I’m not ready to bring around the third Alpha yet, but I wanted to release this update now of something I was working on toward it since some of the improvements to rendering are important.

Following this update, the next thing I’m going to be working on is getting the alternate non-WebGL renderer so people with lower end computers, or without WebGL support at all, can play.

• The flare of the star now has non-linear attenuation to emulate eye adjustment and give a greater sense of intensity and scale.
• Fixed some issues that’d use too much memory/CPU with the rendering, and increased the speed at which it’ll build the world.
• Updated some dependencies that should also fix some issues some people had.

• Fixed a minor issue that would come up with descriptions that could output something like “thick covered dick”.
• Clarified that new characters are made on the account page only at the moment.
• Fixed clicking the checkboxes on traits not actually selecting or deselecting them.

I actually wanted to do a lot more with the rendering since there’ll be the lower end fallback coming soon. I was working on implementing HDR, but I had too many problems where it requires multiple draw calls and would require supersampling to render as smoothly. The performance was going to be like 10 times worse.
I’ll have to wait for WebGL2 to be adopted by all the browsers, but the standard was only finalized recently and it’s still hidden away as “experimental” in Chrome and Firefox at the moment. When that comes, multiple buffers can be recorded with each render call and all that becomes feasible.
Ended up tinkering a lot and had to scrap much of what I was working on. But ah well, I have fun with graphics programming.

I think there are still issues with there being a mismatch of clothing state on the client and server. It’s some deep rooted engine issue that’ll take some time to fix.
If you see messed up text that keeps describing your “covered” parts as if they’re bare, you may need to unequip all your clothing and play that way at the moment.