Smarten up [Build 0.4.9] (Patreon)

Hey crew.

Maintaining a relatively rapid pace of updates for the moment. This isn't exactly the CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT update I promised last time, but it does have some CONTENT.

Physics

The primary reason for this is that I was eager to get out an update that includes some performance improvements I've made recently. Some very patient patrons with shitbox computers have found the game unplayable for a while now due terrifying physics glitches. These were caused by the game's physics being tied to the framerate, and that framerate dropping below a certain level that caused the simulation to freak out.

As far as I can tell, this update fixes any whacko physics errors and so the game should be playable at lower framerates. The update itself probably won't improve performance very much, but it will turn an unplayable experience into a merely sub-par experience.

Hand Physics

More specifically, hand physics should be less janky now and react better to changes in body size.

Performance

For the first time in a long while, I started testing some development builds on my laptop, which doesn't have a dedicated GPU. What I discovered is that environment rendering is by far the most significant bottleneck on performance in this case.

I am 90% sure that I'm not violating any best practises when it comes to environment rendering in Unreal Engine, and that UE4 is simply not designed to run on hardware that is, how you say, dogshit. That being said though, there are major opportunities for optimization of environments and this is something I will be looking into.

In the meantime, I added the non-Euclidean pink void from the designer menu as an environment option for those of you suffering from lack of GPU horsepower, which significantly speeds things up.

Haruka

A while ago I discussed how I would like to approach adding new customization options to the game, and I decided that framing groups of items into the context of a "character" would probably lend some structure to the process.

Well here's the first one! I thought some OL items would be a nice addition and would probably offer some good mix 'n' match-ability. This update includes 4 new clothing items (dress shirt, waistcoat, pencil skirt, cravat).

I originally thought it would be a nice idea to package the game with presets ready made for these new characters, but it turns out that's quite a technically difficult thing to do considering how UE4 handles saved content. I think I will pursue this option going forward, but for now you'll have to just put the clothing pieces together yourself.

Contextual Morphs

Speaking of putting clothes together...

A dress shirt worn on its own and tucked into a skirt are two very different things. For this reason, I needed to extend the definition of clothing items in the game to handle contextual information about what other items are active at the same time, and react accordingly. Defining interactions between all the clothing items will likely be pretty labor-intensive as their numbers increase, but I feel that this is worth it for the flexibility it brings. I will also need to go back and add these contextual morphs to some of the older items in the game.

External Addon Updates

I've introduced a couple of new capabilities to increase the flexibility of importing external addon models into the game. Addons can now specify a mask texture to hide parts of HD-chan's geometry, and can also hide parts of HD-chan's hair while active, which is useful for things like helmets:

(everyone stopped talking about Atomic Heart before I could use this addon to shill the game)

More detail can be found in the guide.

Resolution Settings

I said last time that resolution settings were fixed when they just absolutely weren't. Now maybe they are?

State of Play

Thanks to the new demo build, we've seen a significant uptick in the rate the game has been acquiring new Patrons. A warm welcome to any of you reading one of my incomprehensible update posts for the first time.

On itch.io, the game has recently enjoyed a near-doubling of daily pageviews, and a near-tripling of daily downloads, which by my calculation means that the game is roughly 150% as good as it used to be.

I am still a long way off being able to live off my income from the game and treat its development as my full-time job, but that dream now feels a tiny bit closer to reality...