Getting Closer to Radical Elements Release news - BlackBox mod for StarDrive

The performance has been enhanced again.
McShooterz changed the code to improve weapon targeting a great deal AND added a feature to let the ship fire all of its weapons at whatever target is is close enough not just the main target.

That works pretty great. the ships will fire like a "the last star fighter" death blossom. but this increased the load on the targeting routines resulting in increased ship lag.

In investigating this issue i found that when the game was checking for ship to shoot at it was first checking if the target was in arc of the weapon then checking for ranged. I turned this around so that it checks for range first and blam! better perf than before the all weapons firing.
Then in a desire to have a weapons fire processor queue I made the weapon fire spin up a new thread so it could continue to process ship state while firing all those weapons.

Result is much smoother gameplay and more effect core utilization. To really see this bump the game speed and watch the core utilization in task manager and you should see the load start to spread out over available cores.

While going through this I also modified the module targeting to take into account ship experience. When a ship is level2 or higher the weapon will prefer non armor modules and damaged modules.

Investing some orders issues i found the carrier fighter interaction to have some issues so i modified this so that fighters will prefer its carriers attackers and targets but will not be forced to them resulting in more control over the fighters and fixes a few bugs.

there are still a few issues to try and figure out. We are running into some trouble with beams in the new build causing a few major issues. Once those are hammer out I feel radical elements will be about done. Just some polish and cleanup to do.

Remember if you want to contribute to the project you can. Its mostly an open project.
The mod superpack mods could use some clean up to more fully utilize BlackBox mod features, which are extensive, issues found in the mod reported to bitbucket are very helpful, ideas for features are also helpful but will be delayed until the core game is running as best as we can make it reasonably, Donations are also gladly accepted but certainly not required. Paypal.com

Getting close to being complete with this phase. Next phase of development will include more perf changes, mode cleanup, and untold game expansion.