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 animation selection. I tried replicating the issues on a bunch of different computers, and while I couldn't get it to exhibit the same issues, I did find a bunch of garbage code that I promptly tossed out and rewrote. So I've done my darnedest to fix these issues, and have hopefully succeed? Please tell me if you are still having issues after the next update.
With this next update I also spent an excessive amount of time trying to get the older versions of Flex characters to update correctly. Ultimately I got pretty close, but there are still issues that I couldn't resolve (mostly small differences in the character positioning). So, if you're working on a project that relies on an older version of Flex, please send me a message and I can provide a download link to the previous versions.
So looking at the bigger picture for a moment (and setting some expectations for the coming months). I am now back into the swing of Flex development, but I do still have work commitments that will ramp back up in the coming weeks. While I get a good amount of enjoyment from working on Flex, it's not yet something I can devote a large portion of time to. Almost all the money I make from Flex goes into software licensing costs, business costs, etc. So while it is self sustaining to a degree, I have to prioritize work that pays the bills. Of course I would love for this to change! I have yet to do any large scale promotion of Flex, and once I feel Early Access is complete I will start doing paid advertisements and looking for creators to promote Flex to their followings.
So my roadmap as I inch closer to the full release is to focus on aspects of the app that will make it more desirable and competitive. Flex has always been lacking in clothing content, with my new clothing attachment system I can now integrate more clothing and hair content into Flex, and even work on attachments, like glasses and facial hair. The posing system (the handles that control the characters positions) is feeling clunky when compared with those in an app like VRoid. I'd also like to give better control of character skin and clothing textures, with the ability to export/import custom textures. If you have any feedback and ideas for new features, or improvements, I'd love to hear them!
As for this next update, I'm working on the last few fixes, and am aiming to have it uploaded by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience in the last few months & please let me know if you run into bugs/issues when this next version drops.