Hey guys, hope you’ve had a couple of good weeks. I didn’t post anything last one because I was busy solving a crash the game was having regarding the mod, something related to the quantity of nations the game can support without crashing.
Interestingly, it seems the game cannot handle more than 512 nations because of limitations on the RAM required to load the .tga file where flags database is stored. When the flag quantity surpasses 512, it needs to duplicate its size in the graphic database to make room for the whole new bunch, therefore, increasing the file size too from 16 MB to 32 MB.
I know of mods that have found a way to overrun this naturally, like TGC, but unfortunately, I haven’t realised how to fix this myself. I had to spent some days stuck at the problem analysis, and then, testing over and over until I somewhat discovered a manual fix: a constant rescale of the .tga flag database is after its generation during the startup done directly from the documents folder.
I must admit I feel this fix is too rough for a final version, even for a beta. However, it’s working out so far despite reducing the flags quality (also something I need to solve eventually), and it will be the workaround for a while. This, to be honest, made me want to talk about performance…
Regarding this, the mod has quite a unstable performance for now. There are plenty of unexpected crashes at the moment, more often occurring while checking out each of the government’s areas, like the budget or reforms. These problems are somewhat not too worrying as identifying them is not too hard, actually it’s quite easy (sort of). In example: the budget crashes relate to economic modifiers or calculations, and these are exclusive to certain files in the commons folder.
However, I’ve found another type of bug which worries me the most, as I cannot identify if they occur because of wrong modding, or because of the overall performance of my computer. That is why I’ll be having a few tests with some users in the next month, probably by the end of it.
The killer bugs I'm referring to are certain ‘graphic collapse’ glitches, where the interface stops working, the game freezes without repair, etc. This is what slows me the most, but even so I’ve been committed to advance as much as possible, and fortunately anyway, the gfx glitch happens only so very once in a while.
Discord is finally setup for anyone interested in joining. From there we’ll test and fix all performance issues. I appreciate your support, and will keep in touch with more information of the progress so far, and why not, another article with some of the new stuff.
Take care, Lib out.
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