News Stuff! (Patreon)

So, I've been learning some new things in Renpy's code to try and make the experience for everyone better overall.  Today, I learned something HUGE.  It might not make as much of an impact for you guys, as it will for me though.  The big upside to what I learned is a way to possibly cut the file size of EA in half.  It might help me with uploading to Patreon again without dealing with external links and those thigns breaking on everyone.  On top of that, it'll make my life a lot easier in coding while I continue to work.  Big plus there!

On the downside to this...  It will take a lot of time to re-code what I've already done.  For now, I'm starting small.  Dozer and Darius are easy for me to handle, since I've only done 4 days of their routes.  Super easy to handle.  Everyone else....  Not as much.  Spencer's update is coming this time around, and I've already made it bigger than intended (lots of choices to go through).  We might hit some filler in the meantime, since I'm going to be putting in some extra work in getting this new method of coding put into place.

The clarify what I'm doing...  Right now, in EA, each character sprite is made up of 1 image.  If you count all the character images I have in the game right now, there's around 300+.  Each image is small, but they really start to add up when I have so many.  Today, I learned how to build the character sprite by just combing parts of the image together to make the full character image.  So, let's say Spencer has 5 expressions and 5 shirts and 5 pairs of shorts...  That's 125 possible images for just Spencer.

With this new Method, I'd use a grand total of 16 images.  A base model for Spencer, then an image of each piece of clothing which I use code to combine to make 1 image.

I'm going to try keep my updates normal, but the sooner I get this changed, the easier my life will be for coding, and it'll make things faster for me in the long run, meaning more content for you guys overall!