It's been a while posting something like this in a while.

So, while I am on vacation and taking on a job (so I get some cash to upgrade my laptop), I worked on a few things on the game. It's not much, due to work (although, it winded it down this week I'm writing this) but I was able to do some improvements (including finally moving to .NET Core).

Northbridge Boost and .NET Blues

After Preview 7 of .NET Core 3 was released, I started moving Northbridge over to this version. This was a technical necessity, since .NET Core had a vastly improved Just-In-Time compiler (the JIT Compiler is used when it's necessary to use code) and the option to ship a copy of the framework, to make it easier for me to adopt features new to it. Alongside this, Preview 6 added even more features that I'd like to implement. The two features I refer to are Ready2Run images and Trimming. This is gonna get technical, so I'll try to make this short and sweet:

• Ready2Run is, essentially, creating an image of native code and embed it to the binaries. It's like NGEN, but it's done by me ahead of time. This is great, since I don't need to smash my head, figuring out how to use NGEN in cases where I couldn't automate this. So, everyone can enjoy better performance.

• Trimming is... well… removing libraries from the local copy of Core to save space. Since Core itself is about 100MB, saving some space from it, is nice. Sadly, there's an issue where I can't use both in Northbridge, because it causes crashes. But looking at the WPF GitHub repo (yes, Windows Presentation Foundation is open-source now), they are working on it, updating the toolset as well, so there is a light in the tunnel there.

After about an hour of work, the transition went smoothly, which is rather good. Aside from waiting the WPF library being finalized (maybe in August or September), I am going to start shipping builds once I polish up the game as well. I am aware that Core 3 is still in preview, but they gave the go-live status, so as long as there aren't any issues, it's A-OK. Although I wonder if I should still use the installer project, since it's no longer necessary to check if .NET Framework 4.6.2 is installed and then install it. If you have some time, please take part in the survey here. It would help me decide if I should bother making the game's installer.

Oh, and as a bonus, I posted a video that shows how I migrated to .NET Core 3. If you are interested, you can see it here:

Tune-ups and new content

Of course, the game also got some changes under the hood. For one, shop discounts are now active. The idea here is this: You take on guild missions and you receive hunter or bounty coins. You use those coins in exchange of upgrading both the hunter and the bounty licensee. Both of them provide bonuses to you, should you partake and complete them. For this one, I'll focus on the hunter license. Upgrading the hunter license will give you discounts to items, weapons and armor. The higher the license's rank, the better the discount. It's a rather nice way of saving up for better weapons and/or getting more items.

Now, obviously, I need to add more missions to make it worthwhile for you. And I am working on it as we speak. I have some ideas for missions for you to take on, and they'll come in in an upcoming Beta Build. And some tweaks to the combat system, but I'll talk about them at a later post.

That is all for now. Have a fun summer. And I'll see you in the next post.