Mid Month Update! Upgrading to Unity 2019 LTS, URP, New Outfit UI, and New Animations!

I have some big news I felt was worth making a quick update post about what to expect the rest of this month and next month!

Migration to Unity 2019 LTS and URP

First off some notes about the move to URP in Unity 2019 LTS. While there is some variance it does seem confirmed that URP will provide a big performance benefit to Android, though it's much bigger for newer devices than older ones. But I think the benefits will become more apparent at scale, as what drew me to SRP in general was the improved handling of materials.

The problem is in the move to Unity 2019, and SRP I may lose acess to some things, and it may cause problems and I may have to redo some stuff. But the redoing is inevitable which I'll explain in a bit. Just know overall this is an undertaking but one that will benefit the project long term, and any setbacks should be temporary. 

Initially I planned to make this move in a month or two, but it looks like I'll be doing this along side other things over this and next month. This is because there's already one big other change I need to do, so I might as well do it all at once. 

New Outfit UI and Q-Costume Integration

Up until now the UI has worked and EIREXE did exactly what I asked him to do,  but now the outfit selection has grown larger and the issues with that UI are shown. And on top of this the issues with what I use to merge skeletons Mesh Assembler has shown it's issues too. 

I first noticed this in another client project hypnolab but Mesh Assembler has a serious performance issue that is part of why android has been so bad. Note both test builds I sent out used Q-costume not mesh assembler. Mesh Assembler takes as much as 20% of the performance impact each frame. 

Now I've been avoiding talking about this cause I wasn't sure when or how the issue would be solved. But thanks to Kaitou the system has been reworked to support Q-costume, there's still some limits, but for now i can start implementation.

I mentioned earlier there's something thats going to take reworking and this is it. I have to redo most of Naomi's current character setup. Which impacts a wide range of things, this is why i figure it's best to do it all at once so I don't need to touch this again by migrating stuff later.  All these things are seriously connected, but it's worth it. 

This improvement comes with a few benefits available right now. 
  • Better performance overall
  • A new UI with tabs and bigger buttons
  • The ability to set outfits for dialogue scenes
  • The ability to select preset outfits from the outfit selection UI
  • Outfit items should overlap less if i don't want them to.
  • Outfit items can now have physics attached to them and extra bones

And I'll also mention some future benefits that are work in progress...
  • Ability to save outfit sets so you can load them later
  • Automatic clothing removal when needed (like during penetration)
  • Unlocking clothing items

Thats all I'll say for now about future stuff.

This feature has been largely why I've been delaying a big public release and more active promotion of the project. Once this is implemented, Kaitou should be working on the full gameplay loop for the final game and we can begin proper version numbering. 

There's some other issues to solve before this can become a proper game, and hopefully I get those matters handled! DX 

Animation Progress

The new sex sim animations are in progress, I've already finished a few of the animations needed. I should add a checklist to the Trello soon... I promise to post previews soon when I have enough but until then I do post bits in the supporter section of the discord. 

TL;DR

Expect that during or post animation completion for this month it will be a heavy development focus to implement the new outfit stuff and migrate to improved Unity features. And you can expect the project to change quite a bit. After this is done I'll be comfortable with a big public release and push towards the proper game!

Thanks for your support!
~sacb0y