Progress!

Hey everybody! Just want to give you a quick text update here since it's been a bit.

To start off, I wasn't able to get much work done when my family was visiting, unfortunately. I keep my work a secret from them, so it was pretty difficult to find time for it. Because of that, it'll still be a while before v.30 is ready for the wild - I'm still very hopeful for releasing it this month though.

Since the visit ended, I've been working hard to finish up these new menus, and they're getting pretty close now! I don't have any screenshots at the moment (I'm writing this just before heading to sleep), but maybe I'll try to get some for next update. The audio/video menu, especially, is completely finished and functional now! Not only can you select fullscreen and vsync options from the menu now, but you can also scale the game window up when playing in windowed mode - all the way up to 999x the normal size, a theoretical maximum of 639,360x479,520! No monitor in the foreseeable future will reach anywhere even close to that number, so Crisis Point should be pretty future proof. Don't worry, though, that doesn't mean you'll have an obscene amount of options with your regular modern monitor - the game automatically reads your monitor size and sets a maximum scale based off of what your monitor can handle. For the average 1080p monitor, that means you can scale it up to 2x, for a total size of 1280x960. Of course, playing in fullscreen will still scale the game to fit your monitor exactly while keeping the same aspect ratio, but windowed mode keeps the scale to a whole number to avoid improper pixel scaling. In addition to this, I've switched the game over to a borderless windowed setup - unfortunately it's impossible to allow toggling between bordered and borderless, as I have to pick one or the other when exporting the game, so I decided to go with borderless, and also implemented my own code to allow you to drag the window around your monitor by clicking and dragging near the top of the window. That's the only real benefit of bordered windows, so I think it's a pretty good compromise!

Aside from that, we now have separate audio settings for sounds, music, Alicia's gameplay and H-voices, male enemy H-voices, female enemy H-voices, all enemy combat voices, and cutscene voices (which affect CGs and cutscenes alike). Each of these settings has 11 levels, ranging from 0% to 100% in 10% increments, which will allow you a pretty wide range of freedom in balancing your volume levels for your audio setup, or just straight up turning off any of the options you're not a fan of.

Compared to the last post, I've changed some of the options menus - Video, Audio, and Content are all wrapped into one now, and a new option for Gamepad Selection has been added. With the way gamepad support in GMS works, checking every gamepad port for input every frame would be annoying to set up and a bit of an unnecessary drain on performance (hardly noticeable, but small things like that add up) - so instead, there will be a menu that lists every gamepad you've got plugged in, and you'll be able to select which gamepad you want the game to use while playing. The good news is this should prevent any issues that may arise for players that have multiple things plugged into their computers that count as gamepads, such as flight simulator controllers, which I know can cause some issues even in current AAA games.

That's about all I've been up to for the past day or two, but I do want to mention before I go, I'm planning on starting up streams again pretty soon! For those of you who weren't around when I streamed regularly, I used to do dev streams for Crisis Point every couple of days at https://picarto.tv/Anon42 - I spend most of my time coding, which might not be the most exciting thing in the world to watch, but I often have an artist friend streaming with me so there's something a bit prettier to look at. I kind of fell out of streaming due to depression and personal issues, but I feel like it's about time to start that up again, especially since I do some of my best work on stream - so keep an eye out for it! I always post on here shortly before a stream, but you can also follow me on Picarto to get notifications when I start streaming too. I can't say for sure when I'll start it up, but I plan to soon, and I'd like to get a dedicated schedule set up for it eventually.

Anyway, this post has gone on long enough. Thanks for reading everybody, and I'll see you in the next update!
-A42