Esoteric Update #176 - Unlimited GPU Power!

Again, sorry for the late update, but Monday lately has just been difficult for various reasons. I don't even feel that bad today; I just had something that needed to be done yesterday and decided to delay writing the update until now.

So first off, lore makes a return:

Lore: Fear's Waxen Seal Upon The Eyes
Lore: Our Shadow

Now for the update. I'm gonna admit that things didn't go as planned, but I did accidentally bump into something interesting, which I'll discuss at the end. As it turns out, I spent the week on various minor and somewhat random improvements and additions.

So first for the more mundane updates. Extended and adjusted the first poem to have a better flow across all possible paths. Implemented more emotional response texts to roughly double the selection of fragments and am still working on more. Added babydolls and teddies (and also garter-teddies) to the lingerie collection. Extended the selection of leather skirts. Got pretty close to finalizing tartan as a material, probably to be deployed for skirts at first, but then also for other items. Made some slight changes to the engine to increase the security of previously implemented features. To explain, security here just refers to making it less possible to code the game into an invalid memory state that bricks a save state.

Now for the big thing. For a while, I thought that the engine already used rendering that was enabled for hardware acceleration. But over the last week, while doing some experiments with moving the logo to the SVG format (it didn't work b.t.w., I'm not sure what the issue is but the rendering of the logo is not correct), I noticed a disparity in performance between the SVG rendering inside of the engine and outside of it, but theoretically running on the same C# libraries. So I dug in and found out that no, actually, hardware acceleration for rendering is turned off by default.

So I turned it on.

While there was one place where this led to issues, ones that are already patched up (yay, imprecise sub-logic-pixel redrawing), turning hardware acceleration on leads to an overall performance increase of... somewhere between 400% to 1000%, depending on the situation. Which is just great. You might ask why this is important for a text game, but it makes a massive impact in specific places, even if it makes everything smoother and crisper overall. Those significant areas of improvement are cover/page rendering for books, magic circle rendering, the character sheet (most negligible impact out of what's mentioned here, but perhaps most noticeable overall) and a particular in-game web page that uses a massive animating background that used to somewhat chug before.

Now, this isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Hardware acceleration for web browsers is notoriously fickle and can lead to crashes and, at worse, even OS instability. Because of this, while I will be making it available as an option, it will not be mandatory. If you prefer, you'll be able to run the game without it. This would be the best choice for people with older PCs. But for those with more modern GPUs and up to date drivers, it should make for a noticeable, positive impact on game performance and UX while not causing any issues.