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Hello! First, forgive me for the strange framerate issues that exist. I also know there are a few graphical issues regarding transparency. These are all being addressed! 

Secondly, it isn't as straightforward in my game to get better performance as it is in other games. Your first instinct is to turn off V-sync or lower the resolution, but in this game, since there are already underlying issues (that I know about and am fixing), these things do not in fact increase performance. So having said that, here's how to get better performance: 

*F11 will turn off the UI bars visibility, this will immediately increase performance by quite a bit. 

*Draw distance will significantly increase/lower performance 

*SHADOWS WILL ALWAYS LOWER PERFORMANCE NO MATTER THE QUALITY AND ARE OFF BY DEFAULT (and should be kept off) UNTIL FURTHER INVESTIGATED 

*There is a new object render distance setting that can help increase performance 

*A lower FOV will inherently increase performance due to less being rendered on screen at once, whereas a higher FOV will lower performance 

*A high amount of cassettes or vhs tapes will lower performance 

If the game starts in a resolution that your monitor does not support or if you want borderless, windowed, fullscreen by default, look at the Config.ini file!

Hello and thank you! I appreciate the feedback and time you took to test and post. I've got about 85% of an update ready, I'm sure it'll be done by the end of the week. It addresses the horrendous item picking and interacting, adds mouse look, fixes the draw distance, a couple of smaller bugs, simultaneous keyboard inputs and more! It's an overall QOL update before I continue to expand. There are a couple settings in the console that you can use right now for draw distance: turn on devmode with "devmode" and then "set game pdraw to 20000" to unlock the draw distance fully. Driving draw distance is it's own variable named ddraw and can be set the same way. A settings menu is definitely needed and in the works. Also the lighting is on a day and night cycle and I started the day rather late, so it gets dark awfully fast. I know the transitions of sunlight need work as well!

In regards to the individual scenes for the house, shop, etc. I see how that could greatly increase performance rather than having to load the entire scene, but I don't plan on the town being too large. The reason it feels so strangely empty right now is simply I haven't added the surrounding residential buildings.  This is just the culmination of a few weeks of work, so believe me, there will be plenty more updated and fixed. Again, thank you for taking the time to play my alpha and for reaching out with your thoughts. I hope with your feedback and the rest of the community's, that I'm able to shape this into something unique. 

Thank you for taking the time to test and review Cineverse, even in it's early stages. I truly appreciate the feedback and thoughts on this as I want to be able to polish as much as I can (again it is still in its really early stages).

Some things like the FOV, I hadn't thought of previous, but a few things have been known, like the awful "general forward direction" item picking up rather than a centered crosshair  that you use to pick up objects. The lighting angle for the time of day is also a known funny issue. The skybox not being visible is due to the draw distance, which I've turned on permanently at the moment because I've yet to make a dedicated settings page to control them all with.

Anyhow, the issues have been heard! Some have been bothering me for a bit, others are news to me, so thank you again for taking the time to test and review this.

I appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback! The arrow key aiming is a placeholder for mouse aiming, so I apologize for it feeling so rough. And the radio is empty by default (the tv only has one thing on each channel) but it's made so you can drop as many mp3s, flacs, whatever audio files you have, into the channels in the radio folder of the game. There is a .txt file in Assets that explains how to use the radio/tv/tapes custom functionalities. 

This was a "state of progress" posting for my game for me to take part of the jam and to stay motivated to keep working on the game. Forgive me if it is in early stages, I tried to reflect that in my descriptors of the game.

Thank you for the support and feedback!

I had never considered keyboards recognizing as gamepads. I have it set at the moment to disable certain movements on keyboard when using a gamepad, correct. With this info, I will likely fix this so you can use either or both simultaneous. And yes it was completely built with a controller in mind, so there had been slight neglect on the side of keyboard users, forgive me.

Most of what there is to do is messing with the TV/Radio/tape systems at the moment, which you can easily add your own files into. There's a .Txt file in the assets folder with lots of instructions and help with this! However many tapes you put into the tape folder in assets, will determine how many tapes are in game!

Next will be some needed polish (like rebuilding the system that allows for item selection/picking up) and some graphical fixes, but then I'll expand the town and add more shops and I'll add NPCS so there will be an actual game loop. 

Did you like what there was to see? Not like it? Let me know! Any Ideas or thoughts, share them here.

There is a settings menu if you need to change graphics settings/ performance settings! Need further optimization? Check out the config.ini in the game folder. 

This is still early in development so there will be a few bugs. I believe that most of them are already known, so here is a short list of the ones I have found and not addressed as of yet:

• Exiting the vehicle at the exact moment of reversing/accelerating may cause the vehicle to never slow down and thus drives away without you
• Looking out of windows causes some texture pop in/out. I'm not sure what causes this one, it might be an engine limitation with handling transparency, but it's here and will be addressed at some point.
• Textures can load in improperly or sometimes lose their opacity after compilation, this is something I am currently trying to address as well, so forgive me for any missing/incorrect textures.
• Using the 'change resolution' setting before using entering fullscreen can strangely reposition menu button click areas
• Slight audio desync sometimes
• Driving the car makes the streetlights shutoff at night until exiting the vehicle. A quick work around is to use the car headlights with L
• Using camera movement other than the mouse while driving the vehicle and not repositioning the camera back to the neutral forward position before Exiting the vehicle will cause the player movement to be off by that amount. This is reversible by doing it again with the opposite camera angle.

Let me know if there are any other bugs found and detail as much as you can with it. You can use 'print log' in the console to print out a few .txt files into the LOGS folder of the game directory that has loads of game-play specific info that I can use to debug, so attach them and send them to me as well, along with any screenshots!

The Radio, TV, Cassettes and VHS tapes all work very similarly. 

For the Radio or TV, either drop files straight into ch1 or ch2  (st1, st2 for radio) or just make any amount of new folders (named ch3, st3 and up) and drop them in there!  

For VHS, make a new folder in tapes called tape1, tape2 and so on, and drop your file into there. VHS "technically" can have more than one file but there is no continuity check to keep it playing and it won't play in order. Tapes can have cover art! There's no size limit or requirements other than it has to be a PNG. Just drop cover.png into the individual tape folder you made with the video in it and that's it! There are cover templates in /assets/textures/blanktape and /assets/textures/blankcasstte 

Cassettes work the exact same as VHS but need to be put in it's respective 'cassettes' folder. It also must be named 'cassette1', 'cassette2' and so on and so forth. 

My recommendation is that if you have numbered tracks (you can have 14 on one cassette!), to number them 01, 02, and so forth, then 10-14 can be regular. Otherwise the sorting goes 1,10,11,12,13,14,2,3,4,etc... silly I know. It also can take cover art the same way as the vhs, there is no wrong resolution as long as it roughly follows the template and is named cover.png 

If you don't want to have 100+ movie files in the game because, ya know, that takes up a lot of space, you can solely collect covers (Legally and on your own; I don't know laws on this stuff, so find them yourselves) and still make folders for them each and put them in there and it will generate a "blank" tape with that case. It will still act in game as a regular tape, you simply won't be able to watch it. Customers will still try and rent it, can be removed from case, etc. 

If you name a TV channel or Radio station a higher number than you have actual folders, it'll create empty static stations in between to make up for it. This doesn't happen with Cassettes/VHS, but rather if you only have one folder named 'tape5', it'll internally call it 'tape1' because it's the only one it found, hence the naming convention, same with 'cassette5', etc. 

There's no limit that I'm aware of to how many files you can put onto a station or channel and there's no limit to how many stations/channels/cassettes/tapes you can have. 

If you want to watch just a single file again and again, don't yap at me to turn on file looping or whatever, just put it on it's own channel/station and it'll loop. You can also put it onto a tape now f*** off. 

Custom Video/Audio is passed through FFMPEG so it should be able to handle most file types, hardware depending. 

***********HEVC, H265, 10bit or 4K video just shouldn't be used for performancereasons*********** 

In fact, during my own tests, I found that only until you get into larger file sizes for 1080p does it ever become an issue (20gb+) and even then, it's just a bit of audio de-sync. But 4k, 10bit video, HEVC, H265 whatever, they all crashed the game and I don't care enough to fix it. It works great as is. 

I have not extensively tested audio support. 

For best results, I'd use video/audio files that have mono audio tracks. This will allow the 3D audio in game to work proper and is how the game is meant to be played. You can easily convert your own files using FFMPEG. If it's music, you only have to merge: 

----------------------------- 

(THIS IS FOR ONE FILE) 

Split audio from original video file ('input.mp4' should match your file): 

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn -acodec copy output.aac 

Merge audio streams into mono channel('input.aac' should be the file you just made above and .aac should change based on the video codec. If its an .mkv video, its .mka): 

ffmpeg -i input.aac -ac 1 output.aac 

Recombine the old video with the new audio ('input.mp4' should be original video, 'input.aac' should be the mono audio we just made): 

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i input.aac -c copy -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 output.mp4 

Delete your original video (if you want) and the audio streams we made, that's it! 

-------------------------------- 

(THIS IS TO BATCH CONVERT ALL IN A FOLDER) 

BATCH SPLIT,CONVERT and RECOMBINE DUAL AUDIO TO MONO (these have to be done in CMD, no powershell, and can each be literally copy/pasted one at a time once you're in the folder in CMD) 

Split audio from original file (.mp4 and .aac should change based on the video codec. If its an .mkv video, its .mka): 

for %i in (*mp4) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -vn -acodec copy "%i output.aac" 

batch convert all dual channel audio in a folder into mono 

for %i in (*.aac) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -ac 1 "%~ni mono.aac" 

Recombine the old video with the new audio: 

for %i in (*.mp4) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -i "%i output mono.aac" -c copy -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 "%i MONO.mp4" 

Delete your original videos (if you want) and the audio streams we made, that's it! 

------------------------------- 

Also, "f***" 

Also, also, here's a few more helpful FFMPEG tools for stuff: 

Convert *input file type* into H264 (change .mkv to whatever file type your videos are): 

ffmpeg -i 'input.mkv' -map 0 -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -vf format=yuv420p -c:a copy 'output.mkv' 

Batch convert all *input file type* in a folder into H264 (this one can't be done from powershell, has to be CMD or similar. Change .mkv to whatever file type your videos are) 

for %i in (*.mkv) do ffmpeg -i "%i" -map 0 -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -vf format=yuv420p -c:a copy "%~ni [H264 re-encode].mkv" 

without subtitle decoding: add '-sn' to the above. If you had an issue running the command and it's because of subtitles, this probably will help. 

I noticed two things today, one small, one more just annoying than anything. And a third thing that might just be my incompetence. 

The medium flag has a heavier weight listed in the store than the large flag, not sure if this is intentional.

Secondly, I ordered a big couch and was using the gravity gun to move the box that it came in. I got about half way where I was going (to the windmill) when the box finally broke, but no couch came out. It also might have left the gravity gun in "grabbed" mode, but I was able to get out of that easily enough. No couch back at the base either, she's just gone. (Edit: couch returned on reload)

Third, the motor at the top of the windmills are easy to get stuck in. I'm assuming it's intentional that it can suck items through the force of the motor running (I tried jamming it with a crowbar), but if you crouch jump into it, you get stuck in the middle of the motor. Again, this is just my own incompetence but I figured I'd put it here. 

Also, are the floors of the windmill interior at the top intentionally supposed to drop items through the floor? I came back and several items were knocked over entirely inside and several others had flown out (through the walls? Floors?) and were now all over the place due to it being up on the hill.  I figured it has to do with how the location of items is stored considering the top of the windmill rotates and may not be in the same position as where the items would need. Would be cool to be able to turn that into a little hideaway but as of now it's not possible. 

Oh I guess one more thing, any time I put multiple TVs out, the audio output on them stop working (unless I reload a few times). Like if there's already a TV in the base (off) and I run across the map to where I've put one in a transformer already, the audio won't play out at the transformer TV, it'll only play back at the base even though that TV is still off. The video still will be working, but audio is played where the other (off) TV is.