May 18, 2023

Status Update for infants support in Color Sliders.

Working on Color Sliders support for Infants.  This update is taking a lot longer than expected because of several reasons.

First, there are three ways we could have done the infants update.

  • 1. Build a new set of base packages, and discontinue support for the old set of packages.

This is a crazy solution that everybody would hate. Currently Color Sliders is 20 GBs if you have all packs.

If you downloaded the mod yesterday, that would be too bad. Your download would immediately become worthless and you'd have to redownload 20 gigs of content again in the worst case scenario. Obviously we aren't doing this.

  • 2. Place the infant assets in the patches file for the base game.

I initially wanted to do this, but the patches file for the base game went from around 250 megs for the base game to 500 megs.

This was another bad solution. Not everybody has fast internet, and the user would have to constantly redownload the same infant textures again and again for each patch.

In the end, we ended up doing the solution that would be the easiest for players to use.

  • 3. For the Base Game, Infants are a separate download,  but all packs going forward will include infants by default.

The total size of the base game infants packages is 252 MB.

However, despite it being the easiest way for the player to recolor infants, it required quite a bit of work on the tools side to ensure clothes wearable only by infants went to the right packages, and that future patches would ensure that the clothes wouldn't be duplicated unless they were changed.