Greetings from the Dust Zone, commanders! It's come to my attention that some of you like to throw around some BIG fleets in your campaign and Sector Assault games. Well, this update is for you! I've been aboard a science station in the Thoricus Sector working tirelessly on Dust Fleet's internals. I've rebuilt a lot of the battle code to make use of some of those spare cores your CPUs have lying around.

The end result is big performance gains for users on low and mid range CPUs! You'll find Dust Fleet running about twice as well as it used to during big battles.

And that's not all. There are improvements to game load/save times. On the starmap turns are now processed a little quicker. For players who make enormous sector assault games you probably saw a little bit of hitching and stuttering during turns - that's now gone, and turns will process in a much more buttery-smooth fashion.

And, thanks to some very helpful commanders, I've tracked down and fixed a few bugs as well.

A lot of Dust Fleet's core management code has changed and been rewritten, and I've tested these changes thoroughly. However, I'm just one Admiral, so if you see any new problems please report a bug (but please don't report bugs via reviews).

Speaking of reviews, if you haven't left a review yet, please do, it helps a lot for small indie games like Dust Fleet.



Here's the full rundown.

CHANGES

• Big performance improvements for large battles where the game is CPU-bound.
  
• Quicker and smoother turn processing on the starmap.
  
• Faster load/save times for saved games.
  
• Location production stats on the starmap left bar now include contributions from mining ships and location bonuses.
  
• When exiting hyperspace ships will move clear of the wormhole if more ships are trying to jump in, unless the player countermands this with a move order. This is an improvement over previous behaviour where ships would simply block the wormhole until the player moved them.
  
• Autosave indicator added to starmap.
  
• Battle speed now resets to 1x for the mission complete/fail screens.
  
• Reduced bomber strike charge time 180->150 secs.
  
• Reduced nuclear strike charge time 240->200 secs.
  
• Increased nuclear strike cost: 1800->2600.
  
• Escape key can now be used to bring the UI back when it is hidden.
  
• Escape key can now be used to close the console.
  
• Sound effect for APC docking
  

FIXES

• Height reference lines disappeared while adjusting movement height.
  
• Connecting line from slot to location on model was missing in loadout editor.
  
• "Withdraw from battle" button not working when last defending ships are destroyed during a bomber strike.
  
• Player and enemy ships were freezing for approximately 1 second in some rare situations.
  
• Audio stuttering massively reduced.
  
• Error when loading a game that was saved while certain combinations of ships were docking.
  
• Unable to save the game during latter stages of Enforcer Pt 2.
  
• Unnecessary and confusing fade-in when player un-hides the UI with TAB.
  
• Ships stopped dead while exploding.
  
• Player could cancel AI station builds by clicking the station icon.
  
• In-progress station builds now match the colour of the player who currently owns the build, even when the location has no overall controller.
  
• When guarding harvesters, refineries rested at an odd angle.
  
• Utility ships got tangled up when launching while another is queued to dock.
  
• Ships built from the wormhole would exit hyperspace and stop on top of each other.
  
• APCs now have less trouble docking with enemy ships.
  
• APCs sometimes flipped 90 degrees upon successfully docking.
  
• Clydesdale-S cruisers could not be set to hold fire.
  

Safe travels (and battles) commanders!