About the 0.4 update and a blog post about the infamous reins! (Patreon)

The newest update to the demo (with the new competition mode!) was planned to come out today, but will be delayed to come out on Wednesday the 23rd instead.

A bit of a backstory:

Since the release of the last demo version I've finally begun untangling one of the dumbest issues that Tales of Rein Ravine has had since very early development in 2020: the infamous rein problem. A lot of you will probably guess what I'm talking about, as it's become the most common request I get; please fix the reins from clipping through the neck!

Why are the reins like that? 💀 It has to do with the engine. The game engine I use (a free software called Unreal Engine) has awful pre-made assets for the kind of rope actor needed to create realistic reins with collision detection. The pre-built rope component is stuck in a permanent beta theta gamma stage, it has bugs from 5 years ago that the company has said they verbatim have no plans of fixing. The reins as you've seen them in the demo are actually phenomenal compared to what they used to be once. (If you want to see what I mean just watch my OLD TIKTOKS 😇). An additional issue when dealing with the rein physics and detailed collision is the potentially high rendering cost.

In spite the fact that Tales of Rein Ravine has been acclaimed the most realistic horse game in the world, after countless of failures I regrettably accepted my defeat; the reins were going to stay the way they are for now. It wasn't realistic to fix them by the time of the final demo release.

Except in the last 72 hours I very unexpectedly stumbled upon a solution!? After the 2 years of searching we are finally here.. 🤩 In the video you can see that with the new method practically all of the clipping is gone and the movement of the reins is a lot better overall. There are small problems still of course, for example if you look carefully the outer rein disappears when moving the camera from side to side, but these issues are all fixable.

So because of this change some things in the game are a mess now. The new rein method requires certain other things to be modified as well. I've come to the conclusion that it's best for me to delay the update by a couple of days, that way I won't have to revert any changes that I've already done.

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Another small thing regarding the future of Tales of Rein Ravine development.

Some of you may know that I live in Eastern Europe, and the situation isn't the best here at the moment. I am currently looking into relocating to a different country. My country isn't (at least not yet 🙄) in danger or war but I'd be lying to say that the situation wouldn't be stressful right now. I'm still positive that the final demo will be released until the end of the month, after that (closer to the summer) I might have to take a few breaks here and there as I'll be moving.