Hey everyone, welcome to another CPE update! v0.49 is progressing steadily, though a bit slower on my end than I would've liked. It's been a rough few weeks mentally for a number of reasons, which didn't help, and I got hung up on a cutscene unlock bug for about ~4 workdays, which I believe is the longest I've ever had to spend on a single bug before. I did manage to fix it eventually, but between those two things, I didn't get as much done as I would've liked. Still, we're soldiering on and progress IS being made!
Before I ramble on any longer, though, let's get those daily updates out of the way:
So I spent a lot of my time on that bug, which turned out to actually be a confusing mess of multiple bugs working in tandem (one of which wasn't even my fault really, just the engine indexing strings in a strange and unintuitive way). Made things a lot harder to track down and diagnose than usual, but at least it's fixed now. I was planning on saving the implementation of Orex's new animations for after I finished the rest of my v0.49 work, but I really needed a coding break after dealing with that bug, so I've been working on adding in those animations, and polishing up the new cutscenes while I'm at it. It's still a lot of work setting up animations, what speed they should play at, timing sounds and ingame effects, etc., but it's all comparatively straightforward so it's been a good break from the bug fixing.
For Orex's part, he's been going through animations as quickly as he can. In an effort to get the update out quicker, we're leaving some of the animations in a semi-rough state, basically like this:
Not all of the cutscene animations will be like this, but some will have flat colors in various places, just so we can get through animations quicker. They'll be given full detail later on, but right now since v0.49 is already late, we basically have to pick between having a few animations at full quality, or a larger amount of animations at a temporarily lower quality. I personally think the mood of the cutscenes benefits far more from having a variety of animations, even if they're not fully polished yet, so that's what we're going with for now.
In any case, Orex is nearly finished with the roughs for the Top Priority section of our v0.49 animations list. I still want to get through some of the High Prio animations before we release the update, but especially with the rougher animations, I have high hopes that we'll be able to release the update by the end of this month.
Well, that's pretty much all there is to talk about right now! We're doing our best to get this sucker out, despite the delay, so I hope you're still looking forward to it. Until then, thank you all so very much for reading as always. We'll see you again soon, hopefully with a more concrete release window!