Plans for v4.0 Beta 4 (15 May)

This is the fourth of the five updates making up the v4.0 Variety and Polish Overhaul and the second update focusing on Clothes in the overhaul. It's very similar to what was done in Beta 3, just even more in quantity.

- 200+ new female clothing items

- Notably, compared to Beta 3, the Beta 4 batch of female clothes have a lot more of those with the "Partial Undress' state available

- 200+ new male clothing items

Estimated Release Date: Saturday, 15 May

Note since this is a beta update, part of a larger overhaul:

- Even after tons of clothes have been added in Beta 3 & Beta 4, there is still a smaller but more selective batch of around 100 items to be added in v4.0 Stable, focusing on uniforms, ceremonial / religious attire, and accessories. Basically, for Beta 3 & Beta 4, I simply went down the list of assets I have collected, so most of what's been added are just everyday clothes. In v4.0 Stable, I'll review what's still missing and seek out the specific pieces that the game still needs for its different building types, jobs, scenes and ethnicities. Also, I have deliberately avoided jewellery and other accessories so far in Beta 3 & 4 because they must be rigged, morph-transfered and tagged a bit differently from normal clothes, so I leave them for v4.0 Stable to do all in one go for efficiency. 

- Also, all the logic to use all the new clothes for NPCs (which piece should go with which to avoid clipping, what to wear for which location, etc) will come in v4.0 Stable. Therefore, for now, just like in Beta 3, all the new clothes are just for the player character to try on. NPCs still use the old clothes, which clip horribly because of all the new character morphs added in Beta 1 & 2. Don't worry though, Beta 4 is the final update these clipping-friendly old clothes even stay in the game files as they will all be cleared out in v4.0 Stable to save space while the NPCs embrace the new clothes with all the logic added.

- After Beta 3 & 4 & v4.0 Stable, the total number of clothing items in the base game would be over 800, which is plenty. Still, this doesn't mean that I will no longer add any more clothes ever again in the future. So if there's some specific clothing piece you have in mind that didn't make it in these 800 added during the v4.0 overhaul, don't worry. In the future, once every few months, I will dedicate one update (for example, v4.7, v4.16, etc) for a new batch of clothes, and these updates will come in the form of easy-to-install & version-neutral optional downloads (just like the optional maps) as I don't want to keep increasing the base game's download size. The best thing about these being available as optional downloads is that I won't have to be as stingy with polycount and texture resolution for them as I had to be with the 800+ items in the base game, since it won't matter how heavy or performance-intensive these optional clothes end up being since the player gets to pick and choose how many and which they want used in their own game. Basically, these will be "High Definition Clothes Free DLCs".