This article is copied from my personal blog.

I spent a good chunk of the day trying to solve a performance problem. After approximately 100,000 bullets were fired, the framerate would drop to an excruciating 16 FPS.

I was able to figure it out by using Google Chrome’s heap profiling tool. Here’s what the heap snapshot looked like:

I found out that there was a memory leak in the game engine – every time a sprite was created it calledsetInterval but it did not call clearInterval when the sprite was deleted. Ever since I fixed the issue, FPS has stayed at a nice and smooth 60, no matter how many objects are created and destroyed.

Here are some other things I got done today:

• 9pm – Miscellanous small enhancements.
• 11pm – Fixed the performance issue.
• 12am – Added the new thruster sound that Michael gave me.
• 3am – Added Sandbox Mode.
• 4am – Added more features to Sandbox Mode.
• 6am – Added Ctrl+A to select all your ships. Also made WASD and J work the same as arrow keys and space.
• 7am – Added dogfighting mode.
• 8am – Added graphics so that ships display their targets when selected.
• 8am – Added 2 more dogfighting levels. Enhanced manual piloting of Militia ship so that you can use your melee attack.

Here’s a screenshot of Sandbox mode:

Here’s me playing through Dogfighting Mode and messing around in Sandbox Mode a bit:

I have only 2 days left to work. The last day will be primarily reserved for gameplay tweaking, bugfixes, touchups, and testing. That leaves only 1 more day to make actual progress.

These are my goals for tomorrow:

• Add a rotating turret to the flagship.
• Add a civilian to Level 1 and use that to explain the Move command vs the Engage command.
• Add a dogfighting level where there is an ongoing battle and you have to rack up a certain number of kills to win.
• Add more campaign levels. I reserve the right to ramp up the difficulty in the later levels!
• Pan sound effects and volume depending on scroll location
• Add some more ship classes and implement upgrades.

Thanks to the folks in the #7dRTS IRC channel for helping me playtest today. Specifically Zapa and Orava.

You can try the game out now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 27th, 2013 at 7:02 am and is filed under MiniLD #44 / 7dRTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.