Progress update- Animation code results (Patreon)

Last week I wasn't sure if I could finish the animation update, and was considering scrapping the whole idea to avoid delays. Luckily it ended up going pretty well! I gave myself a couple days to assess whether it was worth continuing, and ended up fixing the biggest problems.

This major animation update completely changes how textures are packed, accessed, and rendered at the lowest levels of the code. Last week, after implementing the biggest changes, I was looking at this very sad Twilight-

Which made me think maybe this isn't going to work. Besides the obvious problem, the colors are actually subtly broken here, which is pretty important.

It was difficult, and my programming skills are quite weak when it comes to core rendering and the maths involved. But after some intense learning, I was able to unfold our friend into this lovely shape-

Success! ...mostly. This is better than it looks. 

The meshes are the pieces of her body rendering correctly. Those are complex pieces with dozens of vertices defining their shape so they know how to bend and jiggle. An image is then drawn into that shape, creating what you see. The regions are the pieces that are rotated wrongly still. Those only have four vertices- the four corners of the image.

So the broken part is the much easier part to fix, thankfully. I know the gist of what to do already but wasn't able to complete it before this post. 

Oh, and the colors are fixed!

That's gonna be all for now. I've got lots to do! Once the rendering is complete, and a bit of testing, there are some very useful new animation features to make use of. 

To my supporters, thank you so much! The progress lately has been so much steadier after addressing the burnout. There's plenty left to do but the list gets reliably smaller every day now. It's thanks to the amazing community that I've been able to reach this stability and confidence. <3