Hi all!

The next update has been released - 0.8.0. This update focuses on expansion of the map to include North and South America, expansion of the map to include many more sea provinces, huge optimizations, and improvements to the aesthetics of the UI.

In short, the following features have been added:

• 294 new land provinces added in the Americas
  
• 160 new sea provinces
  
• 14 new countries
  
• Lots of optimization, with initial tests showing about a 30fps improvement
  
• Initial version of custom shaders for country appearances while zoomed out
  
• New (interactable) minimap reflecting map changes
  
• New animations for sea provinces
  
• Existing sea provinces given more precise depth values
  
• UI box transitions much smoother
  
• Text readability and aesthetics improved
  
• Overhaul of rendering order for UI to prevent overlapping
  
• New loading screen
  
• Countries with over 50 claim strength in a colonizable province are given a free claim on the province when colonized by another country
  

And the following bugs have been fixed:

• Fixed tabbing out causing music to reset
  
• Fixed cases of armies still being visible while zoomed out
  
• Fixed event popups rendering over UI layers they are not meant to
  
• Fixed some UI being interactable while paused
  
• Fixed cases of tooltips persistently remaining
  
• Fixed some UI elements apearing over others during transitions
  
• Development tab no longer appears when selecting non-owned provinces
  
• Fixed opening diplomacy box causing stuttering
  
• Camera movement disabled while debugger open
  
• Capitals hidden while zoomed out
  

Map Expansion

Full map of the world


North American provinces


Central American provinces


South American provinces


Glad to have finally finished the creation of all land provinces in the world and the majority of the sea provinces. The new provinces and countries each have all of their metadata (terrain, population, initial developments, literacy, objectives, etc.) implemented. The only sea provinces not implemented yet are the ones in the Pacific, these will be implemented when the world is rounded (can travel continuously east to west). Each of the provinces need to be hand drawn, stitched together, and research done on the historical names, population, etc. so creating them is quite time consuming (though really cool when it's all pieced together).

Some interesting notes about the colonizable land, the trend I tried to follow when deciding if to mark land as colonizable/owned by a country was if I could find any historical record that Europeans/their daughter countries had a sizable permanent presence in the area (at least around 1000 people). If there was not, the land is marked as colonizable by any country. This is most seen in South America, where the upper Amazon and Patagonia are seen as colonizable. This also allows for a point of contention between the South American countries and more easily allows for wars to happen between them for this land, which historically was seen. To help facilitate this, if a province is colonized by a country, all countries that have a colony claim strength over 50 are given an event to get a free claim on the province (which the AI always takes).

Adding the remaining sea provinces (outside of the Pacific) also allows for much more freedom of navigation through the seas and provides the basis for future events which will make sea navigation more difficult where ancient beasts awaken from the ocean floor...

Map Shader / Performance Optimization

To both make the map look more aesthetically pleasing and to increase performance, a custom shader was written that is placed over dynamically created country sprites when zoomed out on the map. The shader is able to improve performance by offloading much of the rendering process from the CPU to the much more efficient GPU. Additionally, a lot of work was put into optimizing the code for map interaction since the base performance cost of this was increased from the addition of the new land and sea provinces. Overall, tests from the optimizations show that on average the game is able to comfortably run about 30fps higher and with less stuttering.

Wrapping Up

So that covers the major parts of the update, there are also various improvements that have been made to the UI to allow for smoother transitions, a restructuring of the rendering pipeline to prevent overlapping UI's, and various quality of life additions. Unfortunately was not able to get the government mechanic into this update, but I felt these changes were important enough to go ahead and get an update out for. Development for country government interaction, social reforms, etc. is well underway, however.

Additionally, for submitting feedback/bug reports a forum has been made in the Discord (https://discord.gg/TKRz44WKVE) to help organize submissions and make them easier to address.

Well that's about it for now, thanks for reading and be back soon!