#(like the flexibility of builds isn't even THAT big; so... it's kind of a steep tradeoff to just have them not really touch; imo)

[invinciblerodent]

Y'know, puttering around with my recordings, I think I really am going to give Davrin's romance with Ver a pretty serious twisting around. Rewrite some things a bit, change things around, keep most of the "slow burn" of it intact- but also add in the "friends with benefits" elements that I feel match what he says in the check-in scene after the point of no return better.

I think I have a post from like, months before release, when all we knew about the character was "charming Warden (who may or may not have been the Storm Coast team's commander in '41)", about how I sort of expected his to be the romance that starts off more casual (with the expiration date all Wardens have, it's not surprising that someone who's been one for at least ten years would be hesitant to enter any genuine emotional entanglements, platonic or romantic), and then for him to find himself falling for Rook unexpectedly (and kind of against his will) anyway.

And from some of that late dialogue, I still think that that may have been the exact intention, initially, but maybe they didn't want to create too big a disparity between the different romance paths, or like they didn't want for it to come off like they weren't taking him as seriously as the rest, so the path sort of ended up getting a bit... I don't wanna say "subdued", but I can't think of a better word lol. Brought to match the pacing of the others and the overall story more, that's more like what I mean.

.... Anyway, I kinda think I wanna have them sleep together for the first time either after his personal quest (no more distractions, clearly established romantic interest in- and some commitment to one another, but with still an opportunity to angst about everything else) or preferably, that night after drinking with Lucanis.

I'm leaning towards the latter thought, specifically because it'd be clearly a very, very bad idea.

It'd be far too fast, far too early, I got that scene like right after the Cauldron, so deep in the thick of his personal quest- plus, the mutual interest was barely expressed like one day prior to it, and there was alcohol involved. Which all kind of makes it perfect, because it's an awful time to toss that complication in there.

But, it gives me an opportunity to have the both of them keep thinking that it being just a casual, physical thing is what the other wants (despite the "well, I could see us heading somewhere, someday" of it), and to have their feelings developing sort of in the background of it-- and then!!!!! that forest kiss can also take a role more like another complicating factor, with the "heart of a halla" line being a bit more ambiguous.

Like, casually kissing your booty call/situationship/FWB you've been secretly falling for, it's a bit more touchy-feely than the previously established [they were not established] guidelines [there are no guidelines] suggest is appropriate [none of this is appropriate], but it feels right, and that alone makes it feel weird and confusing, ykwim?

But, then the whole "Most of my life, I've gone it alone. With you... I never want to go back." thing makes more sense being where it is, after his personal quest, to me at least. Because that sounds like a confession, and with being free from worries and the griffons safe (with Eldrin, in that game), there's a great time to have a long-ish, actually serious conversation about what this is and where it's going.

.... That would also mean that some of the bed scene dialogue doesn't make as much sense ("Is this all just for show"? "Just like I imagined"? Girl you know exactly if it's for show and what his hands feel like, you've been getting dicked down semi-regularly for weeks), but I can work with some tweaks to that lol. The final parts of it, about planning the future and getting soppy still make perfect sense, it's just those lines in the leadup that need some minor tweaking.

Idk, I really liked the in-game experience I had, and I love me a good slow burn, but I can't deny that it's more my style when "slow burn" doesn't also mean ".... so sex is a thing that happens only at the very end, when all feelings are resolved". I like it adding more uncertainty and confusion into the mix, and giving a sort of "oh, this is different now" feel to that first time once the feelings are also resolved.

(The date though, I wanna keep where and how it is exactly, because he mentions he got the tip for the picnic from Evka and Antoine, and I find it really cute to imagine him just sort of looking at them after speaking with Valya like.... "... they probably have the right idea of it, don't they. While we're here, let... let me just go ask. How to, uh. Do this whole. Romance thing, I guess. Make it sound, idk, casual. And chill. We're... chill." Never mind that Evka and Antoine are literally one of the most romantic couples any of them know, but yknow, nbd.)

(And then it goes all the way sideways? Love it. Love the "hey so this tea I thought would be a fun, cute thing for us to try made her trip absolute balls for a while, so maybe this outing is not a great opportunity to like, talk. Seriously. About how I may or may not be falling a little bit in love with her. And by 'little bit', I mean 'up to the very tips of my ears'. Nbd, just gonna... postpone, spilling my guts out for her perusal, I guess." of it all. A+, no notes.)

[canmom]

Natalie Lawhead does good as ever, this is one of the biggest collections of game engines I've seen anyone put together.

It's worth discussing what's missing from a lot of these engines - the features that kept people with Unity instead of these alternatives. Not to say we have to stay with Unity, but the big challenges that other engines have to meet.

The biggest one is multiplatform support. Particularly if you want to release games on consoles (Android excepted), you have to deal with all sorts of opaque black-box proprietary APIs and all sorts of weird gotchas and headaches. One of the best features of Unity is that it runs, and runs well, on nearly anything. Which isn't to say Unity doesn't have its own gotchas trying to build for different platforms, but it provides a very good abstraction over a lot of difficulty.

Unfortunately, console support is a big barrier for a lot of open-source projects. Godot spells it out pretty clearly. The console manufacturers won't license their proprietary devkits to an open source project.

This means the only real alternative for console dev is Unreal, or a proprietary engine. Unreal isn't quite as universal as Unity, but it's fairly close. It handily beats Unity on high-end graphics features. However, its design is generally less flexible, and the editor is quite cumbersome and demands a pretty high-end PC. It also doesn't have the CPU performance of Unity DOTS, even though it's written in pure C++.

(For standalone VR, Unity has been pretty much the only game in town, but the situation isn't as dire as other consoles since Android is at least open source and OpenXR provides an open source abstraction layer that other engines can implement. So while there's not a great Unity alternative yet, it's entirely possible that Bevy or something else could become viable.)

That leads in to the second reason - performance. I've been watching people in the Latios Framework discord try and figure out some alternative ECS-based engine for the kind of super-high-performance code that Unity DOTS enables. Unity DOTS is kind of an engineering miracle. The Burst compiler is fantastic - only the Rust compiler can stand alongside it really (not surprising since both are based on LLVM) - and there are a lot of extremely smart design choices in how it handles e.g. ECS iteration and rendering.

There are other ECS-based game engines out there, with Bevy probably the most advanced. It's also possible to cobble together your own by combining an existing engine with an existing ECS library. The problem is that for a realistic game engine that goes beyond a tech demo, there are a lot of pitfalls that can erode the benefits of ECS (a somewhat polemic article, but a good explanation of how ECS alone doesn't guarantee great cache performance). Bevy currently doesn't have the rendering performance of Entities Graphics, although it's moving in an exciting way.

Unity is a strange beast - it's a hodgepodge of features, some of them really cutting edge, some of them more or less abandoned after the people championing it left the company. There are usually multiple ways to do any given thing (e.g. user input or UI), and it's a bit of a steep learning curve to go from 'using Unity' to 'using Unity well'. However, the good parts of Unity are actually really good. It's taken years to get them this good. It sucks to have to reinvent it.

(The third reason is of course there's a huge amount of expertise and assets and shit built up around Unity. But - unless Unity does some pretty drastic actions to regain trust, or it dies and gets opensourced - that can't be helped, the ship's going down, not now but likely in a year or two when the currently-in-progress Unity projects have been released.)

It's probably going to be pretty chaotic for a while. What I really hope is that when all the dust settles, the 'next Unity' will be free software that can thrive as much as Blender has without risking this kind of 'enshittification'. With both this and Flash, it's fucking appalling that such a huge block of cultural output could be put at risk of being erased by the actions of one company. Also it will be the year of Linux on the desktop and federated social media you guys. For real! I promise!

A great look at what Unity alternatives there are out there besides running from one for-profit corporate product to the next