Episode 5, part 1 - Update #1 (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

I'm sending this devlog a little earlier than usual, as I'll be busy this coming week and won't have time to write it next weekend. It's only been a week since the last release, and I hope everyone got to enjoy it a little.

I got a lot done, and a lot went wrong... but don't worry, it's already resolved! I switched to my new dev machine that I built last month, and it was a lot of work getting everything installed and getting up and running again.

Had to wipe the Perforce storage about 3 times, as the geniuses over at Helix decided it was a good idea to enforce maximum security in their newest version. I got unlucky with this, as my trial run to switch server machine went flawlessly the day before they decided to roll out this new version, which I didn't know they were going to do. Anyway, it doesn't matter, it's all up and running now and runs great.

I prepared the demo, and its currently in the hands of Steam. Hopefully I won't need to make any changes there, and I can forget about it. Once that's done and dusted, it's ready for October's massive Steam Next thing. I found a few more bugs too when running the demo. When the MC and Natasha are listening to music at the party, the images were the wrong size, so they don't pan. And I forgot to update one of the gallery icons. Only some minor things, but they are annoying nonetheless.

I'm supposed to be taking a break, but I was very excited finally being able to work on EP5, so I started doing some work on it already. I won't tell you anything about the scene the preview is from, but you should be able to tell who it is regardless. I mentioned in another devlog that I'm aiming for multiple smaller releases, and I've got the first of those plotted out (next devlog I'll start up the diagram again). It will still take a while, but it'll be much easier for me to handle with the time I have and the physical health I'm currently in + it'll allow me to focus on more detail, without having the looming dread of having to finish the entire gigantic episode.

As always, during the rework phases, I discovered another million things that improves the quality. I applied a lot of them to the EP3 rework, but I went a little too far in some areas. I played around a lot with lighting and it always annoyed me how much bouncelight scattered off the character's skin and made nearby things kinda glow. I hacked in some maths in the shaders that counteracts that, while still retaining how the subsurface scattering works. There was also an issues with lights hitting eyes directly from the front, which made them light up excessively (you may have noticed some renders where the character's eyes are a little whiter than usual). That's also sorted with some additional shader math.

I stuck with UE5.6 for this entire development cycle, but the actual available engine release is all the way up to 5.8 already. I did the usual thing of copying over my project into a fresh install of 5.8, but Epic fundamentally changed a lot about how the engine works and renders now, and it completely fucked my hair shaders. I spent a day trying to work with it, but it's too bugged, and I don't want to spend a week or more redoing every single character. I decided to stick with 5.6, as it's in a very good place for this project. This is the first time I haven't upgraded, but that's fine, as Epic is now kinda done with UE5 anyway and is fully working on UE6.

Anyway, this is a ridiculous amount of stuff that happened in one week, and I'll shut up now.

Ezy ❤️