1.5 Release Plan

Happy New Year everyone! 

1.5 work is well underway and is planned for near end-of-month release. The biggest things being done for 1.5 are quality improvements. 1.4 suffered a bit in quality and bug rate, and 1.5 should rectify that. Here are some of the planned quality improvements:

- faster load times

- much lower memory usage (extreme example scene that was using 20+ GB in release 1.4 now uses 6.5 GB). Target is to work within 8GB for most, if not all, scenes. Some scenes that use a lot of textures will probably go over 8GB still.

- improved overall performance - Already made some fixes that have improved performance in some areas. Unity 2017.3, however, introduced some oddities I need to try to work through to guarantee overall improvement. This paves the way to Unity 2018.1 which promises some large improvements. The beta of this release should be out soon and I'll be jumping into it as soon as possible in order to make VaM run much better.

- bug fixes affecting scene loading and initialization

- much smaller release/download size. Also coming soon (probably not this release) is an updater/patch system, which will allow finer granularity of releases, easier patching of bug fixes, update-in-place, and much smaller download sizes for updates

In addition to quality improvements, the other areas being worked on are:

- Audio 1.0 

- Trigger system

- a few others, but not definitive on what will make 1.5 yet, but have a look here for some of the possibilities: https://trello.com/b/LDlEpfvk/virt-a-mate-public-plans

I'll try to post another update next week as I get further along. Thank you all for your support! It is great to start out the new year with nearly 3000 patrons backing this project! That really ensures the future of this project. Wow!

Meshed VR