Glassix 2 v0.8 release
Hi everybody!
Changelog
- Added Free mode
- Added loading screen when changing locations and spawning cities
- Added building highlight when hovering to see what's clickable
- Channel packed irises textures
- Optimized hair mesh to reduce vertex count
- Added SSGI, SSAO and SSR
- Hair materials are now opaque to avoid issue with SSGI
- Updated hair shader to use Occlusions and Specular maps as well as dithering
- Added water layer on city map
- Added button to toggle lights on and off in locations
- Simplified day time system for easier control
- Enabled volumetric lighting
- Thickened wall of all locations to fix light bleeding issue
Well... This one took longer than expected, again :/ So many issues between some third party plugins crashing the game then followed by even native Unity plugins not working after update which delayed me even more... So many back and forth here but I got most of the issues out of the way and this release should be playable though with some quirks which I'll fix in a patch later on.
Anyway, from my last troubleshoot help request, some of this new stuff was already done: New Global Illumination system which still needs some works but should better lit indoors, some update with hair shaders which is still ongoing but should improve visuals (Currently, only female hair have been properly updated and I'll need to update male hair as well as outfits, locations, furniture and character skins shaders to work with additional textures to give better visual (occlusion, specular and sub scattering skin). There was also a new day/time system which is also a bit quirky currently but I'll adjust that over time too. And some nice water effect on the city map too.
Now for what I've been doing this month, I've added some loading screens when changing locations (I'll add those too in editors too asap) and added some mouse highlight over buildings to see better what is interactable (both were requested additions and made sense so don't hesitate to shoot more ideas). Finally the biggest part, the Free mode allowing you to finally inject your own character cards in any city, choosing the jobs and residences of those citizens. There is also a citizen randomizer which allows you to populate the city with generic citizens using a few options, such as a body template, gender ratio and age average for example. More options will be added in the future to fine tune this process to create your dream city. But you should already be able to create your own harem with a city full of young girls with one male lead :) Once you've set up your city, you can choose any male citizens to play. It's currently limited to male as players but will be expanded to include female too in the future, it'll need more work on animations and interactions to work this way.
The current process to set up a Free mode city is to select your own custom citizens first, choose their jobs and residences second, then add random citizens last. The process is a bit clickity at the moment but I'll add some ways to reduce this hassle.
Anyway, this should give you a better idea of where Glassix 2 is going. Unlike Glassix, you'll be able to create your own cities and own events in the future to live whatever adventures you want, not only the ones I'll have created, and of course, be able to share those easily so that you can have something new to play pretty often. It's still a long way to get there, but I'll get there eventually.
This update took much longer than expected, sorry about that. Unity has been quite annoying to work with those last 2 months with problems cumulating and taking time to fix. But it's still easier to work with than Glassix 1 engine overall so I won't complain that much.
That's about it for v0.8. let me know what you think about this new addition! Thank you for your patience and support!