Gigantic ol' update post: Happy New Year! Plans for the year

Happy New Year peeps.

This year I decided to start out by doing a ton of testing and planning. So now I have more or less a good plan for the next few months. So let's get into it.

State of the Game

As I've said before Our Apartment is largely in content focus. As such the majority of income at the moment is focused toward paying for Animations, outfits, and other assets. And soon my own focus will largely shift there too.

But for this month, I do management. Planning, clerical work, and the like.

Playing through the game, marking down every issue I see, everything that doesn't have a task, any bugs, polish issues. Trying to get a sense of things.

And so far, it all feels good, a few issues mostly in the polish area. And some needed progression elements I feel are needed. It's on the way to being what I want it to be, but it's hard to say if it will be good enough. Won't know for sure until it's done, and I get a little more specific feedback.

But anyway, I added around 100+ new tasks to do.

A lot of these won't be tackled for a while until the content updates are done. It's more a "Time to wrap this up" list. And currently the expectation is completing the list would take about a month of focus. And that month I'll likely shift income entirely to programming. It's not scheduled yet, but when content goals are more complete it can be.

Your support helps with efficiency here! Atm I'm balancing things, but the easier that is the more help I can get reliably.

Quick note about releases again

Last month I released a build to show some of the new animations, I made that build more accessible but like I said that will stop from now on. A lot of people played that and noted bugs and a soft-lock, and I really only intended for that release to be previewing animations. Checking if the story had soft locks wasn't even a factor. These build releases are to show tangible progress more than anything. The only reason I was lax before is covid I didn't want people to feel pressured to get higher tiers just for small previews, now we're 3 years past.

Future [Experimental] builds will be higher tier only. They're for people who want to know things are moving along and their money is going to use.

Content progress

Currently one of the biggest tasks is outfits, if I remember right around 70 items were made, and they all need textures and variants. Just in the past month or so at least 40 sets have been made for roughly 13 items. Oddmores pace has been very fast, and there's still a lot to do. The final number of added items to the game will likely be in the 100+ range at minimum.

Enjoy this video previewing some of the outfits so far.

Besides outfits is also animations, that's my big focus now the planning work is complete. There're some people helping with animations, and even some people I'm bringing on. Their focus is largely sex sim or other lewd content, my focus is largely story stuff. General logic is the work I have to pay for, pays for itself :P.

More animation previews will be coming in due time.

The future!

The past month has also been a period of experimentation. Trying to figure out what's coming in the future that's worth using.

Namely Unity 6.

To explain this simply Our Apartment is currently built on Unity 2022.3 using the URP render pipeline. This allows building for mobile and web, along with being viable for higher fidelity on PC. We transitioned to URP from "Built-In" in a couple years ago order to avoid cancelling the mobile version entirely.

Normally Unity releases versions every year, but last year they announced Unity 2023 would take two years. For me this is a good thing, Unity as an engine has had problems with the yearly releases, and somethings haven't really had time to cook properly.

Then later they announced Unity 2023 was going to be called Unity 6, they're returning to not doing yearly releases, which for me is also good news.

And in the past month I previewed Unity 2023.3 which is a beta for Unity 6.

This longer development cycle for me seems to be bearing fruit, as this is probably the most exciting releasing Unity has had in a while! But first let's go over a little of the research.

VFX Graph

Part of what's been a struggle with Unity is the separated pipelines of URP and HDRP meant separate teams until a couple years ago. This means features developed for one may not come to another cause their foundations are so different. The extended development cycle has been fixing this problem.

For a while I've felt Our Apartment lacks effects, I've done a lot in the shader department but not as much anywhere else. The few effects that exist are very lack luster.

VFX graph is basically a node-based tool for particle effects, and I've experimented with it for a variety of things. While it's sort of gimped in 2022, in Unity 6 it's more fully featured. But honestly even in its gimped form it's extremely impressive.

Here's some of the effects.

Cum bubbles that respond to gravity and visually stack, they also use environment lighting and reflections.
Actual 3D sweat drops on Naomi's body that appear randomly.
Dust particles in the apartment that can be seen in the light and act with gravity and drag.

These experiments are small effects but only the beginning of my experimentation. The way the effects work would be impossible with the previous systems. And the expanded feature set in Unity 6 brings even more possibilities.

APV

Adaptive Probe Volumes is the next huge feature fully realized in Unity 6. A long-standing struggle with rendering Our Apartment is the indirect lighting. The game taking place largely inside means indirect lighting is the primary lighting. I've done my best to keep most scenes with Naomi in the sun light but that only goes so far.

In video games, generally characters and dynamic objects are lit with probes, these probes basically sample how a sphere would be lit at that given point. Then it applies that sphere lighting to more complex objects. As such a character is lit as if they were one of these tiny spheres places around the scene. the entire character.

This causes problems in areas with a lot of gradation, in most games it's fine cause a character is standing vertically, and rarely given too much focus.

But in Our Apartment the character is everything. And Naomi being lit from a single point in the scene has caused a lot of problems I've done a lot of creative solutions to solve.

For example, Naomi is composed of many objects, hair, eyes, shirt, socks, these are all different objects with different origin points. But they're on Naomi's body, so what can happen is the socks can be lit differently than the legs cause the legs are lit evenly with Naomi's head, not based on where her legs are.

This is why in the above example Naomi just looks more or less flat. I need to make sure different parts aren't awkwardly rendered differently, but then the whole character can end up borderline flat.

APV has resolved this problem for me, by one, placing the probes in a grid automatically, and two, lighting the character per pixel, not based on a single point. This means the lighting is much more detailed, and Naomi even if not lit by a real light source will be shaded properly.

This also means I can get rid of light maps, and no longer really need to use things like SSGI, at least not for shadows. If I add objects to the apartment (like change the apartment based on seasons and such), they are much more likely to be lit properly. The result is bakes take like a minute.

Another addition is functionality like Sky Occlusion, and Scenario blending. Sky Occlusion will allow for smooth transitions between time of day in real-time, and scenario blending will allow easily handling things like lights turning on in the apartment. An example video of this system working is here.

And of course, this all works on mobile as well. And doing this may mean less "blink" transitions are needed and we can instead have a visual day transition.

STP

Spatial-temporal post-processing, odd name but it's looking to be sort of killer. Basically, this is an upscaler, but the difference is it works on EVERY platform even mobile, and it's CRAZY sharp from my own testing (above image is a Unity sample, but my testing is similar). As such this means on mobile devices the game will look A LOT less blurry and perform better.

This also provides a solid anti-aliasing solution which is something I've also been struggling with in URP. I did try FSR and DLSS options but they had issues if enabling HDR. While generally I love DLSS in the games I play, STP is looking kind of insane. Only issue is a possible issue with texture streaming where the texture streaming thinks the resolution is lower than it really is.

Forward+

This one I currently have access to and was part of the reason I remade Naomi's shader recently, Forward+ basically makes changes to lighting to allow infinite light sources. This solved some problems in certain scenes like the driving scene. It also potentially adds some performance improvement.

Other Features

And beyond those major ones, here's a break down of some additional benefits:

Global post processing configs, and post process configs tied to quality modes.
Performance improvements thanks to render graph and other tech
GPU Occlusion Culling (faster no need to bake)
WebGL is now compatible with mobile, which doesn't mean a lot for Our Apartment but does mean a lot for future projects!
Shadergraph improvements which I mean to transition to for some things.

What's all this mean

It means in order to improve the quality of future releases a transition to Unity 6 (likely it's beta version) is in the cards. I don't know for sure when this will happen, if it's before or after the steam release I can't say.

Lets break down my logic a bit:

With changes like APV it means the lighting of various scenes I'm currently setting up and configuring will be different. Due to the indirect lighting issues one method I use is adding lights to various scenes and various camera angles. Now I no longer need to do this, and doing so may cause scenes to be overly bright. So the longer I wait to make this transition the more work I may have to do checking the impact with current lighting tricks.
Currently the project relies on SSGI for some shading, but this has a severe performance impact, it also causes issues in some scenes. It's a pain really, and being screen space means issues can pop up at any time especially with this strong use. I can continue to deal with this problem, or solve it properly.
The current limitations in VFX graph is bothersome, not a deal breaker but limiting meaning I would have to create solutions for things that are already features if I just upgrade. Time that could be better spent just doing the upgrade.
Resolution on mobile and low-end platforms has been a struggle, being able to properly deliver visual quality would be great. Also moving to APV may help with memory struggles, and additionally some improvements in Vulkan seem to have been made.

Really the primary barriers are assets and tools that we use and potential incompatibilities.

There's also another major factor

Full Reimport

Our Apartment has existed in some form for roughly 5 years, it started with experiments in 3D, then transitioned to the main project. And through all that time we've used the same project file, same repo, same everything and just upgraded.

That, after a long time and many unity versions causes problems. As such, it seems like a good idea to just reimport everything, remake configs, start with a fresh project file while copying as much as possible.

You might ask why brought on such an extreme task, and remember when I was pissed about the mobile build? Well one of the problems was an old config file, i spent two weeks solving problems that were solved by simply remaking a config file. That's the issue with upgrading too many versions without some sort of clean up.

And if I'm going to do this process it's better to do it on a new version rather than an old one that I will inevitably upgrade.

So TLDR

A major project upgrade is on the horizon, it probably won't happen before the next build release, but may happen before the steam release. And the task would take some time, not long maybe a month. A week to transition the files with a full reimport, and a few weeks redoing lighting and undoing some of the tricks I've had to do over the years.

Until then I will continue to monitor the state of the assets I use, to determine if transitioning is possible without a serious loss.

Additional Projects

I've mentioned, many times over the years a desire to do additional projects, when Our Apartment hits its stride that will start a preproduction of sorts.

This side project will be smaller, and subject wise quite different from Our Apartment. A lot of similar themes but very different presentation wise. Some of you on the discord may have seen some concepts.

Part of the purpose is to have a bit more of an expanded interest while sticking to some aspects I think people like from Our Apartment.

I'll talk more as I decide what project I want to do, and if the project is viable. Or if I'm partnering with someone.

Conclusion

Boy that was a meaty post, I think this might be a record... But hopefully it got you up to speed.

Your support is crucial at this time! While a build may not come this month due to all the planning work there will 100% be one next month, likely including new outfit content.

If you have any questions feel free to ask and tell your friends!

Thanks for your support!

~sacb0y