v0.18999 - Extreme Optimizations — StarMade Steam update #991447

Hello players, this update is something very special. While we are still working on a lot of new features, we took the time to take an indepth look at several systems. Mainly the graphics and the network code. A lot of this game’s choices in terms of style and design have been made to make the game as big and as scalable as possible. This is the whole reason we stayed with the block only system as opposed to detailed polygon graphics, as blocks present a unique set of optimizations and designs that would be lost in a conventional LoD (level of detail) polygon system. To tell the results upfront, we managed to increase the performance of both graphics and network immensely. In numbers, this means an almost doubled framerate (depending on hardware), and a decrease of average network traffic to about 10% of what it was previously (profiled by stress tests on the server). These kind of impro...