Weekly report (Patreon)

Good afternoon,

it's Friday again, so time to give you a short review of my past week.

Let's start with the most important question which is: When is the bonus scene coming out?
Answer: Maybe tonight, if not, then on Monday.
I've been working on that the whole week, but other than planned the images weren't completed on Monday evening but Wednesday night. By now I made 540+ images and a lot of them had to be edited beacause of clipping or other problems.
The implementation of them took me almost the entire Thursday. And since the early morning today I'm working on the actual dialogue and events for the scene.
So to sum it up: If I can get all the writing done until midnight together with some testing, then I will release it today, if it needs a bit more polish then on Monday.

Aside working on the bonus scene I've also been working on the performance of the game. Originally I wanted to work on this during the rework update, but I had to think about it a lot while I was on vacation and since I came up with a rather easy solution for the problem I wanted to get this in now and not wait until the rework update.
The things that cause the performance problems are 3 things: 1 is the light effects, 2 is the audio that gets emitted from things like rivers/fires/etc, 3 is a parallel event that checks if the players food/energy drops because too much time has passed or because he moved around.
1-2 is something that can already be turned off by using the option menu.
However 3 is what causes from my point of view the biggest problem. I tried to tune it down in the past, but the solutions for it weren't really satisfying. All the more I'm happy with my new solution which now removes the parallel process from running all the time and instead running a single process every full hour. This should significantly improve the performance of the game, especially on older systems.
Of course that means that hunger/energy isn't checked every second you move around, but that was a bit over the top anyway.
While it sounds like this is something I should have come up with earlier, it wasn't only the hunger system that is bound to this. There are also other events that rely on this process like notifications for Emily/Frisha and daily resets for quests and other events (Emily's kidnapp event for example).
So the problem of how if not parallel checking on the conditions was what prevented me from making this change earlier. So with the way it's now done I hope all the other events work out as before, but that will require some more testing.

Ok enough writing, I guess that is all there is to say for now. I'll now get back to work!

I wish you all a nice weekend!