Beginning Week 7: Refactoring

Now that most of the major new pieces of the update have been implemented, I'm delegating the rest of the time to refactoring, bugfixing, and polishing the game.

First change is that there is now an actual night sky.

I felt this was necessary because the night sky in the game prior to this was very bland and uninteresting. This new night sky will slowly fade into view as the night grows in-game. I also included a shader that I wrote which makes the stars twinkle every once in a while in a random fashion. It feels pretty real in-game.

I also fixed some awful transition between the day and night sky. For a while the sunset looked ugly because the sky faded to pure black and had a strong red sunlight throughout. This was addressed by smoothing out the color in the transition and giving it a nice tinge of pink. It's much better now:

Another change I did recently was improve the accuracy of reflection probes. Before, certain objects had a very shiny coating at night because Unity was using an inaccurate environment map. But now I added support for realtime environment map generation so objects more accurately reflect the environment they are in. This made a big difference indoors as it removed the glowy shiny artefacts and made the overall scene look more grounded.

 This prompted a new quality setting in the game. You will now be able to choose from low,  medium, and high. On low, the game remains like before. On medium, the reflection probe runs once every second. On high, it will update every 14 frames (it's not that much of a difference).

The character shader has been revised and now features a more grounded appearance but still maintain the toon aesthetic.

Lastly, the tutorial system is being improved as well and will feature better documentation. Some textures have been changed as well:

I am in the process of knocking out any and all remaining bugs reported in the Discord. I am also making cooking less of a pain to work.

Public release is T-9 days. Stay tuned!

CHANGELIST

• Added night sky stars
• Added water current forces to the main river
• Fixed some holes near the pond
• Changed UI textures
• Improved reflection probe calculations
• Some items will no longer fall off when touched
• Loli now reacts to splashing water when outside the bathtub.
• Fixed loli rotating during a headpat
• Loli will now match the appropriate sit down/stand when going somewhere (prevents her from crawling to a direction instead of running).
• Fixed handhold angry having wrong animation
• Reworked Horse controls (can now hold both reins)
• Improved hand physics (less slippery and can now squeeze carry items)
• Fixed give behavior