Hi, everyone!

It’s been a while, so first and foremost, we’d like to apologize to everyone for the long period of silence and lack of updates, as well as for the lack of responses. We realize that our communication has been less than ideal in that regard, and for that, we sincerely apologize.

Secondly, today we bring an update to the engine! As a quick summary: Long-awaited inclusion of more outfits, Linux build, and an experimental preset saving feature. Let’s break it down below, shall we?

Linux Build

We’ve made a Linux version of the Character Gen EX editor, but this is currently untested, as we do not utilize this system. If you encounter any issues starting the application, please let us know below in the comments.

More Outfits

Today, we bring some proper outfits: soldier armors, traveller clothes, simple dresses, rogue outfits, and simple commoner clothes. Here’s a nice preview!

We have plans to branch out and create more outfits, but we have no release schedule or a roadmap available yet, and we’ll discuss more about that regard below.

Save Character Preset (Experimental)

A very important feature people have asked for is the ability to save character presets. As of today, we’ve included this new feature, with the caveat that it is currently in an experimental phase.

So, what does this mean in practice? Well, the feature exists and can be utilized, but under a limited scope. Currently, the save preset correctly registers the paperdoll parts being used, but it does not save colors correctly if you set these colors manually. If you randomize the character, the colors will register, but for manually selected colors, they do not save accurately.

Why is this happening? We believe it’s a bug in the way colors are handled in certain areas, such as hair color 4 being able to change both hair colors at the same time. It conflicts with our script in Unity, and the preset does not work as intended upon being saved into the JSON file if you use the other color parameters, like 1~3 instead of 4.

Another bug is that if you select and delete multiple presets, and click both buttons in the window at the same time, the window goes inactive, and all buttons in the paperdoll stop working. In that case, a forced closing of the application is necessary.

Lastly, these presets might lose their compatibility in the future if we make adjustments to the way the editor saves them, so for now, we’d like to leave this here as a disclaimer and to take this feature as just something extra for now.

The Future of the Editor

To conclude this devlog, we’d like to discuss the future of the editor. First and foremost, thank you to all who have given this product a chance despite the radio silence on our end. We’re working on multiple projects, and we still need to find a better way to have a constant feed of communication while being able to focus on development.

That aside, we’ve realized the editor currently has too many issues. Chief among them is how we can streamline more parts production in a way that is easier to draw and less taxing to export, which is currently a logistics nightmare. Thanks to that, we’re considering changing and recoding portions of the editor so it has a different layer reading method.

As of the moment, we lay parts of the outfit in separate layers to be colored differently, but that makes drawing, recoloring the grayscale, and cutting up the pieces a giant hassle and a nightmare to debug. The new method we’re thinking of making it so the editor only needs a grayscale base image + thumbnail for editor preview + mask (for things such as hats, to help hide ears) + a colormap based on a series of color zones. More details about this will come in the future.

That’s it, everyone. Thank you for your continued support, and see you next time!