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Mid-Month Refactoring Progress Update: New Website, SRP Conversion Complete, Asset Updates and Settings
Just figured I'd make a post to explain whats been done so far this month and whats left. To get a more real-time view of what I'm doing follow the discord #dev-feed or check the trello!
I had to focus on a client project for a release earlier this month, but now thats all wrapped up rest of this month I'm pretty much just working on the refactoring.
Follow me on Sac.moe!
Because of rampant internet censorship, I decided I would rework my site as a simple to update mastodon instance. So you can now get updates without the BS!
Some public updates will be posted there exclusively, usually stuff already posted here! I'll also work on expanding it more as well to maybe include other content like a dev feed or something.
If you don't have a mastodon account, consider making one on https://lewd.network/about which is run by my host Kupaa Networks. As I've said before Kupaa is very freedom oriented so supporting them helps us all!
URP
Because of the new asset changes and other goals i decided to focus on the URP conversion first. I've already done this once as a test so it was easy enough. And in the mean time I also made multiple improvements.
I really want to be able to hit low end platforms and while SRP is a major step to help with that I also wanted to make some shader updates as well.
So first, I took what was originally 3+ separate shaders and made them all into a single "Uber Shader" which given how SRP handles materials now this should be very effective.
On top of this the Uber Shader now supports a "low quality" mode which excludes a lot of the more advanced shader features for more simple ones. Gradient maps, standard blinn specular, and basic ambient light (optionally) instead of reflection or light probe based. The current concept is certain quality levels or a setting will automatically change specified shaders to this setting.
You can see the difference between the highest setting and lowest setting in the images above as a concept. At the moment the current plan is the lowest setting also makes the lighting only affect the main character. I also plan to see if I can disable reflections on all relevant objects as well.
I recently bought an asset to help with settings management so hopefully that goes well!
On a final note player customization options are now global properties, so that should allow me to more easily make character colors universal between a wide range of clothing items without the game needing to figure out what item is equipped. Maybe I'll have a solution for preset colors for some options (like a base color setup for certain dick types). Haven't gotten to implementation yet.
Asset updates and prefabs
Next big thing I'm currently working on is updating assets and making new prefabs. I've been doing some things the "wrong" way for a while so i decided to fix that and no i need to basically remake all my prefabs for the updated outfit system. Yay...
This has been boring and tedious but I'm on track to get it done soon. In short i used to group multiple clothing items into a single prefab but now i can't do that anymore.
As a side note i decided to make Naomi's base body model more "final" and updated her skinning some to help with deforms around the legs (hopefully allowing more extreme poses in the future without odd deforms). As a result though more clothing may clip through Naomi, this will be fixed in due time and I'm making sure that when i make these fixes they propagate easily.
Another thing is stuff like Naomi's hair, wolf ears and tail were formerly perpetually a part of her base rig, with the new mesh assembling tool this shouldn't be needed and the ears can be only on the specific item adding the bones to the base rig at run time. I'm hoping this won't require reexporting every single animation I've made so far. God help me if thats the case. But in the long term this should allow more versatile and freely moving clothing items. Like for instance physics on the name tag on the collar item, varied tail options etc.
Whats next?
Once these assets and prefabs are worked out I'll start implementing the new outfit system to make use of all this.
I don't know how much work that will be but i hope it all gets done before the end of the month. If it goes well I can do an experimental build this month.
Besides that I need to get settings working, originally i was working on this before doing the asset stuff but I hit a bit of a wall. Thankfully the dev of the asset has been very helpful and once I finish the assets and prefabs I'll return to this cause it's very critical.
The UI updates also affect the player avatar customization as well since that needs a revamp.
Then, once ALL of that is done, I need to remove some bolt functions incompatible with webgl. And probably replace some bolt nodes with normal code. So hopefully that goes well.
Only after all of this is wrapped up will I work in implementing the new sex sim scene and additional outfit variants.
Lastly, I've commissioned some stuff so expect some updates on Music and maybe something else soon.
Thats all for now peeps, thanks for your support! More updates soon...
~Sacb0y
