Development Update Blog: Troubleshooting the Shift to UE5.4 (Patreon)

Hi all,

Just a brief development update to give you an idea of where we are. Some of the new systems which we showcased in the last development blog required us to upgrade the engine to version 5.4, which we had already done at time of last posting. Since then, and as we approached our initial estimate of the end of July, we began our usual process of test builds to check for any unexpected surprises.

In UE5.4, Epic have included some fairly hefty performance improvements, however these have not come without a cost. The "improvements" have slightly altered the way that lighting works, creating some fairly unpleasant visual errors that we're not happy with. Having spent the past week crunching on almost nothing but a fix for these, we've resolved most of the lighting errors that impact characters, however there are still some which we're not prepared to ship with.

These errors do not exist in the 'editor' version of the game, only the shipping build (i.e. what you all get to play) which does help somewhat with narrowing down what Epic have broken. That said we don't want to have all our hard work undermined by a graphical glitch that ruins the final look of DSS 2.0. To this end the art team will be doing little else until we've resolved the issue, a decision that will necessarily add to our development time.

We will keep you in the loop and let you know as soon as we have it nailed down. What we can say fairly conclusively is that we're not going to have DSS 2.0 out in July, rather it'll drop sometime in August. We appreciate that you want to get your hands on it ASAP, but we also know you won't want a scuffed release that's been pushed just to meet an arbitrary date. This shouldn't impact our additional planned updates for the year, as these are mostly being worked on by different team members in parallel (that is to say that you can still expect multiple content updates from us, after DSS 2.0, before the year is out).

In the meantime I wanted to share one of the small upgrades that's coming in the DSS 2.0 update (though technically it's already been revealed on the Patreon-exclusive "Behind the Scenes" section of the Disord), and that's correctly coloured genitals. All genitals will now have differing tones based on your selected skin, so you'll no longer sport a generic colour when it comes to your "equipment". This also means that particularly vivid skins may sport some fairly outlandish genital colouration, giving us more ways to express differences between subtypes of various forms. We'll extend this colouration to female genital variations in time.

So that's where things stand, a slight halt whilst we fix what Epic have broken. Shouldn't be too long and be assured that we're working on it. Watch this space.

Team Carnal Instinct