All of the FX!

FX Goodness
So that depth fog material from the previous post... it doesn't play well with bloom and transparency! Which means it nukes a lot of the pretty lighting FX that I thought it would be an easy solution to handle. It's fine, I'm not bitter, nope, we'll just do it the hard way then. Volumetric fog to the rescue. This will be a bit heavier but it also comes with a lot of fun stuff. Like all of the light scattering and bloom and it plays much better with other FX and transparency. Which is what I've been putting together in the above screenshot.

I've also been implementing the triggers and controls for all the elements in that screenshot. An emitter that spits out floating 3d text. A material with warping and transparency. And the fog sphere that they're both sitting in side of. This also so far shades well with multiple layers of transparency and isn't giving me any weird artifacts. Like the rounded cube here has the more complex slime shader applied to it (I still need to go back and finish rolling this out and also make a gelatinous cube NPC). So the very last piece of scripting for this will be direct controls over lights through dialogue triggers. This shouldn't be too hard (famous last words) and should be enough for the mushroom scenes and the interrogation scenes that I'll hopefully have ready for this next build.

Spawners and Interiors
Trying to fix NPCs falling through the floors still! It's caused by the level streaming system and different things stream in at different rates if I trigger them all at once. So sometimes the player and the spawn point will pop in, the spawn point will trigger, and then the floor geometry will load in but the NPC is already falling off into the void. This fix I've been working on is adding a bit of a delay to things. There's an event that gets fired off after the level has "completed" streaming. I add the quotations because in my testing it doesn't seem to be 100% reliable. But this should add enough of a delay and buffer to hopefully load in the floor geometry and then call the spawn points to be triggered. The downside is I need to go through and update all the spawn points to this new system. But it will hopefully fix things!

IRL update
There's no more game stuff after this point so you're safe to stop reading now!
I've been a bit slow with this latest progress update because I picked up some contract work these past 2 months. At first I was maintaining and doing double duty on Feign and the contract but it finally caught up to me this week. Luckily this was the end of the contract! I was able to save up a good chunk of money and I'm back on Feign full time (and very very happy and eager to be working on a fun NSFW project again!)
It'll take me a few days to recover but I'll hopefully be back up to speed on Feign with much meatier progress posts again!

And a last quick note. Just wanted to say thanks everybody! There's a lot going on in the world and things in the video game industry are super rocky right now. And I really really appreciate everyone's support for Feign it 's always a huge morale boost and amazing motivation! Thank you!