A Gaze into the Future - VII - Also a soft call for feline OC skins (Patreon)

Wow! Is this really the seventh monthly Gaze or did I mess up the numbering at some point? I guess this is! Madness.

Hello and welcome, my lovely patrons and followers and every single person or pawson that takes a peak at this! ^^ 

So, as you may know, we've been working on new furry heads and body improvements all the last month, and r4.14 showroom preview build is already out. Next up we're finishing last bits for full r4.14 release (note: It still won't have all the skins and animations, because they take quite a long time to fix for the new heads and bodies) and we're aiming to release the r4.14 full build (with island and new movement system) by the end of next week.

After that, it's time to get fuming with R5. R5 is basically going to be all about hunting, item management, and conversations. It sounds like it's suddenly a huge stretch of work before anything new gets in, but all those three features are actually smaller than they sound like, and perfectly support "step at a time" -approach. Unlike the new heads and body setup, we can make new builds while systems are still in development, and just add snippets here and there until the the full hunting system is in ^^

Also I finally made a proper feature progress bar (totally not inspired by what Fek does <3):

Click for bigger version: http://www.ruffleneck.com/PatreonProgressbar.png

I left out releases 1-3 from the progress bar because they're basically just one big blob of testing systems and basically fall completely under prototyping / pre-alpha phase of development. This progress bar will be added to the main page too, I just need to figure out some nice HTML/CSS trick to make it readable ^^

Currently I'm fighting with the fur shader to figure out why or how we can use it effectively. It looks pretty good (as you can see in the preview build) but it's not very optimal, and it has a lot of issues with enabling and disabling tails (which is the reason there's only one tail in the preview build). If the shader isn't usable in the end, there is a better alternative (modelling fur manually), but the problem is that it's so much more time consuming and has to be built per object instead of being fairly automatic like the shader would be. We'll see. Either way, fur is, and will stay in :3

Hareress is fixing the old animations, and next week focusing on new skins (If you have any favorites, feel free to send them in at rufflenecks[thisisatsignusedinemails[()]]]gmail.com! If you have any feline ocs, you can send them in too, just make sure you have rights to them and remember that we can only support 3 colors at the moment. We'll eventually have official character submission things too, for huntable or meetable characters ^^), and Drathek (our resident coderoar <3) is fighting the good fight with me against the fur shader and will... after we either admit defeat or celebrate victory, move to the gunplay programming x)

Speaking of guns.

Here's a rough concept of the hunting rifle. I think there will eventually be different tiers of guns, and this would be something in the middle ^^ Mechanics wise it's an over and under rifle, has a classic gunpowder cartridge (I love big bangs and I can't make a pun out of this), but instead of a bullet, it has a dart it fires. Yes, it will sting a little, and no, I don't want a gun that says spufft and shoots a dart. Bang! Or go home.. or... well, miss, and see everyone run away because of the noise x)

Eventually there will be different kind of ammo too, with different power vs tranquilizer strength to consider. It's not that important for the first versions, but eventually with different species needing different dozes to tranquilize and with different "overdoses" it's going to add a nice depth to hunting. And of course, the greedy big city traders will ask a lot more for the stronger ammo, but it's also one thing that we can give as loot... hunt for species, hunt for items, hunt for everything! :3

Well, I think that's all, from top of my head. I don't dare to dig too deep x)

Have a good one, my pretty pretty ones :3

Yours truly,
Ruffleneck