Cloudstrike v2.5.1: Cutting RAM Usage by More Than 80%

Today was all about memory optimization without sacrificing Cloudstrike’s pixel-art look. Compared with v2.4.0, the Windows build dropped from roughly 1.03 GB to around 165 MB of working memory. That is a reduction of approximately 84%. Private memory fell from about 1.07 GB to around 202 MB, while the startup peak dropped from nearly 1.5 GB to below 200 MB. The largest improvements came from:

• storing terrain and clouds at reduced resolution and scaling them pixel-perfectly;
• keeping only the required landscape segments and environments in memory;
• releasing temporary Android startup memory;
• compacting particle textures;
• generating explosion frames at one texel per visible 4×4 block. The explosions are still generated procedurally at startup no new bitmap assets were added. Internally, a 160×160 explosion frame now needs only 40×40 stored pixels and is rendered at its original size with nearest-neighbor scaling. This reduced explosion and projectile image memory from approximately 9.68 MiB to 0.62 MiB. As a pleasant side effect, the explosions now look cleaner and fit the game’s chunky pixel style even better. On Android, the latest cleanup also reduced measured in-game PSS by around 16 MiB. Android accounts for graphics and shared memory differently from Windows, so those figures cannot be added directly to the desktop savings. All gameplay tests, Windows builds and Android builds remain clean. The performance-critical gameplay update still runs with zero bytes and zero allocations per operation. Cloudstrike v2.5.1 is now tagged and released.