EBF5: Smoother Hits

Hey guys, I’m still optimizing EBF5 for mobile. A big bottleneck is when targets in battle get hit – hundreds of lines of code crunch all of the stats, equips, status effects, elemental particle effects, and other variables, and then different animations are played – sometimes for 5 targets at once. This is a lot to happen on one frame, and usually isn’t too slow, but it often triggers garbage collection or throttles your device CPU for a few seconds afterwards to avoid overheating.

So I’ve added two new options to the game to lessen the resources used:

The “Disable Idle Animations” option now also disables “hit”, “big hit”, “evade”, “heal”, and “defend hit” animations, and replaces them with the target just flashing white. It doesn’t even look too bad.

There’s a new option to “Disable Multi-hits”, meaning that attacks that hit multiple times for no good reason, like Fire Storm, Star Blast, or Hyper Beam, now just hit once. This may make gameplay slightly different when it comes to status effects like Morale, but in the end it shouldn’t be very noticeable.

Hopefully those options get the game running smoother for more people.

Also, nobody asked for it, but I added the option to display a grid on the map, making hunting hidden items a bit easier! A lot of the really hidden items have already been made easier to find on mobile (such as adding visual hints where there were none in the PC version).

Fanart: Summer Anna

Hi Folks,

We’ve been enjoying an extended heatwave, celebrated birthdays, and eaten far too much bbq food over the past week. The garden is in total bloom with all the sun we’ve been having, and we’re trying to keep up with watering as much as we can since there’s no rain in sight. Matt is still working on the tedious optimisation of the EBF5 mobile version, meanwhile I’ve been making plans for more berry bushes and fruit trees for the garden as well as testing out lots of new recipes for said berries. Remember to stay in the shade and keep hydrated – hope you’re all well!

Here’s some appropriately summery fanart of Anna from Audric the Skyknight.