Inner Circle Update for November 16 2016! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

So, I really wish I had more visual stuff to show off this week, but it hasn't worked out that way :(. Nonetheless, things are moving along, and some good news is that the new promotional video is definitely happening and is underway! 

Images and Content for this Post on Google Drive 

New Promo Video

The new video will be somewhere around 2 minutes and will be used as the Patreon cover video. The goal is therefore for it to serve as an updated version of the original video, with focus on showing the progress we've made since then. 

After collecting a bunch more footage earlier in the week, I worked with the editor (who is also our potential new sound effects guy) all day yesterday on getting the outline ready, and now it's pretty much in his hands. I was hoping to have a clip ready for you today, but we opted for getting the structure done while I was present instead of focusing on a single part. I'll be sure to post something as soon as I get my hands on it :D. 

New 3D Workstation

I've received almost all of the parts for the new 3D workstation aside from the processor and the hard drives. Newegg kind of screwed me out of my preorder on said hard drives (what they apparently meant was first come first serve), so I've been making daily stops at the local electronics store in an attempt to get them as they come in.

I was able to score (what appears to be) a legit 22 core Xeon E5-2699 V4 for less than half the retail price, and therefore decided to change the build pretty dramatically to offset its (still really high) cost. It's now a single processor build utilizing the new revision of the X99 chipset designed for supporting Broadwell CPUs. For anyone interested, here is the final build (my total cost was under 2/3 of what's displayed): 

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/28ZtQV 

This was far and away the most research I've ever put into a computer, so hopefully it all pays off in performance and efficiency.

Material Presets Database Optimization

This is about as mundane as it gets, but it's an important optimization that I discovered when creating the rendering manager last month. Every time a render pass is done, a new set of materials is loaded onto the 3D models. This can take up to 10 seconds per character per render pass for the scene, meaning for bigger scenes it can be pretty slow. I discovered I was using overly complicated shaders in some situations, meaning in a lot of cases that loading time can be reduced to nearly instant. The only way to resolve this is to manually update the material presets on a character by character basis, but it should hopefully be done in the next few days unless the remainder of the parts for the workstation show up (in which case that will take priority). 

AltairPL's Battle Engine Overhaul 

As mentioned in earlier posts, APL is working on overhauling the battle engine to better accommodate features we've either been piling on since V0.03, have had to set aside until something like this could be accomplished, or have planned for the future (things like double teaming). 

He's been experimenting with various ways to attack this large undertaking, and has begun by starting with what are called 'Actions'. These are basically data structures that handle info for any action a character or enemy makes during battle (attacking/skills/item usage and so on). One of APL's goals is to make the battle system entirely concurrent, meaning that theoretically actions could take place simultaneously. While we don't plan on changing how the active time system behaves from the player's perspective, doing this will allow for a lot of flexibility and power with behind the scenes stuff. It will also make the engine way more inherently stable, whereas currently stability is something that needs to be addressed on a case by case basis. 

TK's Map Progress

I've added another quick WIP process job from one of TK's latest map revisions, but also a GIF of an idea he sparked that could really come in handy for later maps. One thing I had trouble with when I made the early outdoor urban map for V0.01 and V0.02 was placing large objects like buildings, due to the fact that they would block huge areas from view of the characters and objects. It came to mind that with the work APL did on the map engine in V0.05 and a bit of extra work, it should be possible to make sections of maps where large, view occluding objects can dynamically display or be hidden based on character location. Also, for those of you that didn't know, there's always been a secret room in the Access Tunnels B5 West 2 map >.>