Mid-week progress update :D (Patreon)

Sup everyone, apologies for no weekend update! We have been a little quiet, but still as busy as ever working towards the next Fitting Room playtest.

The movable menu system is now completed, suggested by Przemek and DrathFox, and probably a few others. Should resolve a few people's gripes with wanting to see both the sliders / colors and their character in the same view, and people wanting to modify their character from a distance. Menus can be teleported or walked with, and will automatically orient themselves to face the player, so hopefully it's a great improvement over how it was before!

There's a brief clip of this at our Twitter.

We've almost completed the final 'system' that is planned for PlayTest #3, which is a hair selection menu. Some of you commented about UI buttons and stuff not being very 'VR', so we talked about ways we could make the hair system feel a bit more tactile than just floating glowing buttons. 

We wanted to stay away from having you pick up and place hair on your characters like how clothing system will work, because then it felt kinda like they were wearing a wig. We think we've come up with a pretty good middle-ground between the clothing system and the UI system in response to some of you guys' comments. Player will select hair components and styles from a look-book style magazine, where the book can be picked up and pages can be turned. We're planning to design the magazine as an authentic looking hairstyle catalog with pics and previews of the style type, letting the player pick from a combination of different bangs, details like ponytails and buns, and the overall style. There's a brief glimpse of this magazine in the clip linked above too, but the design isn't finalized just yet; will hopefully look a bunch nicer.

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On a complete tangent, we've spent a little time this week creating some more skies for Virtual Novel and improving our sky system a little bit to allow us to blend multiple skies together - this means that we can now do real time dynamic weather transitions and other fun stuff! 

We also did some neat stuff with integrating our clouds with UE4's atmosphere system a little better than how it was before. The result is real nice looking illumination of clouds as they block out the sun (as the header pic shows off) and it means our cloud system is now compatible with night-time lighting. Will hopefully have weather changing and, maybe even dusk / night time in one of the next play tests, I'm sure you guys are getting bored of Takayama's sunny mid-day spring weather like we are :D

We also will be adding a new graphics setting in one of the next couple builds - atmospheric god-rays. (But they are not cheap!) 

Will have a target date for next build in around a week or so, but I think our ballpark is week 3-4 of this month :>

Thanks everyone for your support, suggestions, and bug reports, 

Love,

Virtual Novel Development Team™