Progress Report

Salutations! Here’s what’s up.

Kira’s character art is finalized, all new systems are in place and “older” events are redrawn (some require more time/editing and all of them require “layering”). If everything goes as planned, the next update should be “lit”, as youth says.

Our plan for this month consists of three steps - fixing the lag/glitch issue, finishing "new you" quest and saving new artwork for events.

To ensure that the next release will be ready, we’re starting this month with new content. While I’m finishing new you quest, Moana works on fixing our bugs, then I’ll replace ingame pictures with new art “the old way” to ensure that it will be in the game. It has a downside in the form that not all physical changes will be shown and it will ultimately be a waste of time, since we still need to transfer everything into the new code.

Remaining time will be spent on transferring all events into the new system, which we couldn’t do previously because of two reasons - Time, and the fact that events work on the same numbers as Kira’s character art, so if we change (some) numbers in character art, we need to change them in every event. So without final version of Kira’s artwork, there was no point in changing events.

He's a more detailed description of our glitches problem and new you quest:

The game struggles to process our quantity of pictures which causes it to freeze. With time, the number of pictures will only grow, so we need to find a solution immediately. Thankfully, we have a couple of options:

Cut the artwork and features our new character art system has.

Optimize code manually or by using existing plugins

Resave all artwork for web (thank you Stasi) which will drastically reduce the size of the game, without ruining the quality.

And we’re doing all of that.

Picture cuts - We’ve managed to cut around 1500-1800 right now, by removing an option to see some poses in all of the outfits.

Self grope pose won’t work with outfits in the future, so we’ll only be able to utilize it on naked Kiras. Same goes for “cover” pose and any potential poses. Male and female groping will still work with outfits, but I don’t think we will be able to add more variations to them or animate them, at least not while Kira is dressed. I think this is fine, we don’t really need her to be dressed anyways. Everything else will remain (body modifications, outfits, gropings etc.)

Code - You might remember our loading screen from v0.4.4, well, with it game works a bit better, but it takes 2 minutes and 11 seconds on Moana’s pc and around 3 minutes on mine to load it, both pc’s are pretty strong and this is simply unacceptable, so we won’t go this route. Tests with other plugins show promise, there are at least three more ways we could further optimise the code and fix freezes/fps issue.

There’s a big chance that every location will have a small loading screen to preload all required pictures, so you wouldn’t see kira’s body appear on screen layer by layer, which is a separate, but related, issue from freezes/fps one.

Saving for the web - it was literally suggested to me by Stasi today (thank you again). So far I see no downside to it, apart from the fact that is would take me at least one full day to resave everything, and I’m not looking forward to doing this again, but Mulan’s gotta do what a Mulan’s gotta do, as they say.

I can’t believe I wasn’t even looking in this direction, because it’s benefits are clear as day. It reduced the size of one picture from 1.66 MB to just 159kb, and the best part - it looks the same. This should allow the game to process everything quicker, and reduced game size is also a plus.

All and all, I’m optimistic about it, I believe we will be able to fix our lags and glitches before the next release.

I’m not going to spoil the quest in here, but I’ve got a few other things to say about it.

I did intend to release it with the last version, but unfortunately it didn’t happen. On the bright side, because last version wasn’t ready at all, I kind of half-assed it, so now I have more time to improve it by editing both art and text, or drawing something new:

Like I’ve said in the opening, we’re starting this month with new content. And since Olga is involved in this quest, I’ve decided to update her to Kira’s new standards.

Ideally, every character in defenestration should be redrawn or just drawn the “new way”, but I don’t think it’s realistic for me to do them all, it wouldn’t stop me from trying though.

I will post that “changelog” I’ve been mentioning probably on monday, it’s nothing special - basically a big masterpost which consists of everything I’ve talked about during this rework, and since not everything will be utilized immediately, it will serve as an “open-date” roadmap.

Thank you all for sticking by and believing in us, I promise we will do our best to ensure that at the end of this month you will get a stable and working update!