- Flex Development Update - November 2021 - 4 November 2021
Greetings all! Tremendous apologies for the lengthy radio silence. Towards the end of July I had to prioritize some paid work to keep the debt collectors at bay. This was coupled with what seemed like an endless cascade of bugs caused by the hefty changes to the app. So progress ground to a halt there for a moment, but last month I finally had the bandwidth to pick back up the development of Flex! Over the last month I’ve been able to invest some significant time into testing every corner of the app, finding and squashing bugs, tweaking features and graphics, and improving performance. I’ve reached a point now where all the basic features, as well as the most recent updates, are back up and working well. I don't want to call it bug free (because that is basically impossible) but I'm hoping the issues that have been cropping up in the forums have been fixed. For those struggling with the…
- Flex Development Update - July 2021 - 4 July 2021
Greetings all! Over the last few months I’ve been making some great under-the-hood improvements to Flex, and I wanted to share the latest progress in this dev update. These changes will be coming in the next update to the app, which I’m hoping to wrap up by the end of July. This dev post will “get into the weeds” a little which may not be interesting, so here is a brief TL:DR of the features planned for the next update: Character Plugin Rebuild: A ground-up rebuilt of the plugin I was using for character morphing & clothing attachment. This one took the bulk of the time, and unlocks some fun functionality I’ll go into more detail below. Unity Engine Update: With the clothing attachment plugin rebuild I’m finally able to upgrade to the latest version of Unity, which improves performance and compatibility with various devices. Character Shading Improvement: Along with the engine update I…
- Flex Development Update - April 2021 - 27 April 2021
Hello! After some serious bug squashing I finally feel ready to release the latest update of Flex! It’s taken a little longer than anticipated to get here, but I think it’s worth the wait. As I discussed in last month’s post, there’s not a ton of new features, just the one big one: Multiple Characters In this latest version of Flex you’ll be able to add, remove, and quickly switch between any number of characters you want, all inside a single scene. While this feature addition doesn’t sound like a big change, there was a pretty significant overhaul to get here. But on the positive side, a lot of the codebase (which I wrote years ago) was pretty clunky and bad, and so I was able to fix those issues, and hopefully make the app more stable and performant going forward. Getting multiple characters working meant a big restructure, and improvement, in the main channels of communication in the…
- Flex Development Update - March 2021 - 11 March 2021
Since January’s big update I’ve been pushing hard on a couple of big improvements to Flex. The first is a feature that has been long requested, but required some significant structural changes to the app, multiple characters! From the beginning of development I built Flex around a single character. Much of the code that communicates between the UI and the character, the connective tissue of the app, needed to be ripped apart and reconstructed to handle multiple characters. Additionally, there were some user experience considerations around multiple characters, as well as accommodating long-term plans for things like additional characters and props. I’m pretty satisfied with my solutions, and happy with how fast and intuitive adding and interacting with multiple characters feels. Check it out below As you can see a key new feature for handling multiple characters is the new scene outline…
- Animation UI Fix - 22 February 2021
A quick fix for a bug in the animation selection
- Flex Development Update - Jan 2021 - 17 January 2021
Greetings all, and happy 2021! I realize it’s been a solid year since my last update to the app, and I apologize for the radio silence. Turns out 2020 held some big life changes for me (as I’m sure it did for many of you), and I unfortunately had to make other projects a priority. Over the last few months, I’ve been able to spend more time working on Flex in my free moments. I’ve been able to really make some progress, and I’m excited to tell you all about some new features and improvements coming this month! Hand Posing This feature has been near the top of the list for requests this last year, so I’m happy to say it’s finally here! There are a whole new set of options which allow you to customize your model’s hand pose. Check it out : With Flex, I’ve always tried to walk the line between usability and customizability. Plenty of more high-end software packages give you pretty deep cust…
- Flex Development Update - Dec 2019 - 13 December 2019
Greetings all! I’m just about to release the next update to Flex, and wanted to give you a quick overview of what new features to expect in the December build. Extreme Sliders I really couldn’t think of a better name, though there probably is one. This feature was originally suggested in the discussion forum, and for a while I was under the impression there was a technical limitation preventing it. But a little research later, and after an update to the engine, voila! Extreme Sliders became a thing! So what, you might ask, is an extreme slider? Well it’s basically the ability to crank any slider past its natural min and max values. This has some obvious benefits for things like lighting intensity, etc. But things get pretty wacky, and amazing, when you introduce this to the body modification. I think you should probably be the judge of how wacky. https://imgur.com/rIA93nk https://i.imgu…
- Flex Development Update - Oct 2019 - 17 October 2019
Greetings all! As you may have noticed, I just pushed the latest update to Flex. There are some neat updates in this release, both big and small. In this post I want go over these changes as well as give you a heads up on what I’ll be working on next! TL:DR version: Made some nifty updates like character save/load, more body morphs and eye control, as well as smaller updates and fixes… and even more exciting features coming in the December build! Character Saving & Loading The ability to save and load is pretty important if you plan on using the app for any ongoing project. I’ve been building the infrastructure for this feature as the app has developed, but there has been a bunch of testing and bug fixing over the last couple of months. Tying in the save infrastructure to the operating system’s file management has been the biggest hurdle. The good news is that it seems to be working wel…
- Flex Development Update - Sept 2019 - 14 September 2019
Greetings all! This is the first official development update for Flex, so I just want to say... thanks for checking out the project! This project started out as a fun side project a couple of years ago, but has slowly grown in scope and become a big part of my life. Seeing the initial response I am looking forward to investing more time into developing new features in Early Access and post-launch! So far there have been a ton of cool ideas posted in discussions, as well as some great feedback for improvements and I’m excited to develop Flex as part of a community. While I can’t add every suggested feature, I’ll do my best to incorporate new ideas and suggestions for improvement, so keep the ideas coming! My plan is to release increment builds, every 1-2 months, as we move closer to launch in early 2020. The majority of the new features will be structural in nature, reducing the initial…
