0.5 Development Update 17

First of all, the Alpha and the upcoming Beta. The Event made it in.

I think most of you are happy/going to be happy with it. 😏

Some folks mentioned that the transition to that event was a bit abrupt, and after thinking about it, I tend to agree. I know (most of) the characters’ thoughts and feelings, so their motivations are plain for me to see. For all the others, The Event could use just a few more lines of exposition. The ending of The Event could do with some extra dialogue and renders as well, this is all coming to beta.

I was thinking about including a very barebones version of the upcoming repeatable version of The Event into the Beta, but decided against it. You’ll have to make to with a replay for now, sorry. It was just going to feel really out of place because Lyriel’s story needs another event before the repeatable makes any sense, and that event will come in 0.5.5.

Speaking of 0.5.5.

Apart from the said Lyriel’s event + repeatable, it’s going to consist of the Viorel BJ scene. We made three animations instead of two for this dream, and that’s the main reason why we couldn’t get it done in time for 0.5.4

There will be some tech stuff in there, too, and I should FINALLY be able to finish the occupation suggestion thing.

This second update this month is me trying the “big update + smaller update later in the month” scheme. There is one problem with it.

Patches. 

The patching solution (Visual Patch) I’m using is falling apart. What’s worse, it’s the only working binary patching solution that I could find (and afford).

Just to give you a bit of a background, my plan was to provide a cumulative patch for every 5 major updates. So, for example, the current cumulative patch iteration was supposed to last until v0.5.5 and enable patching any version from 0.5.0r1 to 0.5.5r1. Then the next patch was supposed to last until 0.5.10r1.

So what’s the problem? The problem is, the difference in size between v0.5.0r1 compressed and 0.5.4a2 compressed is just a bit under 230 MB. I mean, alright, there were some scene updates, so I can imaging another maybe 15 MB of diffs. And, let’s say, there are some indexes and checksums for another 5 MB, that’s 250 MB.

The current compressed cumulative patch is 460 MB. Almost twice as big as it should be. There are some ways to make the data more digestible for the diff maker, but everything I can think of will come at the expense of flexibility and potential issues down the line.

The only realistic solution I can think of right now is to switch to incremental patches, containing only the most recent versions.

The patch for 0.5.5 will only contain enough data to upgrade the game from v0.5.4 to v0.5.5, and that’s it. Then the patch for 0.5.6 will only work on v0.5.5, etc. etc.

I will try to maintain a patch list post, but this pushes me even more towards a single monthly update schedule. Juggling multiple patches with different access levels is not something I want to do.

But let’s talk about v0.5.6 just a tiny bit.

Now that the Lyriel’s story arc is done (for now), I wanted to immediately move on to Cait’s story. But then I remembered that we have an anniversary coming up.

It’s high time Bunny Lounge made its appearance in the game proper.

More details will follow.

See you soon!