THIS. ROCKS.

Today was the most exhilarating day of development, hands down.

For the last few days I have been losing sleep (and I mean that most literally) over the game's performance.

The code was as optimized as it could get, yet as I added essential stuff, performance kept dropping with no workaround in sight. There were simply no more corners I could cut without making SERIOUS sacrifices.

I started thinking I would have to either target exclusively top-of-the-line mobiles, or significantly reduce the amount of characters on screen. And I HATED both ideas.

I just cannot see AC-130 Gunship Simulator being exciting without having at least 100 characters in a given sector for most of the missions.

And then, today, IT happened. I did not FIX the problem. I ACED IT.

I aced it so hard, I actually thought I had commited an error somewhere. So I rechecked everything, recompiled, and tried again.

Sure enough, the thing was flying. 30-35 FPS where I was getting 12-15 on my old tablet (rated under a Samsung Galaxy SII). With ---200!!!--- characters acting independently on the map. The best part is that the solution I implemented generates little overhead per new character, so I probably could do twice that number without much of a hit.

If you're interested in more technical stuff, check out how I solved it.