non-numbered update! wow!!
hello friends! since I’ve completed the critical parts of the engoodening, I made the decision to split it in half so that we can get the important fixes and stuff up ahead of my other plans. thus, we have Engo, The First, and Odening, The Flast.
Engo is up and has all of the important tech stuff I was working on, plus a little extra! notes within
Engo Changes
Da Big Visible Ones:
- Chromium performance should be better across the board on 3D stages, with VRAM flickering much rarer (especially in the Embassy). Firefox does not benefit from this nearly as much, unfortunately.
- Camera/stage rework - all stages should have normalized heights, cameras, all angles have been touched up, third person camera in embassy should look a lot better across the board. widescreen should no longer make you ultra tall for no reason.
- the beginning and end to Suspicion in the embassy are different now. this part of the site's writing and presentation has always been the weakest point and bugged me, which is bad because it's so important. this is probably the only time I'll ever revisit and alter a scene so much. the old version was a product of how little time I had to review and rework things back in the EP1 days!
- (technically a retcon, but it's the same info being given in a better way so i'm ok with it)
- the basis for a localization system is in place, allowing for easy replacement of even hardcoded text. more info on this to come in time
- save export/import is now file based - but there's an 'advanced' string import option you can still use for older saves too
- moth's icon now glows if there's anything new to be talked about - it checks for new stuff on a timer and whenever the page changes, so it doesn't constantly light up every single time there's some new minutiae to learn about.
Other Stuff:
- Quality rework - there's now only "regular" and "low" since the differences between high/regular were based on a misunderstanding
- there's a very simple mod loader in the system menu (which now should be a little easier to parse overall too)
- widescreen users now have a highly recommended option to limit their resolution (can be ignored)
- a number of hover-text definitions are now handled automatically, and will be consistent across appearances. before, they'd be defined in some places, and not in others
- early sprites have had off-palette grays cleaned up
- in-combat item usage is now a click-to-open menu vs the hover thing it was before
- rare music overlap when changing pages should be fixed
Firefox Users Beware
we've been trying to track and solve all instances of firefox-specific flickering - it's a browser-level issue with the 3D rendering that we theorize is related to elements being transformed at angles that the browser doesn't like, since it has nothing to do with usage... really strange!!
if it happens to you, it's typically a flash of white or grey, then your entire browser runs poorly until you fully close and re-open it. it's like FF says "ok nevermind I actually don't want to use the GPU anymore"
it happened before in a few select places, and it should happen less now that we kinda know how to stop it, BUT if it happens to you please let me know where!! send me an email or xweet or something with your resolution and where it showed up
anyway, take a look! enjoy! and beware... Odening lurks over the horizon... they will carry much of the 'fun' parts of the engoodening...