ARCHIVE v0.3.018

Hello friends of Archive,

just before the end of year we have another update for you. The last few months have been very productive. You will find the list of changes as usual at the end of this post. For some changes we also want to go into more detail further below.

But first, a fair amount of new story has been added. Around 1.5k nodes with 7k words, which is now a total of 8,8k nodes and 44k words in Archives story, Yey. The overhaul of old story parts has been also continued.

During the last weeks we had a conversation about Archive and it's annoying repetitions. (If you have your own ideas to break things up, we are eager to hear them! :)

So, we took our time to think about how to overcome this repetitions and what's next. As some of you already know, we are already working towards a bigger milestone. We aimed to complete this one by the end of the year. Which we did not manage to. Tweaking the realtime 3D and adding the last features took more time than expected. But it's mostly done now. (More on that further below.) And thanks to some awesome feedback we fixed logic issues in the story and major bugs in the code. In sum we should have now a stable version of Archive to build on and work with.

So what's in for the Future? - Well, our milestone consists of:

- The recording of video tutorials on how to write storys and using the new studio.

- Adding the next step in story. Specifically, this is the next stage in the relationship with Archive.

- Rework the entire web presence of Archive & reorganize Patreon.

We believe that especially the new story part has to be released in one go. At least some basic version of it. That means it will take some time until this story update is released. This does not mean we do not do updates. You just will not be able to play this new parts until everything is ready for it ;). Story parts that are not part of it or fit the current content will be accessible earlier.

We will keep you updated on this milestone progress!

Realtime 3D:

The overall completion of RT3D is now at about 95%. Still some details are missing, but these are no major functions and will be added when necessary. In addition to changing clothes and their color you now will be able to modfiy the body shape. At the moment this does not include the face. We are still testing to figure out the best way to make this modifiable.

With this new variety in the bodys shape sadly do come in a lot more clipping issues. We try our best to fix them. But when you go with extreme values we unfortunately can't cover them all. We will therefore limit the values in Archives story. You can go more crazy with them in your own story. This of course will on the other end limit the poses you can use without clipping issues.

While working on the modifications we did tweek the shaders of Archive, too. The skin now has SSS and the texture size also got upgraded. Archive is now using 4k textures. As she is sometimes very close to the camera we think this was a necessary step. And while she is most of the time the only thing on screen this should not be a problem performance wise. If have issues nonetheless, please let us know.

For the environment we did switch from a sphere texture to realtime reflections. This may cost a little more render performance but is a significant visual quality improvement. Especially on shiny surfaces.. ;) On top of that we added depth of field, which you can toggle in the settings.

Settings:

Speaking of settings: When you start this update for the first time, all software settings (gameplay, sound, render settings, ...) will be reset. This is because we did seperate the settings into their own file. You will now find a xml file in the locallow directory of naughty habits.

Mediagroups:

There was a problem because of two different kind of mediagroups. The one you can add when ever you want and the others created by the story. Both are listed in the inventory and until now you could delete both of them. This of course is a problem when the story trys to load an image of the story's own mediagroup. We had code the prevent this from happening. But due to changes it stoped working and we missed to update the code. Therefore mediagroups are now split into two lists. And the mediagroups created by the story are no longer deletable.

Randomness:

Lately we had the hunch that something was off. Some parts of the story did run again and again, while others didn't. That's why we changed the code behind the fork node in random mode. It should now be more evenly distributed.

Data handling:

We also changed some code in the story's data structure. This does not effect your savegame. What it does effect is the saving of story data. We deleteted unnecessary values and shrunk the files size. Still we do not know for any other story than Archive's. This is why we decided to not include a patcher. Should you be writing your own story and want to update to this and futher versions, please let us know and we will provide this patching routine. Your story needs patching when you have added environment or outfit nodes.

DO NOT RUN this (or later versions) with your own story without doing a backup.

All that's left to say is have some nice days, happy holidays in case your are celebrating and a happy new year soon!

Cheers,

NH

Patch notes of ARCHIVE v0.3.018

- Cas2 cloth variants

- Added body modification.

- Upgraded skin to 4K textures.

- Added sub surface scattering.

- Skin color is now adjustable.

- Tweak rendersettings, new XML file for settings

- Added depth of field.

- Switched to realtime reflections.

- Added a separation of mediagoups. System mg are no longer deletable.

- New shoes added.

- Ambient lighting can now be adjusted in color.

- Overhaul of the story data structure.

- Overhaul and adding of new Animations.

- The usage of emmotion sets are now displayed in the studio.

- Overhault of old UI elements to fit the new look.

- Added more options to the color selecting tool.

- Fixed a couple of issues with the realtime character model.

- Fixed abroad & resume issue.

- Fixed some posing glitches.

- Fixed issue with load & unload of images.