Glassix 2 v0.9 released

Hi everybody!

Download links 

I'm a bit late with this one, partly due to some assets corruption which forced me to reset art of the project files. I also took some time to add a few quality of life stuff in the game. Let's review the changelog a bit.

I've added more occlusion textures in the game which should improve the visual quality of the game. Some of the texture might be a bit quirky, making stuff really dark even in bright lights which will need some fix but overall, it should increase texture details. I've also fixed an important bug which prevented light to behave properly. Now light should not ignore walls.

Not really graphical related but it'll reduce the number of sub titles, I've added a few animations and started some tests with animation blending. You'll be able to see the result with teachers teaching their class. 4 different animations are blended to make a randomly unique animation which changes a bit with each loop. I'm hoping to achieve a semi random type of animations this way which would make NPCs less rigid in the end. It's still a bit quirky but it does show some potential to make things more lively in the game in the future. It does take some time to produce though so it'll come little by little.

Male hair even been decimated reducing its vertices count which should reduce CPU and GPU usage. Occlusion and specular maps have been packed to reduce additional memory usage and I've also looked into some core graphical options such frame rate control which did reduce CPU/GPU usage even more but I forgot to enable it, my bad :x I'll add it in next version.

A few new buttons and some behind the scene code have been added to make it easier to look around in locations. 

First, camera movement, rotation and zoom speeds are now tied to how zoomed in your are. It might be a bit tricky yo get used to at first but it makes it much easier to move around the interesting parts when zoomed in ;) It was way too fast before when zoomed in. It does mean we have to zoom out if we want to move faster though which downside should be reduced by the new camera focus button inside locations which allows the player to quickly move the camera to any character in the room and focus on a body part. Still about camera movement, you should now be able to move with WASD (or ZQSD for french players, currently based on Windows language) on top of the arrow keys.

Next would be the new auto hide button. Several players got confused as to why furniture was disappearing randomly. I've now disabled the auto hide by default and the player can enable it with this new button. Furniture gets hidden when it blocks the view relative to the current camera position and zoom.

Not really useful for the player yet, but I've started to change some logic to make various aspects of the game interact with each other more easily and in a similar way, namely, tags. The idea here is to have the various game entities (characters, jobs, residences, furniture, outfits and so on) use tags and entities which can interact with other will have another set of tags to know which tags they can interact with. I hope that was clear (lol). To give a practical example making more sense, let's take the case of what a player character could do in a room. When a teacher is teaching in a class, students should be able to look at the teacher or the whiteboard, while the teacher would look at random students at random interval to make things more life like. Students would have a student tag and the teacher would have a teacher tag. The blackboard would have a board tag. Then, students would search for characters or furniture with tags teacher or board as a target to look at, while the teacher would search for student tag to look at. By changing the tag of character and furniture and the tags they search for, I'll be able to easily have them look at whatever I want. We could even add some kind of appearance tag, determining if a character is pretty or ugly, and would have a character with the pervert trait only look at the pretty tag rather than the tag he should normally look at. In this example, tags are used to search for a look target, but it could be used more easily as a filter in the several UI lists used the game such as the characters interfaces to filter. It could also be used to describe outfit and use those tags for characters outfits preferences on top of the audacity parameter we had in Glassix 1. In the end, this new hidden feature allows to standardize the logic of several entities making it easier to maintain code in the future and once editors are available to add content in the game, tags will help classify stuff much more easily and with more freedom than some rigid piece of code, which is often an issue happening when games gets too big and poorly organized early on.

That's about it for this version! Even if graphics could and will still need work, I still feel like the game has been worked enough on optimization and better graphics in the latest months which finally leaves me room to focus on proper gameplay content so you can actually interacts with the city and your waifus (or slaves :D) in the future. 

For v0.10, unlike what I had planned before, I won't be releasing a poll to let patrons vote for content because I'm afraid the result won't align with what I think is urgently needed in the game (I assume it would be more sex content or naughty spells lol). I'm planning to implement the money system, with salary, rent and more stuff related to money in general. I'll resume monthly poll once the game content the minimum features required to be enjoyable to play without extra content. I'll let you know more about that once asap.

As always, thank you all for your patience and support and I hope you'll enjoy this new version. Let me know if you encounter any issue with it!