BFP v0.7.5(.1) dev log + changelog

Dev log:

BFP v0.7.5 comes with a feature I've been thinking about for a long time: realistic dirt accumulation - and it's probably one of the most challenging things I've ever done in the game.

In short: when fighting in certain arenas and coming into contact with the ground, various type of dirt will accumulate on that respective character area (character to character dirt transfer is not supported and it never will, due to a lot of complexity). Currently two arenas are supported: Desert arena (both day and night) and the Ghost farm. In the Desert arena characters will get covered in sand, while on the Ghost farm it will be mud.

Various type of dirt materials will be added in the future for upcoming arenas where it makes sense.

All in all it's been a rich developer experience. I have been away travelling for work for most of this week, and as such could only work on code (my mobile development environment doesn't include 3d modelling and such). It was a learning experience - this is the first feature in the game that uses shaders - and I almost bit more than I could chew. I ran into a lot of unknowns and issues that I haven't had any previous experience with. The breakthrough came on Thursday evening, and I breathed a sigh of relief and prudent satisfaction :) There were other frustrating issues to fix afterwards, but I ended up squashing them one by one.

All in all it's an elegant implementation, but even with all the optimizations it can be heavy on less powerful systems (although it can be disabled). I'm actually very curious to hear your experience. It also supports easy addition of new materials and configurations for various upcoming arenas.

The only thing that's still bugging me is the few lines on the body that don't get covered properly. Those are the result of UV texture area edges, and I'm still looking into potential solutions. I'm not sure when and how I will improve the issue, but I think for now we can live with it.

For the next week I'll be focusing mostly on new content, predominantly animations, but I might try my hand at modelling and attempt to create some more wearables.

Changelog:

• New actions / animations

• Realistic dirt system:

  • KNOWN ISSUE: thin lines on various parts of the character that won't accumulate dirt; probably not easily fixable

  • NOTE: I have tried optimizing the dirt system as much as possible, but it can be performance intensive on less powerful video cards / mobile. As such, it can be turned off from the Options. YOU MUST RESTART THE GAME AFTER TURNING IT OFF

  • On mobile, under certain conditions / on SOME devices, you might get better performance when having the dirt system active by NOT using the Low / Medium resolution options and switching to the High resolution option (no idea why, but this is the case on the Pixel 10 Pro XL; not on my Pixel Tablet however). Experiment, and remember you can enable the fps option to check out the impact / make adjustments

• Refreshed look for the title and end screen

• Misc:

  • Small size adjustments for several hairstyles to fit better

  • The Intel card fix .bat file coming with the game has been renamed to hi_perf_and_BFP_intel_card_fix.bat, since one can use the same renderer to gain more performance at the expense of some graphical effects

  • Better management of UI focus ingame or in the Gallery to allow pressing Space to pause the game at all times (without accidentally selecting something else)

  • Default characters have had some small updates

• Under the hood: per renderer arena support (the mobile renderer has issues with the Ghost farm wet mud floor on mobile, therefore there are now two different Ghost farm arenas - one for mobile and one for the regular engine)