Inner Circle Update for Oct 24 2016!

Hey Inner Circle Folks!

I’m going to get right to it this time around. Click below for all the artwork and visual previews associated with this update!

Images and Content for this Post on Google Drive

V0.051 Progress

As stated last week, I plan on releasing V0.051 a few days before the end of the month. Expect it on probably the 29th or so, as I want to try to get as much artwork as possible in.  Work on the Render Manager ate up more of this month than I would’ve liked, but it’s definitely been worth it!  I've pumped out a bunch of new skill portraits in just the past two days with its help.

Render Manager Completed!

I completed the Render Manager on the 21st, and am happy to report that it is both working flawlessly and contains features I wasn’t expecting to have ready for months. I’ve been using it for the past couple of days to produce the Vioreaper artwork for Neon’s new outfit, and it’s definitely reduced tedium and sped up the process significantly.  It’s also helping in ways I hadn’t expected, such as quickly testing out lighting possibilities (this would have previously required setting up and rendering a lot of files by hand in order to see the finished product).  Now that it’s finished (and I have a solid handle on scripting Daz Studio) it has of course opened new doors for possible optimizations, though I’m still figuring out which are worth committing to.

AltairPL’s Progress Update (Programming)

Here’s a quick list of what AltairPL has been up to since last week!

• Finished work on the “Features” overhaul that was described in last week’s post.   
• Added mechanics for Damage over Time effects -- used for only one internal thing for now, but hopefully this will change soon.
• Fixed a battle glitch that can occur during the elevator battle with Ven.  It was possible to end the battle prematurely if certain enemies were killed fast enough.
• Changed how Knockdown state operates.  Instead of having an internal state duration, ATB is reset and state is removed at the beginning of the turn or hold (see last week’s post for a more in depth description of this… basically it’s to prevent characters getting completely locked down by grapple attacks after a Finisher is used).

In addition, AltairPL has improved code for animations.  Here’s his description:

“Kind of in preparation for [the upcoming] battle overhaul, I was looking at various things that will need some changes, and for some reason animations caught my attention. Animations are one of those fucked up things in RPG Maker; no matter how many sprites are actually needed by an animation, the max of 16 sprites were always created.  On top of that, timing (sounds, flashes) processing was clunky as hell. So, I've coded preprocessing of all animations data to improve animations handling as much as humanly possible:

• Now only necessary animation sprites are created.
• Timing processing now occurs only for the current animation frame (as opposed to vanilla iteration of all timing related elements and comparison of their frame index with current frame index).
• Duplicate animation will now not process related data twice.”

TK’s Progress Update (Map and Environment Art)

TK’s been continuing his work on the replacement Access Tunnels maps, but he also took some timeout to investigate methods for various effects we’ll need (or would at least like) in the future, such as ground fog, water, and modeling techniques for organic growth (either for nasty fleshy growths or for buildings overgrown with vines and such, both of which will likely come up in the future).  You can check out a couple test result screens in the Google Drive folder.