End of Year Updates

New build is finally close. Optimized. Fixed major issues. Packaging is no longer failing non-stop. Felt I needed to go over a few things though going into the new year just so people know.

Getting Updates

Straight up, I don't come here enough.  It's been hard to just remember to post, because I don't like spending too much time on too many websites as I become older (and wiser). The fact I can't post videos here does not help any, since I don't want to make GIFs just to show stuff. For right now I am going to try to focus on posting more updates on my Discord and Bluesky from here on forward, and only likely post the actual builds here.

For those that follow me on Twitter, I have mostly retired those accounts for personal reasons.

Game Updates

To get it out of the way, I actually suffered a catastrophic crash that killed the 5.4 project over a week ago. Luckily, I had a copy of the project in 5.5 that I used to try out the new features, which saved my ass. I have since backed up the 5.5 project and will be updating it going forward.

Since I will be using 5.5, I am trying to use the new MegaLights feature for better shadows. It likely will change the overall feel of scenes since it adds ray tracing, but I hope to keep the style mostly intact.

Optimizations to the models and assets themselves have taken chopped off 75% of the memory footprint of the main actors. It's feeling a lot smoother now, though might still be rough on old computers.

Am going to look into more possible optimizations by using the Mutable functions added in 5.5, but it's still experimental.

The "Viewer Mode" is being retired. The point of it was to have a "jump in and go" level, but after updates to the "Playground Mode" allowing more positional movement including lights, it's just felt like a really cheap method of enjoying the scenes.

New build I am hoping for as early as January 11th but I can't make any promises. Wish me luck.