[Experimental] Our Apartment v0.10.0.a: Cum FX, Grope Functionality, Graphical Improvements, Polish!

Sorry I'm late, but I didn't want to make a post saying "just a couple days" and then feel like I have leeway to do more fixes. Most of the last few days is "It works in editor but not in build" issues.

This build will be marked experimental until I can determine how buggy it is.

Cum VFX

This was a much bigger challenge than anticipated, and part of that is it's a subject I'm a bit out of my depth on. But at minimum the new ejaculation effect works, the problem is it has the potential to break every time I touch it. These effects still need work, some performance improvements, some just clean up. Maybe some smarter behavior.

But the goal was solutions that work in any context. And it's pretty much there. I MAY look at actual fluid physics instead of rope physics we'll see. But for now this lets me move forward with the mentality of needing to polish this, rather than make a whole new system.

The effects listed in the previous post, have been integrated throughout cinematics, sex sim, and blow job training. But there's still more to do.

Grope implementation

Gropes now have an effect on sex sim and when ready will trigger dialogue. They've also gotten a lot of stability improvement. The current effect of gropes is between reducing arousal decrements and increasing the rate. Soon they may apply buffs and debuffs as well. The plan is for certain statuses to occur semi-randomly and to get the results you want you have to manage speed, dialogue, and gropes.

Oh, additionally the grope and hold buttons at the bottom have been removed, and a global grope toggle button has been added to the top menu bar. ATM gropes are only possible in sex sim, but next update they will be available in pose mode and certain other scenes.

For the some that wanted mouse icons instead of the 3D hand, that option will come, i haven't done anything with mouse icons so if I do it will be a whole thing and probably relate to other UI changes. I also toned down the heart effect, but that effect in general is temporary. I want to change it to something that better represents what the effect is doing.

Major visual improvement

The game now has multiple visual improvements and also new optional lower settings.

The SSGI asset has been changed for a better one, making some scenes appear more grounded. Certain glowing outfit items or other stuff may also have better lighting impact. Like how the hugging scene above. SSGI is currently only available in Ultra and UltraRT quality

The SSAO asset has been replaced, the asset has 3 SSAO modes that are now divided between the lowest and highest settings. Low has basic SSAO, Medium to ultra is now GTAO, and UltraRT has RTAO. Benefits can be seen everywhere.

Naomi's body now has a softening filter making her skin look softer and fleshier. This applies on all but low quality mode.

DLSS is back, I tried bringing STP back but for some reason it kept breaking. As for DLSS the implementation was fairly quick, in the future I plan to add a "Before/After Postprocessing" toggle. Before looks better but has less performance benefit (most performance impact is from SSGI/SSAO/Shadows), After has the most performance benefit but looks worse (I need to address some issues with dithering, but that's still a long term goal).

There is now new "Unlit" quality modes, but this is a misnomer, it just means no shadows and disables the sun light, which is the majority of the rendering cost. I will improve this in the future by adding some perpetual lights on the character, since the sun light is gone. But this means I need to manage some systems a bit. I want to avoid this stacking with other added lights and have a better system for when the indirect lighting is not good enough.

I would like to hear about performance impact from everyone, but from my own tests the performance profile isn't too different from before. I also know people might want more graphics settings but while things change so much I don't want to do that atm. More graphics settings will likely come when do some refactoring on settings in the future to improve saving and loading, additionally when things are less constantly changing.

Lots of clean up and refactoring

At some point i got sick of working on the cum VFX and decided to polish other aspects, here's some random notes:

The free cam now focuses on visible characters prioritizing Naomi. So no more getting sent to the void.

I discovered why some expressions and dialogue is missing from sex sim, apparently i reworked some dialogue variables and never made those changes in the game itself. This has been fixed and now Naomi is as expressive as she was before. I don't remember when I made this change, so it's been broken a while :/

Pose mode has been refactored a bit to be in line with other scene activations, I had intended to fix some stuff like look direction and add some features, but I ran out of time. In the good news though pose mode is now ready to load additional environments.

I adjusted the behavior of Naomi's facial expressions a bit, now things should reset a bit better avoiding scenarios where her eyes remain closed for example. I haven't thoroughly tested this though. Additionally, I added a "lock mouth animations" toggle for when activating certain scenes where her mouth shouldn't change. I... (checks project) ... FORGOT TO ENABLE THIS THO. Next release... Anyway, we'll be adding facial expressions to the BJ training dialogue soon.

That language issue that prevented the game from loading properly has been definitely fixed.

Quickie mode now works again

the 3D VN setup has been completely reworked to use a single camera instead of multiple with render textures. The lighting for them has also be adjusted, they should generally look better now. Unless they break...I didn't do much testing.

The vehicle system used in the cafe scene had some performance issues that have been addressed, it's also less buggy.

A wide range of internal improvements that give more control, for example sex sim pace has been an issue for a while, I can now tune that globally without having to do a bunch of other tuning.

I've been doing a bunch of code clean up getting rid of things I no longer use.

Couch missionary is currently disabled until I redo the animations

Free Demo Coming Soon

A big reason why I had to rework the cum and rework gropes is I'm trying to get closer to a final functional picture for the most part. And I want to release a new demo. I can't release a demo with half implemented systems, so those systems need to be complete.

So, the goal for next month among some other things is a new public demo, this will be on all platforms including web. One of the things I've been waiting for is compatibility with Burst Compiler for WebGL. Burst compiler is used for cloth physics and some other stuff like animation rigging (used for looking and such) so this was mandatory.

Part of the issue of delivering a demo is excluding some content, so I'll have to set that up. But it shouldn't be too troublesome. Main thing is making sure what's accessible is polished since I don't want to have to update it down the line any time soon. But I'll avoid temporary fixes which is why some aspects have gotten refactoring's even though they technically work.

What else is next

So again, we're focusing on general polish, I want to take a look at scene transitions since sometimes fade transitions fail and I want to avoid that. Additionally, sometimes a fade transition is not needed, like certain BJ scenes seamlessly transition from one to another. So these shouldn't cause a blink fade, they should just be a simple cut at worst. This should help reduce the frequency of the blinks.

I also want to improve the snappiness of the transitions, so things move when they're ready rather than what's often a timer and a prayer.

The rest is a focus on animations and possibly some new environments. One feature I've been wanting to prove is things like pose mode in special "role play" locations and even sex sim having the same options. I may do a poll on this...

But first...

I'll be taking a short break, I want to work on some other stuff for a bit. Kalan will get an update soon since their clothing was finished a while ago. I'll also be reworking their textures for URP.

The character that was name Naiara will be remade from scratch, I wasn't happy with the fox appearance, and going more human had issues, so she'll be changing species but maintaining the overall design concept. Name might be changed too...is it a bit odd I landed on two N names with similar Syllables? It has meaning and purpose but ehhh...

Anyway, I may spend a week doing a whole new model. I think you guys will like this one.

"Description of scene here": REPORT BUGS!

Some of you might have played the last build release and saw a bunch of these. This is a random error that occurred somehow and I just didn't see it. Basically, I have these placeholders for when scenes aren't completed, and they're all based on the same prefab. And SOMEHOW that prefab got reset throughout the entire project. Both enabling the object that's normally hidden AND deleting the text on it.

I don't know when this happened, but it basically replaced like 90% of cinematics with this.

No one reported this to me I had to discovered it own my own. DX

Please understand I don't get to test this game a lot since playing through it takes a lot of time on it's own, especially playing through from the beginning. If something seems really off like this I NEED to know.

I can't pay anyone to test these things, and it's uncommon that I can find these issues myself.

So, I need your help! I know not all of you play every build but anything weird please report, even if I always can't address it any time soon.

Thanks for your support!

That's all for now, thanks for your support and patience!

This build will come to itch shortly...

OSX builds are in progress but for some damn reason the builds keep failing and I don't know why yet. Both cloud build fails AND the laptop I have fails but it's 100% fine on every windows device.

Android builds will come based on how stable this release is to determine if it's worth the time.

Thanks for your support and patience

~sacb0y

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