October Update: #SaveSuni will release on time, despite technical bullshit (Patreon)

(SHOUTOUT TO MY BOUND BROTHERS WHAT WHAT )

Did you notice that big pretty lake splash page up top? Who couldn't ride futa dick with that kind of ambiance? 

Let's get to it.

1. #SaveSuni Drops In October

You heard it here first, folks. #SaveSuni is coded, implemented, illustrated, and ready for release in every way except...

2. What's the deal with the animations?

The animations are running pretty slowly, and cause the game to devour RAM like a hungry hog. Why is that? 

Yeah. Why IS that? 

The bug reports we'd gotten (special shoutout to @Max Musterman) about this issue pointed out that our game was actually more resource intensive than Maxed Out Skyrim.  This was very surprising to us, because our game is mostly splash pages and text, with occasional gifs of dickgirls railing you right up the ass. Nothing that would require more than 16GB of RAM. 

(16 gigs. For fuck's sake.)

So we investigated the issue, and the news was actually quite bad.

Like most of our headaches, it has to do with the limitations of the GameMaker Studio engine.

3. Every Frame A Painting

We added new animations for #SaveSuni--some delicious chocolatey pixels that y'all will assuredly enjoy--but now we can't compile the game anymore.  

Here's the unholy combination explaining why: 

a. Every graphical asset has to be a picture (sprite), or a succession of pictures (animated sprite).  GMS doesn't have native support for videos (or even gifs); it renders animation as pics behind displayed quickly one after another. 

b. Pics can only be PNG files. 

(The PNG-woke people in the house probably just flinched.)

And not our PNG files: GMS automatically converts pics into pachyderm PNG files.

So! Instead of dealing with light, 100-200 kb.jpg files, Game Maker is trying to render an animation out of pics that are ~4MB each.  And when your animations are even a little bit long...

The Shauna/Player scene has about 250 still images in it.  It's trying to load (250 x 4 MB = 1 GB) worth of animation and render it every second. It has to do that for EVERY animation, and the amount of animation in our game is already at the hard limit we can compile. 

This is quite a problem!

4. What Can We Do? Is #SaveSuni Safe?

Yeah, probably. 

We're still investigating solutions—but we're all feeling very excited about some GMS plugins we found literally a day ago, which might allow us to display animations as light .webm files. 

So we're trying to overhaul the whole animation system in the next week so we can launch v0.2b on time.  But v0.2b is launching in October, goddammit. If we can't fix the animations in time, we'll take them out, and release #SaveSuni as-is. We can always put the animations back in by the public release. 

5. In Conclusion: 

The situation isn't great, but it isn't dire either—if this doesn't work out, we'll open up the floor to brainstorming, and offering cash bounties to y'all console cowboys who can fix this. Until then, we're gonna take our own college try. 

(And, in case you missed it in my Sacha-standard-wall-of-text, #SaveSuni will release on time.)

As ever, thank you for your support. 

Sacha Witt

And everyone on the FutaDomWorld Team