Greetings, Hard Chip players!

In the previous update, a new rendering that enables large scenes was introduced. This proved to be very effective for at least 5 machines with varying configurations! Even if it's far from being complete, the simulation part was not even remotely capable of following that scale. This update aimed at introducing first simulation improvements and benchmarks to check the performance. Once again no content in this update.

1. Simulation partially rewritten: The first version of the simulation was able to manage small-size challenges (<64x64) quite okay-ish. Now that the rendering can go up to 1024x1024, some work needed to be done to even be able to run it. It's not final yet as CPU simulation might not be the way compared to GPU simulation. But help a lot for running large simulation (where before it barely ran), and improves the overall performance on the existing challenge!

Here are the results using the new compared to the old simulation (updates per second):

2. Simulation benchmarks: to help track and show performance results, two new benchmarks are now available. 64x64 Simulation and 384x384 Simulation can be ran with the Benchmark main menu button. Here an example of the 64X64 one:

3. QOL, Bug and Crash fixes: large simulation can now "soft crash" and be restarted without crashing the entire game; Tutorial lighting issue fixed; Moving forward only the "nodotnet" version of the game will be distributed (having the two versions didn't bring anything game wise).

Thank you for playing Hard Chip, and stay tuned for more updates and new features!