I've made good progress on franchises. Even if you won't notice anything visually, there are lots of changes under the hood. And since all this adds load to your CPUs, I had to take the time to optimize whatever could still be optimized. Let's go, I'll tell you all about it right away!
This week's recap
Let's jump straight into franchises. In this build, the game already starts compiling data from your creations and organizing it into franchises. This will take a bit of time when loading your save. And the bigger your save, the longer it'll take.
But what exactly is it compiling? That's an excellent question, and thank you for asking. City Game Studio creates one franchise for each game that isn't a sequel, a GOTY edition, a port, or a remake. Then it goes through all the games that aren't in a franchise yet and assigns them to the franchise of their related game: the previous game for a sequel, or the original game for a remake or a port.
Once the franchises are built, City Game Studio works out the highest-rated game, then the best-selling one. And finally, it calculates the franchise's overall rating, as well as the number of fans, total revenue, and copies sold for each franchise. So there's quite a lot of machinery at work behind the scenes.
And that means extra calculations. So I figured it was better to optimize the game a bit. I reworked the way City Game Studio calculates sales for each game. It's a tad faster and uses less memory. Perfect. I also made a second optimization that cuts computation time by 30% when displaying all the game's charts. That's because I'm now calling a cheaper function than the one I was using before. A single call change and boom, charts display 30% faster.
Since I already had my hands in old code, I took the opportunity to tackle quite a few old bugs. One involved the HTTP requests made by City Game Studio. The game sends a request when it connects to Twitch, for example. Well, every HTTP request had a chance of crashing the game. Thankfully, that's fixed.
Another fairly old bug was the mouse cursor offset in windowed mode on Windows. I had to recompile Godot, but this bug is fixed. It turns out the offset came from the engine not properly accounting for the Windows window decorations.
One last fix and then I'll tell you what's next for franchises. It's the employees' energy bar that disappeared when you released a game. Good grief, this bug was a pain to fix. I had to completely rework it because it wasn't using the UI management framework properly. As a result, it's smoother and works much better.
What's coming next
For franchises, you've probably noticed that some information is still missing. For instance, we don't know how many DLCs a franchise has. Actually, it's the game that's missing this information, not necessarily the franchise. It would be nice if each game showed its number of DLCs and updates. So I plan to look into that in the coming weeks.
There's also the fact that you can't see franchises in the game yet. I'm going to tackle that as soon as possible so you can finally see them.
That's it, this devlog is already over, thanks for reading. See you next week. In the meantime, take care (yeah, I type that sentence every week).
Xavier aka Binogure
