OpenLoco v23.11 is out! While a few bugfixes made it into the changelog this month, most of the work went on behind the scenes instead. Let’s dive into some of the most important changes this month in this month’s instalment of the development log!
Object Selection (#2128, #2149, #2185)
Some of our recent features have had to do with the object selection window. Sadly, though, we can’t add much more due to limitations with the internal object index structure. The solution is to move to a new, OpenLoco-specific structure. To allow us to do that, though, we need to have reimplemented every function that uses it. Hence, this trio of PR’s that finishes off almost all of the functions. Whilst implementing them, one or two little mistakes were fixed. Error messages for some object selection errors have been improved, and ‘object in use’ errors now correctly handle signals.
Vehicle Functions (#2158, #2164, #2165, #2166, #2169, #2175, #2177)
@duncanspumpkin had the urge to implement a number of vehicle functions this month. Most of
these had been left on the to do pile due to there being too many unknowns about tracks.
However, earlier in the year we had a bit of a breakthrough of knowledge in that area,
so these were easy to finish off. Hopefully, next year we can finish off Vehicle::update!
Fix slow start-up with blank game window (#2184)
OpenLoco introduces ways to play the game at higher resolutions than the game was designed for, including ways to scale the game canvas. This is particularly needed on double-density displays, where pixels are smaller than they were on traditional displays. However, a problem that had been plaguing the game for a while, was slow game start-up times when such large-resolution displays were used. After much debugging, it turns out that we were still invoking the vanilla Locomotion graphics initialisation routine – something that hasn’t been necessary for a long time. Our C++ code was actually able to handle such larger displays just fine. Removing the call to the vanilla routine solved the problem, making the game start up much faster.
Use more C++20 features (#2170)
Now that we are using C++20, we no longer require some of our custom utility functions.
This PR removed popcount, rol, ror, and introduced the ‘spaceship’ operator to a
number of our custom types. The spaceship operator is the most fun of the four: the
compiler can now generate <, <=, >, >= operations by just implementing a spaceship,
<=>. This should improve the code generation and simplifies the codebase.
Build improvements (#2172, #2178, #2181, #2183)
The latest GCC 13 was released and generated a number of warnings when compiling our codebase. These have been addressed where doable. We’ve also added new CI images that compile against GCC 13 and improved our build setup for this.
Object Structure (#2179, #2188)
@LeftOfZen has been working on a C# object tool, and whilst implementing it, he noticed a few little improvements/fixes that could be made. It’s great to have another implementation of the object code, as it will mean we can identify more of the unknowns and reduce the number of bugs.