Hello peeps, this might seem a bit early for me, but honestly, it's late. From now on I'm going to try and make updates before the month ends, as that seems to be the pattern of my peers.

This build is experimental cause it's not super well tested.

The primary work this month was basically a huge refactoring of the sex sim system. It's now using the new animation system which required a lot of doing. And while doing all that doing, I got some suggestions for improving the performance, throttling when certain functions trigger instead of having them trigger every tick.

Now this refactor does have draw backs due to me needing to reimplement things. Basically every animation has the same event triggers. What that means is SFX, arousal ticks, and other stuff all triggers the same per position instead of varying. This will be fixed later as the priority was getting things working.

This transition does improve some event triggering making them more reliable. And as I sad before this may result in some memory optimizations since loading the sex sim animations is now possible.

This also allowed removing a limitation the previous setup had, there is no longer a limit of switching to only 3 positions. You can now technically switch to any position but for now I've limited this function to positions in the same general area. If you think all positions should be available, let me know, and let me know why.

Additionally, the camera system for sex sim has had an update but isn't implemented yet. It will use a similar camera cycle system to cinematics. Letting you more manually control camera angles while initially transitioning on it's own.

Like I said before I had planned to upgrade the project, and have done so. To what is currently a beta version, but one that has been solid and should have a full release in a week or two.

Main benefits of this upgrade:

The project can now globally use MeshLOD, this allows for extremely performant LOD's across the project. This allows lower quality modes to have more aggressive LOD's in some cases reducing poly count by 1/10. The method of mesh index MeshLOD uses means these LOD's don't add a bunch of memory use and are more performant.

Transitioning to shader graph for some shaders to reduce shader variants, along with having native shader variant control.

Unity announced a system for cross platform releases making dealing with SteamAPI much easier among some other long-term benefits.

Thankfully this transition has been easy. The 0.9.1 build is not this version though that will come soon.

Some side news, that's interesting is Unity seems to be on a solid path focusing on stability and rather than releasing a big breaking change Unity 7, instead having a slower transition in Unity 6. This doesn't change my plans too much, but I may not use HDRP for now for any side projects. Since their behavior is trending toward "make URP more like HDRP" so I think I'll just accept that for now.

I know there hasn't been a mac build in a while, part of that is cause I need to use a cloud build solution, another part is it's been a lot of fucking trouble. On both cloud build AND a physical mac laptop I cannot get the project to import. I'll keep trying so we can have a new mac build soon but for now this has been a major barrier. It just keeps crashing on import repeatedly.

I'm sorry for the delay on this, I planned to give it this month but it just didn't work.

Since the whole itch.io bs like I said my income has been severely impacted, as such it's impossible for me to continue commissioning people for writing, outfits, animations, anything really. And that will remain the case until the steam release or somehow Patreon and SS explode in support.

There's also the fear that going through steam review might fail, and I've already been caught off guard for one thing. I never anticipated itch would just nuke itself entirely like it did, I expected stripe to run into an issue or something but for the whole site to just no longer be a viable option just wasn't even in my mind.

So, like I said before I've long had the plan to make similar projects like Our Apartment but smaller, and that's been expedited, and some of my time is going templating Our Apartments format. Taking the existing code and adding a ton of place holders for everything a similar project needs to function.

One of the big issues is the UI asset I use unfortunately no longer gets support, so I cannot rely on a big part of my UI code. As such I need to transition that code to a new UI system. To be clear I AM NOT doing this Our Apartment, Our Apartment's UI works, it's not perfect but it works I will keep it. But future projects will use a newer Unity native system called UI Toolkit.

This does a few things I've wanted like a more visual independent UI builder (which can make commissioning UI viable without needing them to deal with the games code), it's also based in a CSS and web type format which I'm familiar with and likely a lot of others are too. It also provides a lot of other neat tools that can replace the reasons I used the old UI system.

I won't be doing any fancy UI just the basics to get things working.

Obviously, all this takes work and learning. But it's the most challenging task to get a side project going. When this templating is complete, I'll let you all know and probably release an initial project. This setup will be implemented alongside the existing code.

Once this is done I can aim for more revenue streams and marketing opportunities.

This has been a rough period, but hopefully soon after this work is done things will improve.

Thanks for your support and patience

~sacb0y