Hi everybody,

so.. the few days delay became two weeks in a flash... Turns out I underestimated the number of furniture needing texture processing to upgrade them to HDRP.

Most of them came with a simple color texture + a normal texture (to simulate the bumps). However, Unity HDRP needs 3 additional textures to render things nicely: metallic, smoothness and ambient occlusion. There are tools to handle those more or less automatically based on the color and normal map but still require lots of manual input. Plus I had to double check the result in game. Overall, there's not much difference from far away and the upgrade is more in the details. I still need to adjust the UV scale of various textures to make locations and furniture look right which also adds more time than planned.

Another issue which this update increased was the incorrect indoor lighting, with some part of the models being way to dark, like this:

 If you look at the MC skin, you'll notice it's way darker than its clothes (and it's not the skin color). This is due to Daz models not being made for games, so a crucial texture, which is the ambient occlusion map, which is used to determine how the models will be lit by indirect lighting, is missing. I generated one myself from the existing textures but the result is still too dark and will need some more tweaking so that models are lit properly and relative to the time of day. You also might have noticed how the sky reflects on the floor which is not how it should behave normally and will need some more looking into...

On the plus side, I made a new best friend in the form of ChatGPT which helped me understand a lot faster many aspects of all the problems I encountered in the past few months and I feel like I'll be able to debug stuff much faster than before. I'm quite amazed by how powerful this tool is. Unity having hundreds of components each with hundreds of parameters, I'm afraid understanding all of them is a long term investment but with AI helps, each problem, if explained properly, gets a proper analysis and solution. Most of the time, several possible causes with several solutions to test out but the more you explain it what you tried and what the result was, the more it pinpoints the issue and gives the adequate solution. This is simply magical and so much faster than looking online through forum or post or even asking on Discord... It also helped me figured out my shadow issues in my previous post.

This issue also occurred inside locations with shadows making no sense and flickering non stop... Turns out it was a really basic setting on the camera called Far Clipping Plane which I thought at first was simply used to tell the camera how far you wanted the camera to render... which is true but not only that, it's also used in shadow calculations, so the higher the number, the less accurate your shadows will be. Since Glassix 2 has a city map using real life measurements and I wanted to render the pink fog fully, I put a huge number in it and it worked more or less fine on the city map but inside location or editors where the camera is much closer to the models, that basically messed the whole shadow calculations. So switching the value depending on the scene and camera distance fixed the issue. I had spent a few hours before on this, looking online and trying various options in the lights, shadows, models and so on... And I got the answer from the AI in 2 minutes after explaining the problem... I should have started using it earlier...

So anyway, long story short, I'm afraid the current update still need more tweaking before I feel like it's in a presentable state. I'd say once more a few more days but unfortunately, I'm currently quite swamped with a big and important project for my main web dev work and have not as much time as I'd want to complete the update so I'll have to push this update to the end of the month once more :/

All this complexity with Glassix 2 loading stuff dynamically really slows down the development time compared to other games such as Lust Complex or Cumshot Simulator where I can handle the content myself. Right now, I'll focus on finally giving proper visual lighting quality to Glassix 2 and after that, I was thinking supporters might be more interested in me working on a game which could give fun gameplay faster than Glassix 2 which will need much more work before it can truly live up to its predecessor. So I'm planning to release a poll once Glassix 2 v0.19 so you can decide yourself.

I apologize again for all those delays, this update took more work than planned but I'm also taking this opportunity to look into the core visual issues of the game and hopefully will deliver something more pleasing to the eyes. With the help of my new friend, I think I should be able to fix issues much faster.

Sorry again about that and thank you for your patience, and understanding!

Hey guys,

Just a quick notice I'll be a bit late with Glassix 0.19, a few more days I think.

I'm still in the process of updating the textures and have been delayed quite a bit because the built-in shader from Unity which I used for Cumshot Simulator actually didn't fit correctly with Glassix 2 modding feature as it did not allow me to tile alpha layers separately, meaning I had to recreate a similar shader which is a mix of the old one and the built-in, with better performance and similar result. Though I won't be able to get the same graphic results in the end since I had to repack textures to save memory and increase performances. Here are a few preview of the result, I'll let you guess which side is before/after. I've also disabled shadows which were quite quirky in the editors.

 

I've also optimized and fixed some of my code which previously failed to compress textures properly (though it does impact quality quite a bit, I might add an option to toggle compression so players can choose either quality or performance for this part) and I've also reduced the number of duplicated materials so the game should run better on low specs in the future even more when more content it added in the future.

With development being so slow due to how Glassix 2 is more complex than the usual H game, maybe you guys would be more interested in temporarily changing the main game for this campaign, Vampire Revenge could be a nice change with content which somewhat match Glassix themes, like mind control and corruption with added strategy and battle gameplay added, and since it would be static content, I could deliver more gameplay content faster than what I could with Glassix 2 so I'll release a poll asap to see if you might be interested in such a change.

Sorry again for this delay and thank you for your patience and understanding. Drop me a message if you want a refund as always!

Have a nice day!

Hi guys,

Changelog:

Just a small patch to fix minor issues and add some options to improve performances on lower specs if needed. Also, the download post has been moved to private now and can be accessed with a Patron tier, giving access to all completed games.

Enjoy!

Hi everybody!

I wanted to keep you updated on what the heck I've been doing lately since I had some hesitations about where I should head to with my campaign.

With Cumshot Simulator release last month which showcased better graphics, there was a lot of work to do to implement that in Glassix 2 and I'm still not done yet since I need to process lots of textures and update some code to make it work with characters, outfits, buildings, locations and furniture.

Here is a sample of the results so far:

First reaction would be, is there any difference? Overall, they are similar, eyebrows are a bit smoother, skin a bit darker and feels less plastic maybe. But the actual upgrade is how the skin shines depending on camera angle, so here is another shot.

This one should better show how the skin feels more real life and reacts dynamically with surrounding lighting depending on camera angle. This upgrade will impact not only skins but outfits, buildings, locations and furniture. Once I'm done updating and generating the existing textures, the game should visually get prettier.

The process will take more time and I've also been delayed by some ideas I had on where to go with my campaign and I've been testing some stuff around. I'll try to sum up my way of thinking.

I enjoy working on Glassix 2 but as many of you have stated or thought, it's more of a tech demo at the moment. It's going slow, the project is ambitious, I want stuff in game to be fully customizable and moddable by the players, most of the game content is loaded from external files so that long term, it'll be super easy to add more models to the game. I want to add editors for all game aspect so players can create their own characters, cities, rooms, furniture and so on... On top of that, I do have lots of experience with coding but game development still requires lots of new aspects to master like shaders or lighting and I did have a lot of update purely optimizing stuff and not adding much content. There is still a ton of stuff to work on to even start making Glassix 2 feel like a basic sandbox game to play.

Working on Cumshot Simulator was mainly to test more stuff but also have a proper basic product to showcase. Completing it, even if it has no gameplay, does feel more rewarding than releasing optimization patches for Glassix 2 so I was thinking if it might be an idea to work upon. If you've followed me for a long time, you might now before working on Glassix 2, I had ideas for 2 other games which would also be 3D using the same assets. Vampire Revenge Rebirth and Lust City (names might change) and since Glassix 2 might take much more time to have something properly playable, it might interest patrons to instead switch to a less complex game like one of the two mentioned. So I started to check what I'd need for Vampire Revenge which would be in a fantasy settings and would require such races and outfits. I already owned lots of assets from Daz from a few years back which was an opportunity to test out and I've imported one such sorceress dress to see how it'd go. Here is a preview.

 But as always, it doesn't work like it should, this outfits has lots of extra bones which mess up the animations and would require lots of extra work to make it work so I didn't push further. Instead, I focused on another aspect which would be required which would be fantasy races. Unlike Glassix 2 which has full facial customization, I wanted to use Daz face presets which is instead 1 morph handling the whole face at once, like this.

The idea would be to select a few fantasy races which will be used in Vampire Revenge Rebirth, select a few face presets for each races so they do feel a bit different from each other and of course, adjust their size, skin color, ear morph... To keep it simple, it would be 3 different sizes, tall, average, small. Some face presets are closer to toons but could work for small races like gnome/hobbit/goblin and whatnot. 

So I've been playing a few days with all that, results are quite nice but it would not be as fast as I thought it would be due to the outfits issues so I put that on stand by again since I've side tracked on this for more time than planned.

Now my goal for the end of this month is to finish the textures/shaders updates for Glassix 2, possibly add more furniture to existing locations if times permit, and after that, I'm not too sure, which is why I'm going to release a poll to let you decide what I should do, either keep working on Glassix 2 or switch to a smaller scale project so you get some with proper gameplay faster.

That's about it for this news! Let me know what you think about all that, feedback is always welcomed.

Thanks for your time and support!

Hey guys,

Just a small fix for the debug message which keeps popping after class. I though I had fixed it in last patch but messed up so here is the actual fix attached to this post. Considering the small fix I didn't make it a new patch version so game stays at 1.0.4. 

Full versions of the game have already been updated with the fix. Android users will have to download the full APK again though.

Thanks for your support!

Hi guys,

Some more bug fixes here, thanks again for the feedback!

Enjoy!