[GENERAL] Murphy stroke (hard) again.

So, what's going on. No news for almost 2 months.

1. Software galore:
As you probably know, I've been working on a new version of the Engine that uses HDRP (High Definition Render Pipeline). This means I had to upgrade the tools I use to create KT. Apart from the code and assets migration process there were several problems I had to face. The most important and problematic one is the new version of the Tool crashes... Very often. Users like me have reported this problems long time ago. But, at this time, the problem is still not fixed and greatly impact our daily work.
Here is a link to one of the countless threads that report the bug: https://forum.unity.com/threads/editor-keeps-crashing-constantly.1420121/. 20 crashes a day is far too much to work in good conditions. A complex tool like Unity uses lots of meta files and cached data to "connect" code and assets and if any is corrupted, the result can be catastrophic for your project. First rule don't forget to backup your project.

2. Hardware misfortune:
In order to keep safe my projects, I use 2 hard drives dedicated to backups. KT is quite a big project (around 120GB uncompressed), doing a full backup takes lots of time and power and my (5 years old) computer is unusable during this process. That's why I only do a partial (code and assets without cached data) daily backup and a full backup once a week. A month ago, the Tool crashed while updating a package. This caused the corruption of cached data and/or meta files. As a result, the project was broken. I couldn't load it anymore even when using the Unity's safe mode, it was crashing during the loading process.

That's when I saw a system message saying that one of my backup drive has been disconnected. Long story short, the hard drive has died. I started to think about the consequences... If I can't save the current version of KT's project on my working drive. I'll have to restore it from the 2nd backup drive... This means an older version and I'll lose a month of work.

3. I'll never give up:
And I didn't. I've tried to save the current version of the project. After several attempts, I've finally succeeded. I've created a brand new project using the same settings and packages than the broken one. Then, I've copied all codes and assets of the broken project to the new one. The tool simply reimported all the stuff (this took a while but worth it). There was still a few issues here and there to fix, but the current version of the project was saved. Needless to say that after that, I immediately bought a new (bigger) hard drive and did a full backup.
Let's get back to work.

4. Anything else?
Of course, I've found some time between software and hardware crashes to work on KT. Using DAZ models and textures greatly improved the quality but it also greatly impacted the performances. My goal it to make sure KT can run at a fair framerate (30 fps) on a my current (5 years old) hardware (Core i7 8700, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 6GB).

DAZ models consum at least 5 times more memory for the geometry and 8 times more for the textures. In order to keep all the customization capabilities, I had to replace some default components (SkinnedMeshRenderer) by my own ones in order to share as much data as possible between characters and optimize the skinning and morphing processes.

I've managed to cut down the memory consumption for any additional character by almost 5. I've implemented a custom geometry processor using jobs and compute shaders which allowed the game to reach the targeted framerate in most cases and there's still room for textures optimizations.

5. And so, where's the new build?
All terrains, materials, custom effects have been converted to the new version of the engine. This was not easy concerning the custom effects because HDRP is not as flexible as the old builtin renderer. The lighting problems are almost all fixed (the Academy and the Diner look really good). There are still a few problems with the interactions UI and the graphics options.
I hope Unity will be able to fix the crashes soon, because right now it's very difficult to work with the Editor and I need to import the converted animations. Writing code in Visual Studio doesn't require to use the Editor, but I have to test and debug it from time to time.

I'll never thank you to much for your support and your patience, so thank you all. I hope to have good news to share with you in a few days.