of RAM. In addition, there are some odd edge cases where the game freezes while processing minis and some instability when trying to download a few hundred minis simultaneously.

While I don't have anything concrete to share here yet, I did spend some time investigating some of the performance issues when loading many custom minis (as a reference, I was testing with about 1800 minis downloaded), and I'm planning on continuing to do so to hopefully find a remedy for this.

In the end, using many custom assets will always increase performance consumption (and/or wait times) since we can't change the fundamental fact that there's just more data to process, but we can make things a lot more stable and smooth.

Bugfixes and QoL

I've also spent a decent chunk of time combing through bug reports and feedback in various other places online, like reviews, live streams and similar, and tackled many small-ish issues that degraded the overall experience. Here are a few highlights from that:

• Stop the camera from moving while deleting tiles or props in build mode with Shift + Right-click
• Stop camera from "sliding away" when moving minis with Shift + WASD
• Fixed a few more or less annoying cases of UI going missing:
  - Compass doesn't vanish after leaving photo or slab publish mode.
  - The fog pin on the vertical slider doesn't stay visible when not in GM mode, where it would break if trying to interact with it

    

This isn't quite everything because a few things still need testing before merging, but you'll get the full rundown in the changelog of the next update anyway :)

Update?

The big question, though, is, when will that release be? While, as usual, we won't be giving an ETA, I can say that we need to do a bit more testing than usual for releases - and this is why:

Note: This is us testing the translation system, we're not officially supporting languages other than English yet!

Baggers has been studiously working on our new localization system (for more details, see his posts: 1 2 3 4 5) and it has actually been merged now! However as you might imagine, this is touching a lot of code, so we need to spend a good long while to test all of this.

As part of that I've been doing a few test translations of the game UI to German. These translations will not be shipped as an officially supported language (I'm not a professional translator)^[0], but it was enough to check and see if the system supports all necessary features and identify the ones missing.

Note: We are still limited by our font in support of other scripts (e.g., Cyrillic). However, we do have a font professional working on a new version of our font^[1] with better symbol support.

Symbiotes

A while ago I sat down and compiled a list of symbiote-related tickets for us to look at and I've recently started tackling some of them. The most interesting one is a fix for a Symbiote's localstorage getting deleted when updating it. The fix for this is not quite done yet as we need some more testing, but it's looking promising.

And I guess that's it from me - see you next time!

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn't reflect everything going on with the team

[0]: Which is not to say that we'll not have official translations at some point, just that they'll likely not be coming from me :)

[1]: It actually is an entirely new font but, stylistically, it's similar to our current one.