Inner Circle Update for December 8, 2016! (Patreon)

I'm finally reporting from the new workstation!  You'll likely be relieved to hear that I can now start focusing on v0.06 instead of optimizations for awhile.  Trust me, no one gets more stressed out than I do when things get held up!

Workstation is Complete!

I went to sleep after posting the monthly update on the 1st and when I woke up I had a bunch of missed calls from the nearby computer store trying to give me a heads up that the solid state drives I'd been waiting 3 weeks for finally showed up.  They got two in, and I bought both.  They took awhile for me to install since I hadn't installed a M.2 drive before, and until recently most motherboard BIOS didn't know what to do with them, however by the next day I had both up and running with Windows 10 (I was running 7 previously).  I was able to benchmark them at the advertised speeds (7x faster read than my previous SATA SSD and 4x faster write), which was great.  

The massive downer came when I found out Daz Studio doesn't utilize them nearly as much as I thought it would.  The hope was that I'd see a major improvement in the super slow open/save times for Daz 3D scenes.  Well, Windows 10 has a much better task manager and performance analyzer than 7, so it was pretty easy to see my error when instead of utilizing the drives the entire process was shown as being conducted on a single CPU thread.  The most we could figure is that it has to do with how Daz references its assets to build scenes, since even after decompressing the project files (which one would think is what the CPU would be used for in this situation) no improvement was visible.  Basically, it was the worst case scenario, and I was really pissed/disappointed about this for a full day due to how much the build was held up waiting for these.  It didn't help that I was using the newest version of Daz (4.9) and things were performing significantly worse due to the huge overhead they've forced on users in order to integrate their asset store directly into the program.

Things did get better however after that.  First I blew Daz 4.9 away after realizing it how much it degraded performance from 4.8.  Secondly, after a lot of troubleshooting we were able to get the processor to utilize its max turbo boost, meaning a roughly 1 GHz boost for single threaded apps.  Lastly, I've found that editing processes' priorities in Windows is much more effective with a processor that has a bunch of cores (due to the system being able to push background and system tasks onto non-utilized cores). The result is that now I get the huge rendering performance boost of the multicore processor and everything else now performs significantly better than on my old system.  So, aside from that huge screw up with the hard drives, I'm happy with the results and am really looking forward to getting my hands dirty with it.

I've spent the last few days adding fans, syncing the cloud drive, installing necessary programs, and transferring backup drives / files over from the old system (which is now officially decommissioned).  Now that it's all about done I plan on getting back onto more important stuff within the next day.  Here's a final pic of it in all its splendor! 

APL's Battle Overhaul Progress

AltairPL has continued his work on revamping Action processing this past week.  One major improvement he's made is that results of actions will now be processed in realtime.  Beforehand, variables dealing with stats and what not weren't updated until the results were *displayed*.  This is obviously a major flaw for an active time system and has created bugs in the past.  A future goal will be to fully separate action results from the displayed results (damage and state pop-ups) so that we can have the stability benefits as well as the aesthetics we want for a clean UI.  

A second major task he's accomplished is a prototype for the enemy targeting widget.  It's been planned for awhile to have the target of an enemy skill displayed above the enemy, thus allowing the player the chance to use strategy to defend against the attack as opposed to having to guess which character would be the victim.  We're still unsure of how we want to visually represent this, so the icons in the following example screens are definitely just placeholders.

Single Target Skill Example Screen 

Multi-Target Skill Example Screen 

TK's Map Design Progress

From TK, whom I've been severely neglecting the past couple of weeks due to the system build:

"So I've finished up the last of the Access Tunnels maps and I'm excited to explore more of the world!

First up, I've been putting together sketches and ideas for what the city should look like and function gameplay-wise. I'm collecting models that I can use to kitbash and also making a new set of textures and shaders to use. One thing I've been considering is changing perspective slightly at the edges of long maps, but I don't know if I'll end up using it. In my viewport snapshot  you can see the simple flare deformers on some of the buildings to shift their back ends in or out a little. I'm also revisiting how models can have skewed edges to pick up the light better. This is the blueish ones on the right, where the windows slant upwards, downwards or straight in. I'm a little undecided just yet, it's a weird step to take. But then again, I'm lighting 3d scenes for a pseudo pixel art style. :)

Also, here's my little moodboard of photos  and other concept art to inspire!"

New Guy's Audio/Video Progress

I have no idea what to call new guy yet.  Er, in association with this project that is.  Anyways, the guy is incredibly talented at pounding out quality audio with the quickness, and has taken the liberty to make a few demo tracks for the soundtrack.  I'm a couple days late on setting up his Google Drive access though, so I don't have them quite yet.  My plan however is to add a demo playlist to the soundtrack reward tier so that patrons can watch the music evolve as the project progresses.  In time, it may develop into a full on developer's kit for any patrons that want to use our custom sound effects / audio samples and what not for their own projects.

That's about it for now :o.  V0.06 progress coming soon!

- Eromancer