This Week in the Forest! #18

WHATS GOOD BBs? 

Here's what's good with us. Starting with a word from Vixel!

3/8 weekly report

Finished my memory optimization tasks! This was a leap forward and solves some tricky problems we were facing as we added more sex scenes to the game.

[The Background]

Previously, sex scenes (and music tracks) were preloaded into memory and stayed there the whole time the game was running. This approach worked fine through Act 1 because the game was small -- but now it's starting to cause issues (on WebGL in particular, since web browsers don't like tabs hogging too much memory!)

To reduce memory usage, now I load our biggest assets into memory only when they are needed, and unload them afterwards. (This involves some voodoo magic and asynchronous data stuff behind the scenes.)

[The Improvements]

We see an immediate improvement in memory usage in various scenes:

- Start Menu: old = 380 MB, optimized = 235 MB

- Lake: old = 545 MB, optimized = 480 MB

- Mountains: old = 500 MB, optimized = 395 MB

- Central Forest: old = 495 MB, optimized = 440 MB

Generally speaking, we're seeing about a 25% improvement in memory usage overall.

But where this really matters is: now the memory usage should hold steady around its current levels, no matter how many new sex scenes or music tracks we add into the game! *partyfox*

I'll be tackling the save system rewrite next! (To save your progress between versions of the game.) ^^

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Yumb~ This optimization stuff is some of the first steps to looking at getting mobile support, so this is pretty exciting :>! Still no ETA on all that jazz, but so long as our foundations are solid, it won't be an enormous undertaking in the future! Or at least... be less of an enormous undertaking xD

On my end, I've mainly been going ham on more animation. Nothing I wanna share yet though because spoilers. 

BUT I've also been just recently finished up Maverick's story illustration :> Have a sneak peek!

What's goin' on here? ;>

I'm pretty stoked with the lil mini-arch this story will produce :> It's got legs, so we RUNNIN', BABY!

This was also a super fun illustration! Having this take place in a sorta river lagoon that otters hang out in :> Allowed for some really fun lighting!

This'll be in our next build! Though I do gotta finish polishing up the writing...

Anyways that's it for us! Hope y'all have a good week!