An early Alpha19 build is available for testing on Steam on the ‘dev’ branch. It’s fairly complete in terms of gameplay features, but it still needs some bug fixing and optimizations.

One of the non-gameplay changes in this update is to switch back to the single-threaded mode. It used to be just an option, and by default the rendering loop ran on a separate thread. The main purpose was to have a more responsive UI in case the gameplay loop lagged. In addition, it generally increased FPS, but not by much (less than 25%). The problem was that it wasn’t very well designed, and there were some subtle bugs. There were also problems with very low FPS on some multi-core systems.

I decided to go back to a single thread for simplicity. The code needs to be more optimized anyway. With proper optimizations, a single core shouldn’t have any trouble with handling both rendering and gameplay. With this in mind, I’m going to spend the next week or two optimizing the hell out of every line of code. (or to be more precise, rewriting entire badly optimized chunks of code) 🙂

As a bonus for this week, I compiled a list of the most deadly enemies in KeeperRL.

Percentage of games won:

• Keepers: 11%
• Adventurers 5%.

Total number of games taken into account: 24661.