Hi guys!

Just a heads up I'll be a bit late to deliver Glassix 2 next version this time around. It's quite due to procrastinating and moving my ass at the last moment this month (as always :x) as well as being side tracked by ideas for the game I wanted to implement unexpectedly.

Regarding the procrastination problem, the lame excuse I have to use is being a bit blank headed when needing to write the actual text lines of the scenario. I know where I want the scenario to go, I know how to split it in smaller events but when it's time to write those events text, I have to confess my mind struggles a bit, being more of a dev guy. It was easier with Glassix 1 when I started back in 2016 being young and horny (plus later on, 90% or more of the content was written by CarpeNoctem allowing me to work on the code instead) but being older and wiser (Not sure about the last one though lol), it's harder for Glassix 2, and being in the early stage of development and 3D, receiving external help is not possible currently. There's also the fact my situation vastly changed during those 8 years, starting back in 2016 where I was single and living in a small apartment while being married now with two kids and a loan to pay back...

Anyway, I'll get there in any case, just more slowly. I'm also planning to add a new restaurant building for v0.12 and setting up all the models and textures are bit more time consuming than planned (I want to have a staff welcome party at the restaurant for v0.12) which is another reason for the delay :x

Meanwhile, due to my dev mind, I kinda got more interested in adding breasts physics to the game which is now working quite nicely in the game and I've prepared the video below for your to see. I'm planning to add some manual hand grabbing there too as well as some butt action if possible... We'll see.

I apologize for this delay once more. Campaign support has been falling (due to my own laziness and the change of style with Glassix 2, this is understandable) which also forced me to find more work elsewhere reducing my available time on Glassix 2 even more. This situation might keep occurring for the next few months until Glassix 2 is more fleshed out so the current next versions might lack in content. You might want to think about this and decide if it's still worth supporting or not until then. Support is always welcomed and needed but I am myself aware the current monthly state of the game might not really be worth that much money yet (Though you do get my other games in the deal but that would only require a one time donation for access).

I'm aware this post is kinda like shooting myself in the foot but I prefer to be honest with you all. Actually, campaign support dropping is a mix of dread and relief for me. On one side, I lose money which I need to live, obviously. The other aspect of this also feels like I have betrayed your trust by not delivering good enough content each month which I can only apologize for. However on the other relief aspect, I do feel less pressure to deliver large amount of content for the month (not that I plan to deliver garbage content just for the sake of the money but more about going at my own pace, which was one of the main reason I started a Patreon campaign, being free to work whenever I want, a feeling which somewhat disappeared, replaced by a more classic employment schedule with stuff to deliver on the clock). I'm also thinking about diversifying and work on some normal game project on the side (currently am actually) since working on porn game is nice and fun but hard to place in a family discussion lol. Having a normal game to be proud of would be a relief too. I actually do already have 2 normal 2D games out there but kinda low quality, I'd like something I can show off now that I am more familiar with 3D an Unity. I might advertise it here later here too and offer some free keys if it ever gets released on Steam to old time patrons as an extra thank you. Not sure if it's wise or nice to do it this way but hey, I'll do it my way anyway.

Ok, I'll stop the self introspection post here but at least, you know what's in my head at this time. I'm NOT planning to drop Glassix 2 at all, I still plan to make it the best adult 3D simulation game out there (not in term of graphics though, but gameplay, yes!). It'll take time but I'll get there, though monthly content might not have as much as before I'm afraid. I'll have to update my front page campaign to reflect that.

I thank you all for your patience and support and apologize again for these changes. I'm open to refund for any patrons feeling cheated as always, just drop me a message. My aim is and has never been to take free money from my patrons only adequate exchange.

I wish you all a nice day or night!

Hi everybody!

I'll have to apologize for the lack of news since last month, even skipping an update last month without explanation.

To be honest, last month was a case of... laziness with the holidays period being busy with family, and procrastination thinking about all the stuff I want to add in Glassix 2 and feeling a bit overwhelmed not sure how to go about it... This is something I'm really not proud of and I can only apologize for that. Please send me a message if you wish to be refunded for this mess :x

I wanted to post about it sooner but I then caught Covid early January then gave it to my whole family one by one and the last weeks have been a struggle between lying in bed with no strength and going to the hospital to get medicine with not much time, energy or willpower to do anything else. It finally got better but then I had to catch up my web dev work which had piled up too and I'm slowly getting back on track, and somewhat eager to get back to Glassix 2 this time.

Regarding the state of Glassix 2, I'm afraid it'll keep being mainly some feature expansions in the near future which might not interest lots of people. Coming at the end of the month, Glassix 2 v0.10 will introduce basic money feature with income from salary and ownership of building and expenses from rent. My intention with Glassix 2 is to make money more interesting than in Glassix 1 with more stuff to use it for such as buying buildings, to get rent from them, a new source of income, or furniture, which will allow you to modify existing rooms and create your own sex dungeon once I add more assets to the game and the adequate sex animations, or of course outfits, which this time will be fully customizable for any characters. We'll get back some nice money features from Glassix 1 too such as pimping your girls (or not if you don't want to share them :D or maybe just the ugly ones lol) or asking people for money too though this time, each citizen will have its own pool of money increasing or decreasing depending on their jobs and possessions. 

All this might take some time to implement and balance, I'll try to add a mix of sex content in it too since only features might get boring but overall, Glassix 2 will have much less new sex content each month compared to other H games around. My aim is and has always been to create an entertaining proper H simulation game where players can really feel in control of the game and change it based on their taste and such features can take time to implement. I wanted to be transparent about it so you guys don't feel let down with the next releases which will focus on that.

I'd also like to comment about the graphics in game where I've had some negative feedback about characters being ugly. On this part, I'd say this is a matter of personal taste. Characters can be quite ugly in Glassix 2 with the editor and the random generator but we can also get some hot ones, though it takes some work, or luck with random gen, to get them but I did see some nice ones randomly generated. I've worked on textures and shaders too to try to make them as pretty as I can but being a vast topic by itself, I'm afraid my result won't match a professional or a team with a dedicated designer so I won't be able to improve it much by myself. I've also implemented a template feature to semi randomize characters based on a template with predetermined ranges of variation and I'll need to add more templates to get more variety in citizens designs. But overall, what we have right now will be close to the final result I expect. Another aspect I wanted to be transparent about.

That's about it for this late news. I apologize again for my laziness last month and lack of earlier news, I'll do my best to make up for it.

Thanks for your understanding and happy new year a bit late too ;)

Hi everybody,

Just a heads up I'm still working on a fix for Glassix 2 new version which currently crashes randomly when loading the city or a room. (I made a mistake in previous post, next version will be v0.8, not v0.9...)

Took me some time to figure out but this is due to a compatibility problem with a plugin I use and Unity latest version. This plugin was supposed to make modding easy. Just drop your 3D models of rooms, buildings or furniture in a mod folder and it'll be available in the game. Easy peasy. Unfortunately, it appears the creator of the plugin went MIA and I won't be able to get an update for this module meaning I had to find an alternative which I found among Unity native functionalities but will make adding models much more complicated in the future. 

In the end, I'm in the process of adapting my code to this forced change which will still take a few days but will fix the issue. I'll also try to roll out the Free Mode update at the same time while I'm at it so that the v0.8 content is not only some lame bug fix and optimization stuff.

I've also tinkered with my hair shaders trying to figure out why it sucks indoor (dark hair appearing super bright and such) or feel so plain and figured I was missing some important occlusion and specular maps. I've also applied some dithering, a method to fake hair transparency and avoid transparency issues when using default transparent materials in the game. This should make hair look better though it'll take some time to upgrade male hair as well as skin, outfits, furniture and rooms. But this should upgrade Glassix 2 visual quality up a notch once completed. I'll focus on the bug fix and Free mode only for v0.8, this part will come in another update, only female hair will be updated as a preview in next version.

Sorry about the delay again. Hopefully sticking with native Unity features will prevent such set backs in the future. 

Thanks for your patience and support!

Hi everybody,

I'll have to apologize for the lack of news this past month. I've been quite swamped with work on Glassix 2 with a huge unplanned texture and shader update since the game was reaching some critical bottleneck on the GPU side.

I'm about to get into some boring tech details here so you can skip to the end of the block if you're not that interested and I'll give a short TLDR.

<Details ON>

Glassix 2 is using Daz models for characters, outfits and hair with their 4k textures. In High Quality settings, those textures stay in 4k, halved to 2K in Medium Quality and quartered to 1K in Low Quality.

Textures are images, either JPG and PNG, which are compressed data, with JPG usually smaller than PNG but with quality loss. When those images go into GPU they are uncompressed and roughly take the same space whatever their compressed sized was. A 4K texture takes a bit more than 20Mo in GPU when you add mipmaps (Mipmaps are simply the same texture scaled down and used when zoomed out. There can be several levels 4K => 2K => 1K => 512... And so further the camera is, the lower the quality of the texture is used to reduce GPU usage since the texture won't need that much details from a distance). 

That's for the texture side. Now for Glassix 2 feature side, since I wanted to make the game as easily moddable as possible, I created a shader where you could stack texture on top of each other to add details, tattoos, holes and so on, up to 4 additional layers of such textures. If you make the basic math, when you are using 5 4K textures for one material (the "skin" of the model), that's already more than 100Mo used. For one material... Note that 5 layers used won't happen that often but it's a possibility. And anyway, one model can be composed of several materials (For example for outfits, you could have one material for the chest part and one material for the sleeves, allowing you to color them differently or have different transparency/metallic/shininess... And on top of that, you have to consider the use of normal maps, which are special images giving depth to the base texture. Each material would require such a normal map if you don't want the texture to be flat in game. You can see where I'm going here and why Glassix 2 is so GPU hungry so far.

One Glassix 2 character is currently made of 6 main parts having their own material: Torso, Arms, Legs, Genitalia, Face, Mouth. That's one base texture + one normal map for each, at 4K, so 2*6*20Mo = 240Mo in GPU per naked character. Add hair which usually have 3 materials: 2*3*20 = 120Mo. Then add an outfit composed of a shirt, pants and shoes with on 1 material each (rounded down): 2*3*20 = 120Mo. So one character is currently more than 480Mo in GPU. On the plus side, textures only need to be loaded once and can then be shared across multiple characters. But this means the more hair and outfits I'd add in the game, the heavier the load would be on the GPU.

I never really bothered with this math or the details so far thinking it wasn't that big of a deal with the Quality settings allowing you to lower the textures anyway but after learning about it and reflecting on it, Glassix 2 is simply not a project which can work in 4K, there is simply too much to load and it'll only keep on increasing even more if I don't work on it right away.

So the easiest solution was obviously to lower the maximum texture size to 2K instead of 4K which reduces the size by 4 (since you reduce BOTH width and height), down to ~5Mo rounded down. And the difference in quality is barely visible, only by zooming to the max would it be noticeable so the gain overweight the loss quite nicely. But I wouldn't have be delayed that much if I had stopped to this optimization. Instead, I decided to push it further since I really wanted to the game to have as minimal loading times as possible while keeping quality. 

So the other famous technique to optimize texture is called channel packing. An image is simply the layering of 3 different grayscale channels: red, green, blue (and possible 4th alpha channel in PNG for transparency, JPG don't have). This means that as long as you have grayscale data, you can pack this data into 1 channel and stack up to 4 different data in each channel. Since my hair and outfit textures are actually grayscale which I color directly in game, it means I could put 4 different hair or outfit textures into 1 texture, potentially reducing the number of required texture by 4. However, I also need to pack the normal maps with their respective grayscale texture. Normal maps images are simply 3 layers of data to indicate the (x,y,z) component of the normal (which is basically used to tell the game how the light will bounce on the pixel of the texture to give it more depth). Those 3 layers are stored in the red/green/blue channels and there is a simple formula which actually allows to get the z component of the normal based on the x and y, meaning you can actually lose the blue layer of the map.

So in the end, I went ahead and packed the grayscale + normal x + normal y + potential alpha into one texture which roughly divides the number of required texture by 2 in Glassix 2. Sometimes, the models used the same grayscale and normal for several materials with just a different alpha textures. When that happened, I could pack 4 different alphas into one texture too reducing the count by 4.

Quite a complex optimization and the complexity does not stop here... Because there is a property about images I was not aware of which is the colorspace and is crucial in Unity. To get to the point, In Unity, the base color textures are actually using sRGB colorspace (called gamma colorspace in Unity) while normal maps use RGB colorspace (called linear colorspace in Unity) and when I merged my textures together, I ended up mixing colorspaces which gave horrible results and it took even more time to understand and adapt the shader to handle the packed textures.

Anyway, the shader still needs optimization but it should be ready enough for v0.7 and I'll try to improve it at a later date. The most urgent goal was mainly to reduce GPU usage which has been achieved with adequate results. And while I was at it, I also improved the hair shader to get more details in hair and handle transparency. There's still some issue handling transparency but overall, it should be a step in the right direction.

<Details OFF>

--- TLDR ---

Problem:

Glassix 2 GPU usage is too high due to high number and high size textures. Adding more models (hair/outfit/buildings/locations/furniture) would just lead to a full crash if not fixed early.

Solution:

If you're good at math, that's 4 (a 2K texture is a quarter the size of a 4K texture) * 2 (Texture amount reduced by 2) = 8 reduction in GPU usage. Hopefully that will be a visible result in loading times on low end specs. I'll await feedback.

This optimization took me this whole last month and I've only been able to start working on the content you voted for since the end of the last week... As a reminder, the voted content for v0.7 was more hair/outfits, free mode and more daily life animations. I've just started working on the more hair/outfits part and came up another idea. 

I always wanted to add some kind of bonus for patrons who are supporting me and since I am working on additional 3D models, I thought I could use the same system as many other games: bonus hair/outfits for paying patrons. It's purely cosmetic and in low numbers so it's shouldn't be too much of an annoyance, there will still be much more free hair/outfits added to the game, I just wanted a little something for patrons.

So far, I've been able to add 12 new hair styles, 6 for men, 6 for females and I'll put 3 of each in patrons-only bundles. There's also one new beard. In total, that'll be 30 hair styles (15 male, 15 female) in v0.7 with 2 beards. Some of them also have more than 1 color option. Here is the preview of  the new content:

So Followers, Fans and Leader tiers will have extra hair content, one male, one female. I'll try to do the same with outfits, for Supporters, Patrons and VIP tiers so a total of 6 new outfits plus some free outfits.

I should be able to finish this in one or two days, then I'll move on to the new daily animations and release v0.7 with just this. Free mode will have to wait until v0.8 since it's also quite a big development. Moreover, with summer coming, I'll be on family vacation in France after 3 years of Covid restrictions so I won't have much time to work on Glassix 2 I'm afraid. This pushes v0.8 to around mid August :x

Sorry again for not being able to add more content faster to the game. Glassix 2 is quite an ambitious project and I'm mainly focusing on stability and optimization at the moment because it's easier to do it now than later. But that's only to deliver a good quality game, I hope you can understand that. In no way am I trying to stretch my work just for easy money. However I do also understand that not having actual content to play really hurts the idea of support so I'll resume focusing on content now that the game is more optimized.

I'd like to thank all the current patrons who still have faith in me and this project and will do my best to deliver what I've been advertising so far asap even though I'll be a little late this month, sorry again :x

Have a nice day!

Hi guys,

I'm afraid I'll have to delay the new version by a few days due to family life business Nothing serious, just my mother in law not being available as much as before to take care of our 10 months old baby now and we are too poor to afford a real nanny so I'm handling that when my wife is at work. And boy! Are babies needy lol.

Anyway, I'm just missing the animations part so I'll try to finish that asap. Hopefully one or two days of delay only.

Meanwhile, I can show you what's already ready.

Let's start with the spells.

Here we have the slave mode. Unlike Glassix, you don't need to cast Doll mode then Slave mode. Each spell now has its own icon to cast but cancel each other. Since the game doesn't offer much (or any at all so far :x) content, the only difference so far will be that girls will always accept sex in this mode, same as doll mode, but show happiness. I went with a pink heart pupil effect to differentiate here. In the future, I might add an editor to change spell effects so players can change this effect to something more to their liking if they want.

Here is the Invisibility spell. Again due to lack of content, nothing to do yet. I'd like to add a new "Groping" interaction which would have different results depending on relation, obedience, lust or active spells but just that would take more time, I'll see if I can add it for 0.6. I'll also add a new option in future polls to vote for new daily life interactions so that I can better focus on that aspect which will be important in the future.

Then we have the X-Ray spell which behaves a bit differently from Glassix. Now it will simply hide specific layers of cloth. I added two new actions, one to X-Ray male only and the other to X-Ray female only (I guessed some players would prefer not seeing balls jingling all the time ☺) and I also separated each of them in 3 levels: first level hides overwear (top + bottom + shoes), second level hides underwear (underwear + leggings + bra (no bra in game yet but maybe in the future, could be a pain in the ass to add though))

While some spells are active, I've also added some related icons in the top left corner so players can see which spells are currently active. They stay active even when moving locations obviously.

Next are new outfits. I'm afraid nothing too sexy yet. I've simply added a more classic secretary outfit (the one in the pictures above) which was needed to the scenario as well as a more classic dean outfit.

Finally, sex animations. I'm currently working on a standing cunnilingus one. Tricky part is to automatically adjust head/pussy positions based on each character height, still working on that. On the good side, the tongue is fully animated and I'll also try to match the pussy movement to increase quality. The tongue being animatable will lead to some nice addition in the future such as the famous ahegeo which no real girls ever do in real life but who cares :D

That's about it for this post. I apologize for the delay and will try to keep at as short as possible. Note that my campaign has been changed to full month pledge a few months back. Meaning that you are not automatically charged on the 1 of each month (even if you had pledged and already paid 2 days before). Now you are charged 1 month after your initial pledge as it should.

Thanks for your patience and support!

Have a nice day or evening or night!

Hi everybody!

I've been quiet the last few weeks due to flu season and my whole family catching it one after another, with nights getting shorter with frequent awakenings. But the worst is now behind and I've been focusing back on Glassix 2.

For next version, I've been trying to focus on attributes and skills UI to make it more game like and understandable. So square icons are attributes and diamond icons are skills. Skills have two values: the level of the skill which is the value which will be tested against during events and is displayed with a golden vertical bar on the left part of the skill, from 0 to 100. Then on the right side, we have a white vertical bar showing the current experience accumulated for the skill which is required to level it up.

Skills maximum level depends on the character attributes and I've tried to displayed it in a simple manner, <current character attribute value>/<required skill value for a 100 score>. So if it shows 8/8 intelligence, it means this character has enough intelligence to reach level 100. Skills might require several attributes and all of them  obviously need to reach level 100. Otherwise, you'll simply be limited to a lower max level which could still be enough in some situation. I'll add in game help menu to explain all that again of course.

You gain skill experience by doing actions related to the skill so for sneaking, simply go sneak into NPCs room at night and so on, similar to Skyrim. Of course, there will be spells to speed up XP gain and since the game is moddable, it could even be possible to add new spells to even directly increase the level of skills or even raise the max level of a skill.

Skills will be required during some events but also for job promotions which is another part I'll work on for next version.

The idea is to display the full information of a business in a game like manner too. So each job will be display in its own block with relative information such as monthly salary, skill requirements and related actions in an order which reflect the promotion ladder. Something like Junior Professor > Senior Professor > Head Professor.

Getting promoted will require enough skills, work efficiency, seniority and some good relation with the person in charge of promoting (or blackmail?). Work efficiency will be calculated each month by saving how much time the player has worked and compare it with the maximum amount of time you could have worked (Based on the schedule of your job), that gives a percentage and the promotion will require a certain percentage. This way should give enough liberty for players to fool around some days and be serious most of the others. In the long run, I'd also like to add a yearly job calendar with some vacation weeks to make it more like real life and add unique festive events matching different culture or religion so that we can reproduce most real life celebration in game.

Each job will have different actions. Work will be the usual one but you could also have additional actions, such as promoting rights which would allow you to promote NPCs yourself. And when owning businesses will be added, you'll also be able to hire NPCs or fire useless ones. Kinda similar to Lab Rats 2. Some other jobs could also come with specific unique actions, like policemen having an arrest action allowing you to imprison any citizens you want (at the cost of you reputation or something like that) but you can see there's a lot of fun to expect with this action system, just need to code it.

On another aspect, I've also tried to advertise the game a little more on the F95 forums (since patrons don't give that much feedback unfortunately, but I guess I'll take money over feedbacks, shame on me :D). Anyway, I got some interesting feedbacks and the most urgent I got was to fix the indoor lighting which really affects the quality of the game. So that's another part I'd like to fix before next version. 

I'll try to implement all this asap and I'm expecting either 1 or 2 weeks of dev for this.

As for Glassix 1, we're getting closer to the end, CarpeNoctem expects one or two more updates on his side before reaching v1 for his part, and I'll have a few things to fix on my own which I'll try to squeeze with his updates. There should be one by the end of the month.

That's about it for this post. Thanks again for your support!