Polishing Before Release Part 1 (Patreon)

There are only a few things left to add before the full release next Saturday! I am now carefully tweaking and polishing existing features. There are a few new things in the works.

To start off, Shinobu's skin and clothing shaders have been improved to catch light better. Originally I liked the idea of Shinobu looking toon and her clothes looking realistic but over time I saw that she looked better if her clothing was also toon.

Since the clothing has customization support, it wasn't trivial adding an outline effect to the clothing. Shinobu's skin uses the very conventional extruded vertex method to give her a cartoon outline. This method is the one you see everywhere: Render a fatter model in a dark color and then the regular model on top so it looks like the darker color behind it looks like an outline. This is not possible with the clothing cutout alpha because the cut out texture pixels would not be on the model's silhouette.

Regardless I wrote a shader solution that automatically generates a fake outline with your custom clothing texture. Example:

The dark blue outline on this blue stripe skirt is generated in the fragment pass of the new toon clothing shader.

There are a few clothing pieces left to add to the game. Jelly is almost done with the school swimsuit:

I have finished leggings:

The cool thing is that this clothing piece works very well with the clothing customization system since you can adjust the height, cut out pattern, and color of the leggings. They could also potentially be textured to look like socks instead.

Another improvement is a change to the size of cards. Cards have changed resolution and have gone from 512x768 to 1024x1536. This will allow one to pack full 1k textures (1024x1024) instead of 512x512. I thought this was necessary since I felt like there wasn't enough detail in the customized clothing pieces.

The change was not trivial either since I ran into bandwidth bottleneck issues. As in, Unity was working too hard to pack cards and there were huge framerate hiccups as it loaded the bigger card in under 1 frame. I had to implement caching to remove framerate stutters to address this. Example:

Notice how the clothing cards are dark for a split second before becoming "available". This is part of the caching system in which Unity will now first load a far smaller 192x256 thumbnail of the card image instead of the monstrous 1024x1536. This massively reduced the framerate lag for when one browses the Deck folder in the game. After it loads all the tiny thumbnails it loads the actual full card data. So yes there will now be a hidden .thumbs folder in your Deck folder. Don't touch it!

I am thinking of having one last Beta this weekend to make sure these changes are bug free.

Stay Tuned.