Skunkfrakker & Veelicious
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Hi Everyone! It's Monday! There are new builds on the…
🕑 Added 2020-03-20 11:55:00 +0000 UTCHi Everyone!
It's Monday! There are new builds on the server!
So what's new this week? A bunch of stuff, but let's talk about that in a minute. I have stuff I want to talk about, first.
First up: with Whinny City and (probably) BABScon delayed, there are some very good pony fandom artists that are in a bad way. Many artists in the vendor halls at conventions depend on the convention cycle as their only means of income. I'd encourage you to check out this Google Doc by Foalpapers and see if someone on there makes something you love, and get something from them to offset this a little bit for them if you want to and can. I know at least for me there isn't a convention I've been to in the last 8 years or so where I haven't purchased some little thing from Ardail and Rat of Drawn, and I think I've either had lunch/dinner with, or been to a party with, about 1/4 of the rest of the people on that list. Some people I know personally on there and I know they're really struggling right now. They're good people and would love to sell you something cool if you're buying. If you're a convention artist I encourage you to join that list.
Also, and I know this is a big ask: consider letting your convention admission ride if you can. Barring the state stepping in and offering assistance, a mass call of refund could kill the convention. Everyone, of course, has their own situation so please do not feel guilt if you're not comfortable with that. I'm just throwing it out there <3 The airlines will get a bailout from the government: Babs and Whinny City probably won't.
Second: with most of the planet presently under some kind of "social distancing" quarantine to protect the elderly and those with medical conditions, I'm betting that your anxiety level is elevated just like mine is. Since we can't fix the problem, let's do stuff to fix how we feel about that. Here's what I propose:
I think I should make some new compelling NSFW Pony/maybe Furry content using the Besti X engine instead of doing deeper development stuff for a few weeks. Besti X right now is a solid content-production platform on 2D, VR, and on Oculus Quest, and I think with us trapped in our homes, some new NSFW content would be nice.
For real though, here's what's left on my list for the first 10.0 release:
- Minor adjustments I have in the queue regarding movement and hand positioning.
- The content for the credits system (programming is done,)
- Bringing in the in-game menu systems (done, but needing integration into Besti X)
- Bringing in the new Avatar system (done, but needing integration into Besti X. Couple minor systems need coding)
- Bringing in the updated friend AI (designed and has had significant work done on it so far. Done shortly.)
So I can make stuff in there without all that done, for sure. Really, creating stuff is easy when it doesn't tie into a larger system, so taking a bit of time off back-end development to produce new NSFW stuff with what's done right now would be a good response to the present situation we're all in. I'm thinking stand-alone sexy activities based on the Besti X system, and I have a few ideas that I think you'll like. Doing this slows down overall X development a bit, but not too badly as the stuff I'll program to make the standalone experiences work will backport into X by creating new Besti X tools that you will be able to use to make similar content. It's still forward progress, and I suspect 2 of the 7 days a week I work on it will translate directly into Besti X capabilities, with the remaining 5 focused on content creation.
As far as Besti-related stuff this week: Tons of stuff done but it was slower than normal due to the school closures and me watching the news and being nervous. I did lots of programming (see the changelog) and internal project-related stuff. I'm working with a new actress to make a new voice pack, and thank you for replying to the poll if you're a VR patron on what we should ask her to do. VR Patrons voted for BLUE FAST AWESOME HORSE so I'll send the script off to her today <3 The builds containing the new changes are up on the server, now, and there's a new chapter of the Besti Historical series, too, if you like those. <3
TL/DR: Stand by I'm cooking up lewd content for you to play while you're locked in your house for quarantine. Slight reduction in hours spent on the Besti X toolkit, but you'll get fun NSFW activities to do in exchange for that time. New X builds and Besti Historical stuff on the server today.
Here's a full changelog!
- Did significant optimization on the menus. I was already doing several optimization techniques, but I further implemented two changes based on the results of analyzing the performance, as there were three main areas that were causing a CPU use spike.
- Point 1: Around 60% of the performance issues of the menu related to having multiple signed distance field font renderers in a situation where the menu is hidden/unhidden. This hide/unhide behavior on a signed distance font causes the SDF generator to recompile the displayed text. I could circumvent this by storing that data in RAM once it's loaded, but I found this to make RAM use to to an unacceptable level (1GB to hold all the text in the menu.) On a PC this is fine, but on Quest it is not and would cause a crash. The fix for this is to use bitmapped font renderers for the option entries. These aren't as pretty, but don't have the CPU spike or massive RAM use of SDF. RAM use is actually significnatly reduced overall using bitmapped fonts, but again, they don't look quite as nice. I reserved bitmapped fonts for very limited situations.
- Point 2: About 20% of it was related to the text size resampling system. I wrote it to resample the font size if it couldn't fit it into a given space. I underestimated the CPU drain from doing this on the lengthy settings options. Normally it's OK but we're doing some extra stuff in this menu system and it's just too much. I just reduced the font size in general but it's still very readable in VR.
- Point 3: The remaining improvement came from code and asset simplification. This doesn't have a menu switching improvement, but it permits the menu to load faster, and makes the whole presentation more visually consistent.
- Made an option to have some settings that use sliders round their output to one decimal place.
- Disabled the doppler effect caused by fast-moving audio sources. This is really just going to cause confusion, so what I'll do is make a Besti SDK tool that handles this should you want to make a scene that benefits from doppler shifting. I think in most cases it will not be useful for creators, and there's an associated CPU cost to doing this, anyway. Half a character, or doppler shifting audio? I think this is a pretty easy decision under most use cases.
- Fixed an issue that was preventing binding the Special SDK inputs to keyboard keys and vr buttons. Thank you for reporting this issue!
- Fixed an animation issue with a class of button that was causing the highlight behavior to turn brown instead of green. Unity bug in this case and had to work around it.
- Created a unique Debug configuration so I can rapidly work on the in-game systems without going through the startup process. It goes through them, it just does so immediately.
- Added Menu Size and Menu Distance controls to the settings panel in the Misc section.
- Brought over the in-game menu deployment system for the main menu. Needed to remake it but was able to at least work from a functioning reference. Broken in today's build but it still looks and sound cool.
- Added an enable/disable function for the new teleporter that is event driven and controlled by PlayerControl. This system has the cursor subscribe to an event that says whether or not user-invoked teleportation is permissible, and changes the cursor accordingly if it is not/is allowed at the time. Whether or not teleportation is permissible can be set in the Besti SDK, and it also disables teleport/climb functions while the main menu is deployed.
- Fixed an issue that caused the audio to not loop in scenes using the basic background audio SDK tool.
