Update for everyone

Hello all, and thank you so much for supporting another month of Bloodlines!

In Bloodlines v0.21, we're looking at a beautiful ReVamp of what's been considered one of our least pretty scenes, but this work has not been easy. Defilers from way back in February of 2020 may recall that "Ben turns Valerie" was a nightmare to create due to problems with anti-aliasing and more problems with buggy shadows. The quick fix for these was to remove most of the lighting, which resulted in a muddy scene.

So, how does it look with the new models and setup? Mostly really good, but something about the scene makes lighting very hard to work with, and it's created a few major headaches for animations. Take this example:

Here, we see Ben in human disguise. There's a distinct line on his neck where two different skin textures meet (i.e. his face looks peachy while the rest of his body is dark brown).  This has happened in the past and always makes production difficult, but look at what happens in the next frame of animation:

As the character moves, the lighting on his back stops working entirely. In motion, this results in some awful flickering and even worse skin texture problems.

I'm going to keep working through this scene, but the amount of time it's taken has burned through the minuscule production schedule left by delays from Bloodlines v0.20. However, delaying the release of Bloodlines v0.21 would cut into production of Bloodlines v0.22, perpetuating the cycle.

The plan: I'm going to take an extra day or two to finish the ReVamp and animations, aiming to release v0.21 to Defilers on the 15th (meaning a one day delay for everyone). Sadly, nearly all of the new narrative content intended for Bloodlines v0.21 will need to be moved to Bloodlines v0.22. This means that the scene with Lisa teased on the Monthly Schedule page probably won't make it into Bloodlines v0.21.

I hate having to do this, but last month was so narrative-heavy that I prioritized the ReVamp and animations this month--meaning that these production woes have left almost no time to work on other scenes. The good news is that releasing v0.21 sooner rather than later will give me more time to work on v0.22.

As always, thank you so much for understanding the difficulty of putting these updates out every month. It's a lot of hard work, but when I look at the scope of Bloodlines, I can't deny that we've built something special.

-Moniker