work updates: end of starchild (Patreon)

i've been working mostly every day on "end of starchild" (previously known as time tripper circuit02) since the release of the k2 record. next week i'm expanding testing to a few more individuals, but most of the maps are in their final state. much of the actual zscript/ACS/decorate/etc has been refactored and i've engaged in heavy work in optimizing the project. currently i am working to remove most of the dynamic lighting and replace it with manually-created sector light gradients (see attatched image for the absolute torture). this isn't a necessary step, but will help with performance on slower machines. this will increase the storage required for the maps, as the plaintext compiled-at-runtime UDMF format needs quite a few characters to store all of those additional lines, but it should not be astronomical. the last test version of the project was thankfully just over 50mb, only a handful of which are textures, sprites, audio, and music. most of it is the maps.

the project has wound up containing a lot more text than i had initially planned, so it will ship with a CSV which will allow for easy-ish localization into other languages. i will do what i can to have it ship with a few languages included, but my resources are limited; and please understand that i'm not willing to pass the project out to just anybody to work on in advance.

i'll be continuing to work on this as much as possible for the time being; i do have a music project thing happening, and naturally end of starchild will come with a finalized soundtrack release. i have some plugin ideas kicking around, and will also be looking into making the k2 album multitracks available. those area a bit of a challenge as each channel is used more or less "whenever it is available", so they're all kind of a mess and not super useful to other musicians. but it is what it is.

that's all for now, cheers.