News - some good, some bad (Patreon)

So Unity just released version 5.4 of their game engine (that we're using). Since this release brings a whole range of improvements, we decided to upgrade our project to it right away. One of the improvements is the potential support for Vive (Steam VR) devices. We say potential, because we can't promise Yiffalicous will actually work with this, since we don't have a Vive device ourselves and can't try it out. But we'd say the chances are better now than the last time we did a blind build towards VR, because the APIs are supposed to be generic and we know it works with the Oculus.

To see the whole range of improvements in Unity 5.4, you can visit this link:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/07/28/unity-5-4-is-out-heres-whats-in-it/

A cool thing about Unity 5.4 is their support for single pass rendering. What this means is that if you have a graphics card that supports it (Geforce pascal architecture), you'll see a significant performance boost in VR, since both left and right eye render in parallel rather than sequentially. We’re not sure if we’ll support this feature in Yiffalicous 0.6.0 though, since we noticed it doesn’t play well with screen space effects. We’ll have to do some more experimentation, and might end up disabling it for this release of Yiffalicious to try again later when we have more time.

Unfortunately... this upgrade has pushed things a little bit. Some things broke in the upgrade, and we need to fix them. Also, unfortunately we've had to push the chains that we showed previously to the next release, due to lack of time. We just want to get 0.6.0 out as soon as possible, so we're focusing on the major stuff.

The good news is that Dragoness is basically fully implemented from a technical point (just adding skins and such left), and the new environment has been successfully merged with our project. There are plenty of BDSM props that will make it into 0.6.0.

Now it's just a matter of fixing issues and wrapping everything up, in addition to testing. ETA is next week.

While it's unfortunate that things are pushed a little bit, we hope that the improvements coming with 5.4 and the support for Vive (hopefully) is worth it.

tl;dr:

Upgraded engine to newer version. Release has been pushed, but hopefully things will be better with the engine upgrade.