Things are progressing. Very slowly, but they are progressing. I released another internal video showcasing some of the experimental DyiithJhinn additions and started messing around more deeply with overlays in Vegas.
I was able to run a 5-way FFA in this project without any major slowdowns except for when 2x AH and 1x UD engage at once. This is probably due to the overhead caused by particle calculations and damage calculations being so high latency. Compare this to Salvation, when 1v1 AH fights would cause massive slowdowns in the Lost Fleet. I'm interested to see if the new patch will manage to alleviate any of this lag.
In another instance, I encountered severe performance issues from unexplained outside sources. Enough to strip over 50fps out of the game with absolutely no competing CPU or GPU usage. I am not sure what caused this, but it should be easily avoidable during recording session (I usually run a LOT of software, it's probably some stupid FOSS indie shit leaking somewhere).
The particle vanishing issues are all but gone except for major fights, but I'll be able to record around those, so it's not a really big concern. The Anahn particles that are in the game right now are all considered beta and may very well be production worthy. I am going to experiment with some of Krdax's particles and see what I can conjure with them. So far, my experiments are proving to yield fruit. I have one more major game title to rip particles from and see if their textures are any good, the rest from hereon will be entirely custom made. I sent a huge chunk of these to the B5 project since I did mention I would eventually give them some FumeFX sheets to work with. Hopefully they'll be useful.
I processed a chunk of SFX and ran some experiments related to that. Nothing major, but every time I spent 10-20 minutes on sounds I get a few units off my list.
I've had a single unexplained errorless CTD that was surely not related to ram (1.5gb use pre-purge) and instead was likely to be related to some unusual entity issues still lingering around.
The ships I knocked off my DyiithJhinn list - Complacency, Unity, Conviction
Ships I have finished but not implemented - 2-3 Myrookk capitals, 1 Anahn 4th gen frigate, AH Starsong Kyrie, UD Melancholy. Myrookk stuff is extremely low priority right now.
Ships not finished but started on - UD Fear, AH Revelation. The Fear is an ancient model from 2007 and needs to be updated for super high detail prior to going into the UDK. This should be an easy project because the work is all in the materials that may or may not be impossible to do. The Warlord mobile cannon also needs to be updated.
To be quite honest, only the 4th gen Anahn remain to be determined to be really tough. I'll very slowly grind through DJ ships, and I may get a few more Xy ships done (They have a special ship that will be UDK only that I need to update a bit, otherwise that was the toughest model to create so far). But the 4th gen Anahn are the only race without a functional foundation in the game yet. I'll have to figure out how to actually add them as a new race in Rebellion...
Meanwhile, I started getting concerned about the ram limit. I gutted almost every UI-related texture I could, because they are all absurdly wasteful and it's astounding they made it to release like they are. Nonetheless, I feel if I had a super high performance interface setup that only use a single icon for everything related to planets, I could gut even more out of the game. What I really want to do is gut all of their mesh files, but since the entity files reference these, they'll actually crash the game unlike the textures. My next phase is to gut all of the particle textures, because I only use 3-5 of the vanilla textures for most of my particles (some are very outdated and need to be revised so I can remove their corresponding shit). Finally, I need to clean up my own particle texture directory as I'm sure there's 50-60 textures that got phased out when I switched to animated sheets.
The very vast majority of work aside from modeling remains in the particles, abilities, and SFX. Unfortunately, most of my time is being taken up by being in excrutiating pain from my CTS and arthritis, so I spend most of my hours editing videos for unrelated projects. The hardest part of this project draws closer each and every day - Unreal.
I've had one dance with Unreal so far. It turned out better than expected. But there's still a lot of unknown factors - like textures, and certain scenes will be super hard while others should be relatively simply. Without characters, I can't model most of the scenes since I don't have scale or style to base on. However, I may start trying to model some of the props in the near future.
In other areas, I've discovered the lossless codec I use to transition vegas videos to megui is not in fact lossless, and may be why my test videos are still not 1:1 with sins yet. I'll need to figure out how to get better visual quality before I can consider making a public trailer.
/edit
The OP has been updated to reflect the changes in release and development policies. E.g., the cancellation of the dev series and the privatization of the new sound library.
