Hello everyone! I have made this thread to announce and discuss something new I have been working on on the side.
Recently, I have begun working on updating the art on the game’s furniture items with the goal of standardizing the art styles, bringing many of their quality up to par, optimizing texture usage, and making them easier to decorate with.
These are the problems I am solving:
Many condo items are of several different art styles, due to several factors (some were old furniture we created for GMT, some were created when our artist(s) were at different levels of ability at the time, etc)
Much of the condo items are unoptimized. For example, many of the furniture items have unique textures when they don’t need to. This eats up video memory.
Similar items look very different (for example, wood furniture items should have similar wood!)
To solve these issues I am doing the following:
Improving the quality of some of the models so that all of the game’s purchasable furniture are at the same standardized quality level
Standardizing the textures used in the furniture, which will make the furniture easier to decorate with (and also more optimized)
Ensuring that all furniture has sufficient LODs for optimization
For example, currently, if you purchase a wood table, a wood chair, and a wood dresser, all three likely have very different looking wood, making them difficult to decorate with. From now on, all of these will use a standard wood texture that you can customize the color of. Similar for other materials, such as plastic, concrete, etc.
I will be releasing the updated versions of these condo items in chunks. The first chunk is being released with update 0.9.0.2. Unfortunately, these changes mean that the colors of some of your furniture items may look different after the update. However, I believe that this is important to the long term quality and polish of the game.
I am making this thread to be a central hub for feedback, issues, bugs, and suggestions for these updates. They will continue to rollout in each update in chunks. Thank you for your understanding.
I got a suggestion for the furniture.
What if we had the ability to pick different kinds of textures for the same material, for example with wood we could have multiple wood sorts such as mahogny, birch and oak.
With metal you could have smooth surface, diamond plate and riveted.
For example all the metal furniture could be sold with the standard texture, the texture of the individual object could then be changed by the player to one of the other textures available for said material via the furniture edit menu in the condo.
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that looks really out of place is the watermelon. It’s cartoony and fullbright for some reason, which would be fine in Ball Race and its milestones, but the watermelon pet and the slice you can buy at Fresh should have a more realistic looking model like the rest of the fruit.
Technically, if you can change the color of the wood, I don’t think this option is needed since it just means tweaking around the chroma wheel what hue of wood it is, heck, alien green wood
The wood of all the furniture such as dressers, shelves, etc. are different colors so even if I color them all to the same RGB, they’re different shades and stuff.
You can make a script that iterates on everyone’s condos and offsets the colors so that even after the update the colors are the same. This same logic is being applied to when the vector of canvases is re-centered to make sure they remain in the same place.
A large amount of fixes are being applied in the next hotfix to fix issues associated with the first release of updated furniture. Most of the issues were with the colorable settings not working properly on various items.
I understand that the color of wood in furniture was supposed to be standardized, however before this update, my closet which consisted of office shelves and bookshelves matched fine
Now, no matter how hard I try, I can’t match the colors.
(I’m also a little upset that the material was changed and now their woods no longer match material…)
The color editable on the new wood material was a bit off. I readjusted it, and now you should be able to replicate any color with the wood. That should be the last time that wood material is changed.
Also, I will be releasing new furniture updates in waves, and in the end, everything will be consistent.
I made a post about it before, but the colorization of the Bush Medium, Large, and Huge was changed sometime last year, and is different from the Bush Ground, Small, and Tiny.
Left is bush massive, right is bush tiny and small. All set to the same color value.
It would be nice if they all had full color range again, but at least having them consistent would be alright too.
It has come to my attention that people have an issue with the new glass material. Specifically, people who were using the glass as an “invisible wall” in their condo.
The problem with the original glass material was that it looked more like an invisible wall and less like a pane of glass. So, of course, people used it for invisible walls, despite not being its intended purpose.
To solve this, I will add a new condo material that is specifically for invisible walls. I am sorry for the inconvenience of having to switch over.
To help with transitions, could we get little switches in the menu for the copy cat to only copy specific things such as only scale or only texture or only scale and texture but not color like little toggle switches for each property?
I want to comment on the new condo rocks. A couple notes here:
-The new textures on the rocks are actually just one texture. Previously, all the rocks had their own sets of unique textures for every rock, while the new rocks utilize much less texture space. This makes the new rocks much more efficient from an optimization stand point. Considering how many objects people put in their condos, the less excess textures, the better.
-The new rocks don’t quite look exactly like how I’d like them to look yet. I’ll be playing with them a bit more soon.
