Hello friends of Archive,

we are back with another update. And this time it's a big one. After the last one we went full swing into Archive being realtime 3D. And with nothing that stopped us the entire past months we were able to work on this full time. And.. yea.. it's done! We started working on it around version 0.2.000. One and a half year ago! And now, after simultaneous programming on "two games", it finally has become one. Finally you can experience all this work. It's such a relief for us.

All the static images for the main story are gone and replaced with RT3D. The functionallity of using images will of course remain. But for the story "Archive" we will stop using them.

This enables lot of new possibilities and the real fun can beginn. As a player you now can customize "certain things" ;). And as a creator even more. You can create your own characters, poses, face expressions, camera & lights setups, and more.. all of it in the new "Studio". This is now part of Archive and can be accessed in the main menu while on stage / edit mode of a story. As this Studio is in it's first version, it might hide bugs we do not know about yet. Therefore, please, work with backups! Also did we bring in a ton of new features, menues and settings. Which are not polished and more importantly have no description to it yet. So please bare whis us, this will come.

Of course we also tried out the new features our self and did create new content with them. We had quite some fun with the new tools. The workflow is great. For example, we can add a missing face expression in a minute and are able to instantly flip back into edit mode to continue writing. Creating new content feels much quicker now, plus we can finally add ideas we had on hold for a long time. Also, the realtime 3D update tied up a lot of our capacity, which has now been freed up again.

We hope your are eager to try this one out. If so, please, as always make a backup of your savegame. We had no issues by updating to this version, but you never know. At the same time we like to point out that your savegames should never stop working, as this is one of our major priorities. Nevertheless we would recommend to start a new game whis this version. Because the content that did exists so far, has changed a bit. We had to tweak some values and text. Theirfore may some of your already set values be incorrect by now. As Archive expands and the story evolves we have to revisted old parts from time to time. To make them fit. We think this is an important step to keep the story and immersion nice, updated and clean.

So, what's next? Content!

For the majority we will focus on content for the next month. Of course we will add some functions here and there, as some are still missing to access all new features of RT3D ( modding the characters body is still WIP ). But do not expect bigger new features for the rest of this year. We think it's time to use all great new possibilites of RT3D, make another big step in story and write our ideas that had been on hold for a long time. And when we speak of content we now do also talk about 3D content. As Archive now for example can switch clothing, creating these is also content. And we do have a bunch of them in the pipeline right now.

And yes, we have noticed the clipping issues of some clothings. We are in the middle of that. Figure out what works best whis the new system. What do to, to make it as nicely polished as possible and at the same time flexible to combine different clothes with one another.

We also have to revisit the tutorial story. This one is a bit out of date. It's missing the new features and some existing functionalities have changed. Also do we plan on create some video tutorials on how to use Archive as story creator and how to use the studio.

And now some info for story creators (The following sentences do not only refer to this update.):

Rarly we have to tweak the code behind the story class in a critical way. We only make these changes when they are really necessary. Because it can destroy a story. But sometimes we have to this. When we do, we also create a script that updates a story accordingly. But this script and it's update function we only apply to the story of Archive and it's not part of the released software. It would take us some time to implement. Which we would spend, but as of now we do not know about a single person who does currently write it's own story. If you do so, please reach out to us. We can help. The easiest way to get help would be our discord server. You can find a link on itch or patreon. And of course, do a backup of your story before play/edit it with a new version.

We know that such a problem is a really bad thing. And especially in the early stages of developing Archive it did happen. But now that the software is in a more developed state, we believe that this will be a thing of the past. We try our best to prevent this from happening again. 

Well, all that's left to say is, pay Archive a visit! :)

Have a nice day,

NH

Patch Notes:

- Added RT3D

- Added RT3D preview function to the editor

- Added Environment node, this let's you control the light / camera.

- Added Outfitter node to edit clothings.

- Added a floor to the realtime environment for better feeling of depth.

- Background FPS added. When you tab out of the software it will generate less fps to lower the GPU load.

- Added a searchfield with autocompletion to the dialog node. Variables names or tags can be added to the text by this. ( preventing mistypes)

- Added an undo/redo function to the text of the dialog node.

- Fixed an issue where folders with only videos did crash a session.

- Fixed an issue where Archive will gift you a item slot before being able to access it.

- Deleted all the images of the Archive story.

- A bunch of smaller issues and fixes.

Oh, and we fixed a bug reguarding mediagroups. Maybe an old and deleted mg of yours does popup again in the inventory. If so, it was lost somewhere in the dataset but stil did exist. You are of course now free to delete it again and this time it will be definitly gone. ;)