[Upcoming] Our Apartment v0.11.0: New launcher, New Sex Sim Mechanics, other fixes

Hello peeps, sorry but the build is going to be a bit late, I still need to finish testing features. There's some bugs in the last release that kind of randomly affected people so I need to do a thorough play through and that needs a few days... If you wanna test, ask on the discord!

But I decided at minimum I should make a post before the end of the month describing what the update will be.

Largely this is a mechanics update and QOL update!

What's coming:

A new launcher is added to make opening the game in DX11, (and when the build includes it) or Vulkan. This launcher also includes easy access to logs, the screenshot, and save folder!

More aspects of the game are now loaded instead of perpetually available in memory, this includes sex sim animations and configs and store items, in addition items are loaded ambiguously instead of based on a specific index. This means content can be added and simply loaded which has potential for future mod support, or practical smaller delivery of future content like outfits or sex sim positions. This also reduces memory usage across the game. Unfortunately, this could have various impacts that could break things, so I need to test a lot of things.

This loading change will also allow me to release the demo as excluding content is much easier.

Sex Sim has gone through a bit of a gameplay update I'll explain that below...

The game now has custom mouse icons which indicate what certain clicks do.

You can now hide the majority of 3D grope objects in favor of mouse icons. In certain cases in the future some of these 3D objects will be visible regardless of the toggle.

Fade functionality has been revamped to be more reliable but also this requires more testing. Some instances were found that caused issues due to the old setup.

The screenspace SSS effect is now toned down by a distance falloff.

Centralized clothing masks more hopefully fixing and avoiding some issues, i also fixed some annoyances with using dictionaries and serialization but don't worry about that...

I removed some settings I believe caused problems, namely "exclusive fullscreen" which dx12 apparently technically doesn't support. I also reworked how Vsync/refresh rates and FPS and set.

Sex Sim Updates

So, sex sim has been broken for a while, to some this might have been obvious to others it seemed like Naomi was less expressive than she used to be, and others might have thought it was normal.

One issue I discovered last month was certain dialogue variables weren't assigned properly, but a few days ago I discovered the biggest issue. The scriptable object configs for Likes and Buffs got completely broken. I guess I changed the way they were serialized at some point? No idea how it happened but it's fixed now. You should now see buffs and Naomi may display heart eyes gain!

New functions

Part of why I discovered this was a need for new buffs and likes for new systems.

Sex sim now has a few new functions to gamify things a bit more:

Cumming together no longer works immediately and now displays before both characters are in threshold. Instead cumming together now triggers "catchup and brake" state. So, for example, if the player is in threshold and Naomi is not, clicking the button makes a cumming together "attempt" where Naomi tries to get in threshold and player tries to avoid further increasing their meter. If successful it works, and if not, it fails causing a cooldown state with different effects depending on who's "on top".

There's is now an "edge" state, roughly above the 70% mark keeping the right speed also triggers a "catchup and brake" state

There is now a "Panic" factor, currently above 95% or after climax together fails, where there's an increasing chance of auto cumming. This may be adjusted....

There is now a visible cum threshold on the meter and some UI effects

All of these have impact based on various character stats.

Arousal increments and decrements are now based on delta time rather than specific ticks which is to help make balancing easier.

All that said this adds quite a bit of complexity to the code and some rebalancing. So, this is another reason I need to test a lot! Once things get working better I can release test builds.

Conclusion

Due to working on Forest Project, the first half of this month things start a bit later, but a lot has been done, it's really just testing and bug finding. I don't expect things to take much longer as I'm avoiding any new functions, but the play through may reveal some issues that take a lot of fixes and further testing.

Thanks for your patience!

~sacb0y