A quick little update of changes being made this month to improve client performance and most importantly players' experience. This is tackled by carefully creating maps to maximize land mass, increasing upkeep to discourage massive bases, and a few wizzard-y things map-related to reduce entity clutter.
Upkeep Changes
As farming becomes increasingly easier and resources abundant, we've decided to increase upkeep costs to help balance things and to try and get in front of massive bases. While the increase is not drastic in any way, larger builders will certainly be the most affected.
This change only applies to our Scourge servers, since our other servers have no decay. The exact increase is 41.14% and the calculation came from the previous value, 3500, and subtracting the vanilla value of 1440. This value is not helpful for calculating upkeep on your end, but I thought I'd explain the odd % of the increase.
The new rate is still 30% lower than vanilla and we plan to adjust as needed to help combat massive builds to preserve client performance throughout the wipe. We absolutely hate limiting your creativity but shits fucked.
Map Changes
You'll notice our maps this month look a bit off and that's because we're using a different generator where we can define the tolerance of the terrain. In this case, we've greatly reduced the number of islands to better utilize land mass and to eliminate areas players typically try to contest.
We've also greatly trimmed down on repetitive entities that serve no purpose such as power poles, electrical boxes, and car wrecks along roads. This greatly reduces the entity count and greatly increases the density of junk piles and scientist spawns.
Terrain under procedurally generated monuments has also been worked on to smooth jagged edges in an attempt to improve client performance. We will go at it even harder next wipe if we see any sizeable gains from this.
What's In-Store
This month, our primary focus is on performance, polishing existing features, and incorporating ideas from the community to improve said features. While the majority of this work will be on the backend, I'll be releasing a few visual and QoL updates as well to trick you into thinking that what we do on the backend is anything more than procrastinating violently.
