Fixed some more bugs, and also:

Over the past weeks, the Unity engine has been crashing often, making it very hard to work on the game.

And just after making the build 11.d a few days ago, Unity became practically unusable.

Literally anything I click, will freeze the engine.

This is a issue with the Engine itself, not the game.

Since last year I've been using Linux, and over the last weeks there must have been some updates it had that slowly changed how programs work and slowly broke the engine.

The Unity version I was using up to last build was "u2022", which is already outdated by years,

but it was the last version that had support for players still using Windows 7, just in case someone out there is still using it.

But now the engine has broken beyond being usable, so I'm forced to update to the latest unity version "6.4"

This unity version gladly works for me, so I can continue working on the game.

But I don't know what's the real impact this engine will do to the game on other people's computers.

So I'm going to keep the download link of the previous build for a bit longer than usual,

and I'm also releasing this new build 11.e which as a few bug fixes and is with the new engine version.

Download ----------------

(NEW 11.e): https://www.mediafire.com/file/5wtauc33412q9xm/Bitchland11e2.zip/file

Previous build (11.d) download can be found on my previous post.

The links above comes without mods, find them here: https://discord.gg/S7hcQvYzmJ

(You can skip the next part ahead, I'm just ranting about technical stuff)
(Change-log below)

This update also had a few issues, which I've solved so far.

For example the new engine handled loading png files diferently, and so it'd cause a memory leak whenever it tried to display character png's.

This memory leak is on the engine itself, not the game,
even after ending playmode, the engine will keep spewing that leak and will need to be fully restarted.

Gladly I found why it happens very quick because it was only happening when trying to load character png's and not any other png's like the save thumbnails.
It was because of how I was storing character data inside the png image file.

That data normally would be a seperate file, but then we'd have 2 files per character,
To make it easier to share characters with other people (for example on discord), it's more convinient to have it all in one file, so that's why I made this system.

Few years ago when I made it initially, it was just the character data at the end of the png data.
But when uploaded to discord, discord would see that "extra data" as junk, and remove it.

So then I had improved it by adding the character data as an actual piece of "official" data in the "png file format" itself, so that it'd work on discord.
And then, 1 day after I made that, discord made an update where they'd also remove these "unoficial data chunks" XD

Eitherway, I had left that system as it was, just because it was already working fine, even tho on discord you'd still need to send the image in a zip.

On the new Unity version they must have changed how they internally load png's to Texture2D,
So I had to downgrade the png data system from a custom data chunk, to just adding the data at the end of the file.
This way the engine can still load a Texture2D without causing an internal issue.

But now that means any character png you'll put in the game that's from an other build, will display like this:

I've already converted the default characters to the system that works.
You will only see this if you put your own characters from a previous build.

Speaking of Texture2D and Memory leaks, here's another one that Unity has:

Texture2D's aren't cleared from memory by garbage collection, either from the automatic one, or the manual one "System.GC.Collect();", or by trying to overwrite it with "= new Texture2D(0,0);" or "null"

if you load a bunch of them in a local array, let's say enough to fill 100MB of Ram, then end the function, and then run it again and again,
everytime it'll start filling up the Ram usage of the program.

I had noticed and tested this around the time I started making the game in ~2021.

But it is possible to handle this 'engine issue' from my side, because the function ".LoadImage(bytes[])" does clear the bytes in use, so we can use that to remove unusued ram junk.

First, Never use Texture2D in a local setting, always global and pooled on a "List<>" array.
By pooling them, we always replace existing memory space, instead of creating new.

And then to actually clear it once no longer neccesary, we'll use LoadImage() to replace each entry with the smallest possible option in byte size.

Sadly 0 bytes isn't an option, it needs to techincally be valid image, so here's the smallest valid image I could do, a single 24bit pixel png:

public static byte[] OnePixel = new byte[]
{
0x89, 0x50, 0x4e, 0x47, 0x0d, 0x0a, 0x1a, 0x0a, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0d, 0x49, 0x48, 0x44, 0x52,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x01, 0x08, 0x06, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x1f, 0x15, 0xc4,
0x89, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x01, 0x73, 0x52, 0x47, 0x42, 0x00, 0xae, 0xce, 0x1c, 0xe9, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x04, 0x67, 0x41, 0x4d, 0x41, 0x00, 0x00, 0xb1, 0x8f, 0x0b, 0xfc, 0x61, 0x05, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x09, 0x70, 0x48, 0x59, 0x73, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0e, 0xc3, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0e, 0xc3, 0x01, 0xc7,
0x6f, 0xa8, 0x64, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x0d, 0x49, 0x44, 0x41, 0x54, 0x18, 0x57, 0x63, 0xf8, 0xff,
0xff, 0xff, 0x7f, 0x00, 0x09, 0xfb, 0x03, 0xfd, 0x05, 0x43, 0x45, 0xca, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x49, 0x45, 0x4e, 0x44, 0xae, 0x42, 0x60, 0x82
};

With this, Texture2D will only keep a single pixel in mem instead of huge images occupying multiple MB's.

Well in this new unity version, this 'old issue' might have already been fixed (hopefully).

But eitherway, this is a "RAM usage fix" that this game has had for a long time,
and it's one of the things that make this game use little RAM compared with other similar games out there.

Last time I checked the game used ~1GB total of ram, nowdays it's probably still under 2GB.
Other similar games will easily use over ~10GB.

All these things I've been yapping about are all things I found, tested and worked on by myself,
If you look online about any of these internal issues, you won't find anything.
Most other gamedev's out there would not even know these happen, and either live with memory leaks, or give up when things became unusable on the Engine level.

I'm not even gonna get started on "NavMesh" (Openworld generating navigation), and the tests & tricks I made with it to try making it faster,
But with this new engine version I'll explore that again some more, it might have some new features to make it faster.

Anyway, lemme know how this new build works for you guys.

Change log:

-Converted game to Unity 6.4, because the previous version stopped working on my pc
This change will sadgely cause the game to no longer run on windows 7, in case anyone still has it
-Added craftable "helmet with lamp"
-Fixed game soft-locking after going into the openworld after having used "exit to main menu"
-Fixed rare bug, unable to save after army 2
-Fixed rare sound bug during sex
-Fixed game soft-locking with Sarah stuck in crawl animation
-Fixed npc's blocking Sephie and Sarah during mission
-Fixed "Zea's Trip" mission starting with the wrong title
-Fixed war not moving after opening door
-Fixed Sarah sliding away during wave part
-Fixed 2nd half of grass still being solid when driving