Just some shtuff.
These builds don't actually crash my computer, which makes me very happy. Congratulations. There are a couple of things which have caught my attention, however.
The thruster glow effect is quite nifty. It looks a little cheesy when a non-moving ship has its engines going full blast, however. I know this has been mentioned before, and it's certainly not a game-breaking detail, but I can't help but laugh seeing the Triton freighter in the training missions sit perfectly still while its engines go FWOOSH.
Memory usage seems to be higher than before, probably due to the added thruster effects. Apocalypse in particular, with its numerous ships, is a sluggish mission, and literally crashed on me every time until I boosted my virtual memory settings.
A little off-topic, but something I've noticed in every build of FS_Open I've used so far is that it takes an enormous amount of memory to enter the barracks or the weapons/information sections of the tech room. At first, I thought this was something inherently wrong with the code, but I've found that a virtual memory increase solves the problem. I dunno why extra resources are needed for the barracks, as it's not much different from any other interface screen, but I assume the tech room sections require a lot of extra memory due to the animations accompanying the displayed information. Half a gig of virtual memory was sufficient to enter the barracks, but a full gig was needed for the tech room screens.
Back to the two current builds. I've been seeing a new, rather unusual bug involving the various in-game "counters", such as ship hull percentages, the mission timer, and even the distances to targets. The counter in question often fluctuates values; for example, a cruiser under fire may be damaged down to 24 percent hull integrity, suddenly leap up to a higher figure like 74, then drop back down to 24 again when the ship sustains more damage. This seems to happen when a craft is under heavy fire, since it sustains a lot of damage all at once, but I've noticed it when firing on targets by myself, as well. The distance and mission timer changes are harder to spot, since those values are automatically changing anyway, but you can catch them if you keep your eyes peeled. The bug itself is easy to test; Apocalypse provides a particularly useful test model, as there are three Shivan cruisers that can be monitored while they take constant damage. Apocalypse is also useful because the supernova countdown at the end of the mission is also affected by the bug; you can watch it trying to jump to a different value while it cycles down to termination. This bug doesn't cripple your gameplay either, though it does seem to be able to cause certain mission triggers to activate prematurely when the mission timer acts up.
