Welcome to this long overdue update on Ecliptic!

You may have noticed the screenshots of the game have been updated and that the title screen and some other screens are now taking full advantage of the EHB mode.

It's not all pretty pictures, though. Since the last post there have been some major changes to the internal structure of the game:

Ecliptic uses a garbage collected heap to store the game state. The intent with this was to minimize memory fragmentation and to make saving and loading the game easy - the save game file is just a dump of the heap. The use of the the heap has now been expanded to include many more objects - both UI elements like buttons and textboxes as well as the objects that manage input and the game state are now part of the GC heap. This makes some things - like registering for and receiving events - simpler but it required making the heap more complex as it must deal with things like virtual inheritance

Another big change has been in the management of chip RAM. The game has been pretty flaky on an A500 with 512 chip/512 slow for a while and memory was getting so fragmented that the game would be unable to allocate chip ram before you got out of the first room. Instead of freeing and re-allocating chip ram, Ecliptic will now allocate the biggest buffer of chip ram it can up front and use that for all graphic and sound resources. Resources can be removed from the buffer to make room and, if the buffer becomes too fragmented, they can be shuffled around to make space.

An effort has been made to remove as much code as possible from the C++ side and put it into the game's virtual machine. All the user interfaces using the game's UI toolkit - from the title screen to the control panel and speech bubbles - are now implemented in VM code. This makes things like the new Terminal UI possible without writing a single line of C++ and has reduced the size of the final executable.

In addition to all these structural changes, some time has been spent revising the "combat rules" of the game. The character hit points and damage done by weapons has been simplified and is, hopefully, better balanced. Your robots really should feel different from each other. You can't just charge enemies with Red, he's too vulnerable. Green is a sharpshooter. When equipped with a suitable melee weapon, Blue is terrifying.

A new build of the game should be available in the next few days.