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RimWorld is based on Unity, which is supposed to do all the heavy-lifting. That makes a programmer life easier building the first stages of the game, but has some limitations, notably technical: if Unity is hardwired to use only one core, Tynan would have to rewrite most or all of his code using a different framework/language to make use of multithreading.

Ah - I've got extensive experience in HPC, but i'm not a game developer. So i know enough to theorycraft my existing knowledge into gaming Thanks for the clarification, though!

You could have a morgue in your base, and use frozen bodies for science and stuff.

Ooh - that's a bit macabre! But I like it Perhaps you should even suffer a little negative morale for experimenting on your own people - but make it worth the risk

No need to be rude golgy.

If you have played PA one almost entire update was dedicated to it and it took a game's playability way up.

My apologies if you thought I was trying to be rude - far from it! The quote is meant to be humorous.

Just stating that there's hurdles to implementing multithreading, and it's not just a simple matter of throwing more available CPU cores at the problem. Actor based systems always suffer from constraints on compute time; actor-based systems ( PA is a good example of this, hundreds of actors ) can lend themselves quite nicely to mutithreading, because you need to do all kinds of interactions between them all at once. As stated by GC13 - it's difficult to retroactively shoehorn it in - it requires a bit of foresight and changes some of the internal design a bit.

As i said though - I'm sure if it's a need, it'll be done if it hasn't already been. I wouldn't particularly be concerned about asking for it, however.

A common saying about threading:

A programmer had a problem. He thought, "I know, I'll use threads." Now the programmer has two problems.

Adding multithreading is not trivial - it's not just a matter of saying "oh hey, just use more than one core". It's a matter of having to ensure that all the functions perform thread safe actions on shared memory and designing the internals so that deadlocks/races cant occur.

That being said - I'm sure if its required, it'll be done and/or considered already. Though i'm curious as to whether or not game engines these days can offload graphics stuff onto a dedicated core if one is available/free and branch to allow AI/other computation to occur freely on another.

[Apply in this thread if you can and want to test on Linux.]

I need a couple Linux testers to make sure builds work properly on that OS. Apply in this thread if you can and want to test on Linux. Obviously there's no guarantee everyone will get used.

It would be good if you could answer:

• What's your experience with testing systems? Ever used a bug tracker before? Does the Ludeon bugtracker look foreign to you or familiar?
• What OSes do you have?
• How much time do you have to test?
• Ever recorded and uploaded video before? E.g. with FRAPS.

Right, so in order:

• Bug trackers? I'm a systems admin, bug tracking and rcs is BAU stuff. Haven't used Flypaper specifically before, but I can deal with whatever.
• OSen? I've got CentOS and Fedora, mainly - i'm happier with RPM based distros. But I can run up whatever if you need to correlate between RPM/Deb based stuff
• 4-10 hours a week is probably my max gaming hours a week, but depends on how deeply you need specific things tested. I'm probably better testing one thing deeply than a bunch of things shallowly.
• Not for many years. Does FRAPS still peg the CPU when recording? I remember that being A Thing (tm)