Getting Closer To The Next Beta

Hello, this is TitanAnteus here.  I know it's been a while since you've heard from me, the programmer, but here I am.  You guys are probably wondering about what's taking so long with the next beta update.

If you followed the previous update and its delays, you'd know that it was caused due to memory constraints with GM:S as a development platform and with the actual game that it compiled for us.  This forced us to externalize all the adult animations into external images.  This version ALSO sparked problems with a lot of computers because some of the animations were rather large.  For instance, Neko's scene was around 3MB (that's pretty large for a picture) in size.  GM:S's internal functions don't handle external files all that well and loading a 3MB file png strip sometimes caused it to crash. It wasn't a controlled crash either( Sometimes it happened and other times it didn't.)  This means a lot of the work done to make the game more memory efficient wasn't helpful.  I needed to take it further. 

That's where I said, I'd take the animations and turn them into video. This is a change at a very base element of the game (yet again :( ). Making the change itself would be challenging, so of course I had to test it on a seperate project and all.  Recently, I've successfully gotten the videos to work on the seperate project and am currently midway through integrating the videos into the running version of the game.  Veins throughout this time has been tirelessly working on the world's maps, planning boss encounters and locations, and drawing finalized art for the locations so most of the art assets that would be left would just be MoGi, and the other characters.

GM:S just recently updated as well, and I am going through the pains to actually update and change the code to avoid crashes.  Normally, I don't update, for fear of something fundamentally breaking down, but this new update decreases GM's memory limitations CONSIDERABLY and I have to take take that risk.

Of course the update is a large one and the changes it's made makes this a difficult transition to make, though I'm glad it came sooner than later. You can find the update here.

To be honest, I didn't expect to face these types of problems developing the game, but I've made significant progress.  Under the hood progress sucks because you can't really see it all too well, but we're working so that the game runs with all the machines the original demo ran with. This is a huge limitation since the full game's going to be miles larger than the demo but what's the point of a demo if not for showing that the software can run on your PC.

I am confident I can have a working version of the game out in September.

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Also, I don't want to get all sentimental here, but I'd like to thank everyone. You've all been very patient with us as I struggle through problems I didn't forsee.  Also, thanks to everyone's help the current beta runs on many more machines than it did originally (though I still feel the change to video is necessary.)