Fixing issues and progress update (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I got a bit held back this week end by something that annoyed me greatly while I was working on the new area, and as I dug deeper I found that this was an issue already present in multiple places of the game.

As you can see, the left pic (took in the new area), is blurry and deformed, and I realized this effect can be seen in various place, most visible currently must be the university interior during the day. 

I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to fix it,struggling to find the real root cause, before finally realising the answer was really simple, yet complex : some areas are simply too far away from the game's origin. 

For th.e few of you interested in technical details and wondering how the location of an area can cause blurry and deformation of a character, the explication can be found if you think about floating point precision. Modern games engines handle float numbers in 32 bits size, because this is the size that CPUs process the fastest. so, every game object have a location, or more exactly a set of coordinate, and theses coordinates need to be somehow precise to do all kind of operations. And the further you move away from the game's origin, the less space there is for decimal precision : let's say you're fixed to ten digit ( simplification of the 32-bit size), near the origin you'll be able to tell that an object is at location 1.122135546. Now, the same object a bit further away will be at, let's say, 11221.35546 will have less precise calculations. You might think that isn't a big deal, it's precise enough, right?

And that's right for non-moving object, but when you think about it, a character is composed of hundreds (if not thousands) of small points called vertices, that each need to have their coordinates calculated with great accuracy, especially when moving. So, here you go : the effect is caused by all the floating point precision errors in calculating the vertices positions, giving a very blurry and vibrating look. 

Now, the fix is quite simple, I just have to move the relevant area closer back to the game's origin, but while this is easy for the new area, as this is pretty empty for now, it's another deal for the currents ones, as I have to also move all the events waypoints, the pathfinding for NPCs... It's gonna be an huge work that I could have avoided easily if I knew more about the issue beforehand. 

Now that the technical explanation is done, I'll resume working on building the new area. Most of the content that I want to release is soon to be ready, so I think you can expect an update release in the next week or so ! 

Whith that all said, see you next time !