Development Update #85 (Patreon)

The name of the game is now polishing the characters. Still some bigger items on the list, but this is helping me get everything dialed in and finding the errors I've missed.

One big area of focus has been getting hair optimized. By far the biggest performance hit of my scenes in Unreal Engine is the converted groom hair. Just adding that cuts the FPS in half. If this was for a game in real time, I'd definitely be sticking with less realistic card-based hair. The physics simulations themselves for the hair have a minimal impact on performance. But 2+ million strands is a lot for even the most powerful systems. So this has led to me doing a lot of experimentation to get excellent quality, but the lowest performance impact. It is definitely an individual thing as each hairstyle has its own quirks. I have learned way more about hair and creation of 3D hair assets than I planned to.

Clothing has turned out both easier and more complicated than I thought. I am indebted to a couple of videos that went into detail on cloth settings in UE. Those videos saved me at least a couple of days of experimentation. However, Daz clothing has a big issue. It is very high poly, which means that the simulations in Unreal Engine don't perform very well with it. I can lower that poly count, but it is a challenge to do that without making everything look terrible. I'm still fine-tuning that process, but clothing with the lower poly count still looks great, and the simulations look incredible. It is nice to see a tunic lightly move at the bottom, and not worry about poke through from the character's skin.

Progress on this first scene for Chapter 11 is going well. A lot of tests, but each test gives good feedback for what to fix or improve. Good news is that each scene won't be like this. As with doing anything for the first time, it is slow going. Each time it gets a little quicker. I do love my ability to quickly iterate in Unreal Engine.

The overhaul of the music and sound effects is close to wrapping up. I'm getting all the lewd sound effects redone by a voice actor, and those should be ready sometime in June. All these changes will be incorporated into Volume 1 later this year (free update to those on Steam who have the game there). The changes I've already seen in the audio makes me wonder how I tolerated it before.

If you haven't taken a look at the development tracker lately, some new things are there, including a roadmap. That roadmap provides a look at some big improvements I have planned for the future. Most of that will come at the end of Volume 2 though, at the earliest.

I finished my weekend writing out a list of milestones I've reached, and it was a helpful reminder that, while I still have a ways to go with this transition, I've gotten quite a bit figured out now. Not bad considering everything on my list that I expected to be able to address after Chapter 11 ended up needing to be solved now. Not to mention all the "wonderful" new problems I've encountered with this transition. All this work in order to get realistic animations. May Goddess Anna make the jiggling breasts wonderful.