Grand Century 1.3.0 — The Floor

The floor

The game does the same things it did yesterday, using markedly less of your
machine to do them. Nothing here changes how it plays — that was the rule, and
it was checked rather than assumed.

• The map and panels load in pieces. Opening a panel used to pull every
  panel; the map used to arrive as one 1.3 MB block. Both are split now, and the
  offline cache went from 10.2 MB to 2.0 MB — which also means the world can get
  bigger later without quietly breaking offline play.
• Screens stop redrawing when nothing changed. Every panel, the HUD and the
  map used to redraw eight times a second whether or not anything they showed
  had moved. Most now watch only the parts they display.
• Multiplayer builds one world view per broadcast instead of one per player.
  With eight players that was twenty-seven full world rebuilds a second.
• The daily war pass, the snapshot builder and the culture ledger all got
  cheaper — the culture figures are recalculated when population actually
  changes rather than eight times a second.

Checked, not assumed

Every change here was verified to produce a byte-identical world: ten sim-years
across three seeds, hashed and compared against the previous release. Two things
that verification caught, which would otherwise have shipped:

• A snapshot refactor appeared to change the world. It had not — the probe was
  comparing key order rather than content. The probe was fixed.
• The culture cache was refreshed monthly while the underlying figures change
  weekly, so the Cultures panel could show numbers up to a month old. Sampling
  mid-month rather than on year boundaries exposed it.