Frost's New Bear & Fixing That Fatal Error

For Frost, I wanted to create nice, fluffy bears. 🐻❄️

Even though I had already made a bear for Rebecca ♥, I felt her style didn't quite fit the vision I had for the bears in Frost—so I made a brand new one!

In the past, I’ve received feedback that my characters tend to be pretty slender, so this time, I experimented with a thicker design.

With her model, I applied everything I’ve learned so far:
✔ Optimized topology for fast and high-quality fur rendering
✔ More weight and volume to match the style I envisioned

From the Back: 

Part 2 – Fixing That Fatal Error

Some of you noticed that my newest project had issues loading from the pak container files, while for others, it worked fine.
(I suspect that those who didn’t have issues already had pre-cached shaders from earlier tests.)

After some investigation, I found that deleting my shader cache triggered the fatal error on my end too. However, removing the pak container solved it.

🔍 From what I’ve gathered, the pak system uses a cache to unpack files, and if that cache fills up, things go sour.

So, I’ve decided to rework the updater and latest release to no longer use paks—and this version is working perfectly on multiple systems! 🎉

Benefits of Moving Away from Paks

✔ Easier Updates → Game files are now directly in the content folder, meaning no more downloading an entire pak when only one file has changed.
✔ No More Fatal Errors → Eliminates cache-related unpacking issues.
✔ More Control → Files can be updated more efficiently.

One downside? I now need to update the updater… again. 😅 (Third time’s the charm, right?)

New Updater – Fixing Performance Issues

Since the game now consists of ~7000 files, the current updater lags for ~30 seconds when starting due to the sheer number of files it needs to process.

To work around this, I implemented an in-game zip function that allows the updater to:
🔹 Only check certain zip files
🔹 Download and automatically unpack them

I’ll upload the new version later today, along with a game update. The changelog will be updated once everything is live!

Coming Tomorrow: Fluid Effects on Fur!

Can’t wait to show you what I’ve been working on! :3

♥u all,
Your furrier 🐾