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 install size, improving performance, and fixing issues that crop up, etc.
But there will also be new small features that trickle in, and I’ll be keeping an eye on the forums to see what ideas can be incorporated during Early Access.
So what’s coming up first? Character Saving/Loading!
Over the last month I’ve been working through the last stages of hooking up the saving and loading features. Luckily a lot of the structure of the app was built with saving/loading in mind, so there haven’t been any major obstacles in getting this working. But as with any complex project, there’s lots of little details and platform specific testing.
The feature is close to done, but there are still a number of bugs associated with loading the pose handles, clothing colors & lighting presets. Most of these are rooted in annoying things like scripts executing in different orders are causing inconsistent issues which are hard to pin down. So I’m currently carefully going through each set of feature and testing as much as I can, and fixing problems as they arise. The good news is that all the data is saving correctly, it’s just the loading that is kicking up bugs.
One nice aspect of this system is that the character data is just encoded in simple JSON format, so you’ll be able to easily copy/paste or even tweak character settings from a text editor.
While this feature has been taking up the bulk of my time, I’m also working on two smaller improvements:
More Custom Morphs: More customization options for adjusting the physical appearance of your character.
Eye Controls: This first simple version of eye controls, allowing you to move the gaze left/right & up/down.
With the current rate of progress it’s looking good for early October to have the saving/loading feature completed. So keep an eye out for an update of Flex in just a few weeks!
Thanks again for checking out and supporting the project. Flex has been a really enjoyable project to work on, and I hope to continue to develop new features, and with your help, make it the best figure reference tool in the world!