Smoother on integrated graphics
The first proper measurement, on the integrated graphics chip of the development PC, showed the game was held back by how many pixels it draws, not by game code. The engine was computing a lighting effect for see-through surfaces that nothing in the game uses; switching it off gave back 5.7 to 7 milliseconds every frame. The game also now lowers its render resolution slightly when a frame runs late, because the engine's own version of that never worked on this kind of graphics setup.
Measured on a busy machine, frames per second:
| stage | before | after |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20 | 46 |
| 2 | 34 | 58 |
| 3 | 31 | 57 |
| 4 | 38 | 59 |
| 5 | 31 | 57 |
| 6 | 35 | 59 |
| 7 | 39 | 59 |
| 8 | 42 | 59 |
Frames slow enough to see as a stutter fell from hundreds per stage to under 20. Along the way we found that the Quality option in the menu had never had any effect.
A charge shot you can read
The charge shot is now a defined energy ball at the size of the area it actually hits, with a crisp rim, a white-hot core and a see-through body, so you can see what it is tearing through. Every enemy it passes gets its own flash and sparks. The first screenshots showed the charge-up ball as a plain white glow with the rim and the energy inside lost; turning its brightness down brought them back.
Almost nobody was killing the gunships
The test pilot destroyed 1 of 16 capital ships. Shots on the armour did nothing, and it never aimed at the gun decks. Sustained fire on the hull now wears the guns down, and in the latest run the pilot destroyed all 62 it met. That may now be too easy, which is the next thing to check.
A simulated average player
The autopilot is perfect, so it never dies, which says nothing about difficulty. We added two pilots that play like people: one with average reactions, aim and attention, and one skilled. The skilled pilot still never dies. The average pilot loses 13 to 30 lives per campaign and gets game over on stages 3 to 7. That brackets the difficulty; a real person's run will show where it truly sits.
Testing out of sight
A new launcher runs the watch mode with no window and no sound, at 20 times game speed by default, still taking exactly the same steps of 1/60 of a second. Its first two runs covered 57 stages with no crashes, freezes or deaths. The game's built-in self-checks then caught a bug earlier editor runs had missed: when the game saved the same file twice in quick succession, as it does at the end of a stage, the older save could land on disk after the newer one and overwrite it. That is fixed.
The runs also flagged 30 warnings from the Stage 3 city destruction, where each building's surface was being copied the wrong way. A flood of audio warnings turned out to be the speed itself: at 20 times speed, sounds start far faster than they can finish, so fast runs now leave audio off and sound is judged from normal-speed runs.