Fitting Room Enviro Progress #2 (Patreon)

Time to share our progress on Fitting Room, along with some more info on features which patrons will get to check out in person very soon :)

One of our Patrons, Adam, made a feature request that we really loved the sound of - the ability to add in photos from your harddrive to use as references for your character creations. We're hoping it becomes possible for players to create homages to anime characters they love, or at least have the ability to style some elements of their character after existing characters, so having in-game references of 2Ds for style and color palette inspiration should help a bunch with that!

Currently, you can place up to 6 .jpg images into a folder in the game's directory, and they will show up as photographs on Fitting Room's pinboard.  You can take photos off of the board and place them anywhere in the scene.

Another of our planned features for Fitting Room is custom clothing racks, which can be moved around the scene for easy access.  These racks will serve as a place to store edited garments, if players find a color combination that they like the style of. Replacing a piece of clothing on the NPC with a new garment will send the replaced item to the custom rack as a sort of 'undo' feature. If players find that they preferred the look of the old garment, they don't have to find it in the main clothing unit and recreate its colors again; they can just grab it from the custom rack. 

The Fitting Room environment will also feature a few customization options, which we'll get a bit more into next week once they're finalized. It will be possible for players to select a few style options for the room to allow them to have a little bit of control over the room's aesthetic.  

We don't have a solid date, but we're hoping to get out the first test build of Fitting Room to Patrons early next month! We'll keep you guys updated.

In other news, we've upgraded Virtual Novel to the latest version of UnrealEngine4, and we've converted the project to UE4's forward renderer. This means that MSAA is finally possible (currently at the cost of toon-outlines, but we're working on a solution) and the IQ gains are absolutely stunning! MSAA is very expensive compared to FXAA, and quite expensive compared to TAA, so we've left all the previous graphics options in so players with weaker cards shouldn't be affected by this change. Players have the option of 2XMSAA and 4XMSAA.

Look out for one more post this month where we'll aim to have a date for patrons for the first demo of Fitting Room, and where we'll show off some of the enviro customization options :)

Love,

Virtual Novel dev team