April Progress Update!

Hey hey people, I bring more progress updates for the 4th month, yay!

This has been a peculiar month. What I've been working on has been: separating the town into small scenes, interior design, and optimization.

Basically I've been working on segmenting the city into smaller chunks that can be loaded asynchronously, so the town is not just one big thing that needs to be loaded at once and all the time. Is a simple optimization technique, and I'm happy that I already had my nice drag and drop script for scene loading management.

I thought I could get away with having just 1 scene for the buildings, and many scenes for props, so when the player approaches a specific area, the props on that area are loaded. So kinda only loading and unloading the details of the town. But no, turns out i did need to separate the buildings also.

I got worried after I was done with the layout because, coming out from one building, my pc crashed. This happened a couple times before I realized that the reason was that it was trying to load all the buildings at once. So, segmentation of the town's props and buildings was always the solution.

And I managed to solve the crashing issue, yay.

^ The scene loading system is complete for the main bulk of the city. You can see that I still need to work on the left side ^

I think there's still gonna be a stutter when coming out of buildings regardless, but it is tolerable. I hope to make it even more manageable so is not very slow and annoying on less chunky pc's with less ram.

Interiors!

Simultanously, I've been working on improving the interiors of the buildings.

I already had working interiors, but not very sensical ones. They were just empy boxes.

I wanted to improve them so they actually resemble a place someone can live in. So now every interior has a small bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, a place for storage, and a living area.

^ This interior is based on a loft-style New Yorky studio apartment. ^

A very cool aspect about separating the scenes is that i can get away with lots of detail for every individual one. So I have more freedom to decorate the interiors with more furniture, nicer materials, props, etc.

^ This is more of a single stair apartment complex setup ^

Ideally, next step would be to work on the decoration system, but I feel is not really a prioroty for now. I want to finally upload a new build soon; I'm thinking maybe I should postpone the decoration system until after this next build, so I can work on other systems that would make it so I can finish it sooner.

I do need to work on the player's home tho. Next steps after finishing the town will be setting the player's home and finally work on the... hm... "dating" (inviting characters to the player's home).

And that would be the current loop complete...

After that, it would be a matter of polishing and working on smaller but important systems like: saving/loading, game options, UI, etc. But for now, I still need to continue working on the town and its many scenes. Ah...

Overall I'm happy that the main bulk of the work until a new build is already done, so I hope is not too long before I can update the game.

As always thanks for your support in whatever way you can. See you in the next update 🫂