Drawing a big army: only what’s on screen, in one pass bucketed by layer, with the heading frame looked up from a table instead of searching 16 angles. 400 units in view went from about 29 ms to 15 ms a frame.
Navigation is read a run at a time instead of a tile at a time. Warming every unit class went from about 45 s to 1.5 s.
The season’s terrain is baked once instead of rebuilt from 78 ops at every start. Load went from about 20 s to 8 s.
Windows: Microsoft Store, search 5019
macOS: 5019 by PRIMARY SYSTEM
Drawing 400 units in view went from 8.7 ms to 2.2 ms a frame.
Each unit drew two ellipse rings with draw_arc, each inside a draw_set_transform / reset pair, and its sprite inside another pair: about ten canvas commands a unit. A ring is now a baked 64 px ring texture stretched into the ellipse with one draw_texture_rect (four line weights, picked by on-screen size), and baked-facing sprites are placed by their rect instead of a transform. Two commands a unit.
The kraken is one painted frame per heading. No skeleton, no shader. The frame is laid on a 14x14 grid and the grid is bent every frame in _draw(): the middle pulses (the mantle), a wave runs out along the arms with its phase offset by the angle round the body so the arms move out of step, the arms trail behind when it swims and stretch toward a hull it has grabbed.
That is 196 quads through draw_primitive with the sprite’s UVs, drawn twice: once dark and slightly larger as the shadow, once as the body. Before this it was a rigid sprite that slid around like a rug.
Next update: saucers and mechs
The saucer never lands and never stops. Every few minutes its light comes down, lifts one soldier off the ground and flies him home at half speed. Shoot it down on the way and he drops back alive. If it gets home he is gone, and the other side is paid half of what he cost.
It needed no new save data: a captive is just a unit riding something that belongs to the other side.
Also coming: a walking machine three men tall with a blade of light, and the T-rex in the corner of the top shot.
What’s playable today is the bottom one: fleets, landings, the kraken.
Microsoft Store: search 5019 (free, Windows)
