Faster Graphics

I have spent the past two and a half weeks working on the speed of the Catastrophe X's graphics system. Prior to today, moving to a different part of the map would result in a slow rendering spiral starting in the center of the screen. The rendering speed was tolerable in some browsers such as Chrome, but made the game almost unplayable in other modern browsers like Firefox.

The new graphics system changes all this. Shapes are indexed spatially for fast retrieval and display when you move around the map. And if things do slow down a bit, the system focuses on rendering the most important shapes first, before moving on to purely aesthetic details. The new system is very fast in all modern browsers, though Internet Explorer still struggles.

While digging around the map system, I also replaced the hated mouse-based map scrolling with keyboard-based scrolling using the arrow keys. I have also added some other hotkeys for convenience (N/L toggle between last tick and next tick view, C focuses on the craft deployment box, D signals you are done the tick).

More soon!