Glassix 2 v0.7 release (Patreon)

Hi everybody!

Download links 

Changelog

• Channel packed hair, skins and eyebrows textures to reduce GPU and memory consumption
• Max texture size is now 2K, down from 4K
• Updated furniture, locations, buildings, outfits, hair and skin shaders to work with channel packed textures
• Added outfit menu in Appearance and Biography editors
• Added 5 new female tops, 3 being exclusive patron content
• Added 4 new female bottom, 2 being exclusive patron content
• Added 2 new female panties, 1 being exclusive patron content
• Added 1 new female boots exclusive content
• Added 1 new male shirt
• Added 1 new male pant
• Added 1 new male shoes
• Added 6 new female hair styles, 3 being exclusive content
• Added 6 new male hair styles, 3 being exclusive content
• Added new game menu to unlock exclusive content through unique codes

Soooo... After so much delay, here is what I've been able to put together.

As said in my previous post, this new version focus mainly on GPU and memory consumption to reduce and adds some new models to fit your characters. There's a new outfit menu in the Appearance and Biography editors to change each part, their materials and colors, though the outfit is currently not saved in the card, it will only show in the card picture at the moment. And of course, randomly generic characters will also access those new outfits.

Regarding optimization, textures have downscaled to 2048px max now to since the game couldn't handle that many 4K textures at once in the end. That is, in High Quality. Medium will play at 1K and Low Quality as 0.5K ? :D The channel packing method also reduces the number of textures required by more than 2 so I'm hoping this update will make the game less heavy on low specs. Let me know about it to know if I went in the right direction there.

I've gone ahead with exclusive content to give patrons additional rewards too. I won't lock much stuff behind patron content, don't worry, it's mainly there to make my campaign a bit more relevant. Overall I'd like to add at least one hair style + one outfit for both male and female in each bundle, I have enough models to still keep the free content much more numerous than exclusive content so it should keep the balance fair. I'll work on that later on though. Bundle codes will be delivered through tier locked posts following this post.

The process to implement new outfits was a bit more complex than hair for 2 reasons, first, an outfit is composed of multiple parts with their own model and textures which basically double or triple the number of models to process compared to hair and moreover, I wanted those models to have customizable colors and designs with as much options as possible. Since Daz3D only delivers full colored textures, one texture per color while Glassix 2 actually uses a grayscale texture which is colored in game, I had to process lots of textures to separate the details from base textures which is quite a time consuming process. The result could be better but it should be good enough for Glassix 2. I've also added a few more materials options for some old outfits, mainly the "Latex" material which makes the model quite shiny and sexy, without requiring textures! I should have gone with full latex content so I wouldn't have to bother with textures ahah :D In total, we have 12 new hair while having 15 new outfit pieces.

Here is a preview of the new hair

And here is the preview for the new outfits

As for the Free mode and new daily life animations, I'm afraid the unplanned optimization added in this version took most of the time and I couldn't work on that. Will do in v0.8 sorry about that :x

On a side note, I'll also spend the next 2 weeks on family vacation in France after 3 years of various restrictions or poor timing (I'm living in China if you didn't know, I'm sure the persons sitting around us in the plane will be happy to have my 1 year old baby crying around during the 12h flight ahah). This means v0.8 will also be delayed to the end of August so I have enough time to work on the 2 voted content, and possibly the Global Illumination feature potentially. 

Also, I apologize for the only MEGA link available to download the new version (Mediafire should be up soon). I've tried to upload to Anonfiles and Gofiles too but since it's blocked in China, I need to use a VPN but this VPN keeps have micro disconnections which interrupts the uploads on those website (Plus the speed is shit, with 3-4 hours to upload 4Gb+). MEGA and Mediafire don't have this problem which is why it's the 2 I offer at the moment. If you have other hosts suggestions, please advise ;) There is also no patch available this time either since with the overhaul of textures, most of the content needs to be downloaded again anyway.

I'm aware the development for Glassix 2 has been slow as hell. Unfortunately, since I'm learning a lot while working on the project, I sometimes have to backtrack my steps and rework some part of my code after learning of a better way to code it or optimize it which happens quite a lot. But this is only to have a stable foundation for the game so that we can snowball its content in the future with the community content and mods. We'll get there for sure in the long run and I'm really grateful to all the patrons who are sticking around despite all those delays. Without you, I wouldn't have been able to get this far so shout out to all patrons!

Have a nice day!