Oct 13

It’s just 10 days until you dive into exciting new experiences in FreshWomen - Season 2.

FreshWomen - Season 2 - andre.vidal

Hey, FreshMen!

This is the day we've been working toward over the past few months, and the result is something we're really proud of. You're going to love it.

Some faces will be familiar, others completely new, but the chemistry between everyone is stronger than ever.

As you face serious personal challenges, some friendships stay by your side, making sure you never have to fight alone.

Chloe and Julia are ready to explore things with you they never imagined doing together.

Gabby is fun, intense, and unpredictable. Don’t mess things up with her - you could risk the friendship.

You’ll also have the chance to share powerful moments with Alyssa. You’re already part of her plans for something special.

Lily and Susan welcome you with maturity and experience. What do you have to offer them? They don’t settle for just anything.

And that’s not to mention Devilla, Angela, Sue, Ms. Watson, and Emily. Your moments of romance, tension, humor, and sex all await you in FreshWomen - Season 2.

Over the next few days, we’ll keep you updated with teasers, screenshots, and release info.

Add it to your wishlist now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3478650/FreshWomen__Season_2/

FreshWomen - Season 2 has:

6324 gorgeous 4K renders;
407 animations in 60FPS;
Skins and pubes selection available in a few scenes in the Supporter Edition;
Julia’s 3D printable statue, available in the Supporter Edition;
Translations for: English, Spanish, French, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Czech, Thai, Portuguese, Turkish and Russian;
Voice acting, sexy sounds and moaning;
Sweat, physics, and HD maps for all characters;

Notes:

This version does not include episodes from FreshWomen - Season 1.
You can load your savegame from FreshWomen - Season 1 to remember your choices.

See you soon,
OppaiMan.

Oct 13

Bug Fixes and Version Merging

Bubbaruka! - Super Nova Studios

Fixed an issue causing Warn sickness to remain active while in the bubby care menu.
Fixed an issue causing two Blight enemies to respawn upon relaunch.
Fixed an issue that prevented players who bought the heels from buying the necklace.
Merged the two launch options of the game, halving the file size.
- The default and sole option is now the name fix version. If anyone has any issues with their save being changed as a result of the merge, contact me and I can help send you a save file for where you were.
- A majority of people needed to play the name fix version, so it makes sense to cull the versions down to one.
Let me know if your saves are affected and I will do my best to help you!

Oct 13

It’s just 10 days until you dive into exciting new experiences in FreshWomen - Season 2.

FreshWomen - Season 1 - andre.vidal

6324 gorgeous 4K renders;
407 animations in 60FPS;
Skins and pubes selection available in a few scenes in the Supporter Edition;
Julia’s 3D printable statue, available in the Supporter Edition;
Translations for: English, Spanish, French, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Czech, Thai, Portuguese, Turkish and Russian;
Voice acting, sexy sounds and moaning;
Sweat, physics, and HD maps for all characters;

Notes:

This version does not include episodes from FreshWomen - Season 1.
You can load your savegame from FreshWomen - Season 1 to remember your choices.

See you soon,
OppaiMan.

Oct 13

Monday Musings #28 – Smoke & Mirrors, Part 2 - RGBA Flora

MoteMancer - CyanAvatar

Well the good news is, I set myself up for future success, and am now finally getting to reap the fun mathemagic my past self has sown. I've made no secret about being a color math nerd, and today I'd love to share some subtle FX techniques I've been using for MoteMancer's doodad Flora, and where it will grow to soon.

2D & 3D

For better or worse, MoteMancer does blend 2D and 3D rendering pipelines. I'm not sure I'd repeat that in the future, but it was needed to solve specific problems, and now it's just sort of the bed I've made. The character is actually fully 3D (and I should probably devote an entire Musing to that in the future) as are the procedural terrain meshes, but most of the rest of the game is 2D. With that in mind though, faking 3D turns out to be a fun challenge for simple things like shadows. Most 2D games use static shadows that don't move during the day, but especially since you can literally move the heavens with Daycaller, I wanted to do more.

Color Math, Always Color Math

When I first saw Miguel Salek's demo reel from ages ago, it completely rewired how I thought about color. It's astounding how much you can do with a simple 0-1 data set, and I'd like to demonstrate that in the humble Tree of Life doodad here:

So we have the Diffuse Color pass in the middle as expected, but there are 2 RGBA textures that accompany each doodad, representing 8 things that we can do to alter the presentation of that simple image, and they are all quite different.

For the Shadow Mask on the left:

Red for the hard shadow, you can see it traversing as the day passes, and vanishes at night.
Green for the Ambient Occlusion (AO) that represents darkening or contact shadows, if you look up at a corner of your room right now, you'll notice that things just get a little darker where the walls meet. That's ambient light bouncing less and less, and happens whether the sun is out or not.
Blue is the tricky one. In order to fake the shadow rotation, i am literally telling all of the Red Shadow pixels to move to the right, and then slowly come back to center and move down as the day travels, it's sort of like a part of a Sin wave. Now if i did that to the entire image, the shadow would detach from the tree, thus Blue becomes a mask for how much of that translation to do. Notice that we don't move at all near the roots and increasingly move more as we get to the 'top' of the shadow. The reason for the extra blue area on the bottom is to let the shadow grow into that space because otherwise it would get cut off by the texture bounds
Alpha (not pictured here) will be for a soft bioluminescence pass when night time comes. I'm very much looking forward to implementing that for the December patch.

And then the upright RGBA Mask on the right:

Red controls the hue adjustment mask, we'll get into that later when I show them all together.
Green is a Wind Mask - I jostle the leaves around just a little bit, and the amount that they waver is controlled by how much Green is in a given spot, letting me hit leaves but not branches
Blue in this single mask is the Sun's rim light, which is disabled in the build at the moment but will be coming back in December now that I can tune it for each plane.
Alpha is again a bioluminescence pass for when it turns night and parts of the tree can glow.

Note that I swapped Alpha and Blue for the image above so you can see the rim light pass, in the image below Blue is the bioluminescence pass.
And with all of that technical groundwork laid we are rewarded with...

8 Dimensions of Possibilities

Now we can put this all together and see the anatomy of the trees both for color and the ways we manipulate it. I love this method because it's very much an exercise in "I have 8 Full Channels, how can I get the most out of them?" Every single channel has unique and contextual behavior, but it's all collapsed down to a simple image that can be easily tweaked and atlased with its siblings.

Remember that Red mask channel from before? Notice in the image above, every single flower is the same shade of indigo, but that's not what you see in the game. That's because the mask is allowing me to pick a random Hue inside that mask and shift. Flowers get a lot of hue changes, trees get some but certainly less. This also helps keep things performant because each doodad picks a value based on its position, and the shader just changes that value into something useable per channel. Funnily, this is also why nudging a doodad changes its color, the doodad's position is what drives most of the behavior as it relates to color or local wind.

The result is subtle, but it's amazing how a little motion and variance breathes life into a game. Your brain notices a lack of motion more than subtle motion. Many Structures in the game don't have working animations yet, but they will very soon. For me it was important to make sure that the gameplay and Structure suite was proven before committing to animating them fully, and now here we are.

It's time to teach MoteMancer to dance, and with that, back to the lab 🌿
~CyanAvatar

Oct 13

Team Fortress 2 Update Released

Team Fortress 2 - erics

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

Added 'No Bullets' style for the Commissar's Coat
Added missing string for Cowerhouse contracts
Updated/Added some tournament medals
Updated the Mad Drip to fix LOD problems with a couple of the styles
Updated the Candle Flame Unusual effect to fix a bug where flame's direction point wasn't placed correctly
Updated the Viscera Visor to fix missing flex animation for the surgical hood mesh
Updated Cigarillo Caballero to fix some clipping on the scarf when worn with the poncho
Updated the El Gigante's Gunbelt
- Fixed some minor clipping,
- Fixed a gap on the back with another bullet
- Slightly scaled up belt buckle
Updated the Poncho del Pesado
- Fixed "No Bullets" style not hiding the bullets
- Fixed some minor clipping on both styles
Updated the Buzz Kill
- Fixed hair normals and improved texturing
- Updated backpack icon
Updated the Torn Terror and the Ripped Runts
- Fixed AO problems and improved texture
- Improved mesh to fix clipping
Updated arena_afterlife
- Fixed additional issues causing rounds to last or restart indefinitely
- Added two new Devil voicelines during preround
- Prevented players from going above the clocktower in Hell
- Fixed Devil voicelines overlapping each other
- Fixed players being able to cancel taunts or levitate by attempting to change class mid-round
- Fixed players being able to fall into the lava in Hell and survive
- Rounds are now best-of-3 minirounds instead of best-of-5
- Removed crumpkins
Updated cp_cowerhouse
- Reworked the implementation of the BLU last control point gantry: ragdolls no longer fall through, Engineers' buildings can be placed as intended, and players can properly fall to their demise after the gantry has opened in the post-round finale
- Prevented ragdolls from falling through the RED last control point pit
- Moved the soul gargoyle spawn that used to be underwater to be above-water on the debris buildup at the MID control point
- Shifted the boards on the upper waterfall-side RED barricade in MID to more closely match the height of its BLU counterpart
- Applied minor performance-related optimiztions throughout the map, namely: combined some groups of prop_dynamics each into one prop_static, disabled bone followers on static robots (& gibs), combined several func_nobuilds, and converted a few prop_dynamics to prop_static
- Adjusted a playerclip in the BLU spawn near the rear exit door
- Adjusted the playerclip around the BLU battlement's painting depicting the RED village on fire to more effectively prevent players from getting caught on the edge along the wall
- Mentioned in the changelog (because it wasn't being in nearly enough matches) that shooting each wood cow standin in the RED stable (near the MID control point) will result in them returning to haunt as ghost cows