(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everybody! This week in CPE news, I took a step back from creating new level layouts to focus on some detail things I've been wanting to do for a long time, liiiike reworking the dynamic water, for example!

Here's a shot of how the dynamic water USED to be:

And here's a shot of what the NEW dynamic water looks like:

On top of the obvious visual and animation improvements, this new water is also a bit more optimized! Since the old water was moving constantly, it was always doing calculations - now, since the water is still when undisturbed, when the water isn't moving the code simply doesn't run, saving loads of processing time. The method I used for rendering the water has also improved, which further optimizes it. In a short test using my work PC, I went from about ~600 FPS to ~950 FPS with the game uncapped in this area. Hopefully this will improve any performance issues people have in areas with water!

Next up, with the progress of level design going faster than I expected, I realized that the long-awaited underwater sections of Crisis Point will be coming up far sooner than I expected. With that in mind, I worked on a new special effect involving - as stated in the title - bubbles! They were a lot of fun to add in, and so far have been used in two places: a passive effect on Alicia while she's underwater, and a replacement for the Flare Shot!

You can see both effects in the gif above. Naturally, the Flare Shot bubbles don't actually harm enemies. They're bubbles, after all. It also doesn't consume ammo to fire the Flare Shot underwater, though, so there's no harm in having some bubble fun.

Lastly, I don't have a gif of this one, but I finished adding full mouse support to the rest of the menus too! Now you can navigate the Status and Map screens using the mouse, though you still need the keyboard to leave map notes of course.

For streams this week, I plan on taking Wednesday off, and probably trying to stick to that schedule in general - streaming Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday, usually at 2 pm EST, though there are some days where if I wake up supremely early I might start the streams earlier, since I do my best work earlier in the day.

Alright, that's all for me this week! I did other things too, like writing the Torguis CG script, but I won't be sharing details on that I can't guarantee the Torguis CG (or his H-scene) will be in this coming update though - because of the holiday season, the majority of the CPE dev team has less time to work than usual, and the scheduling kind of got away from me because of that. My apologies if they don't make it in, but we're doing our best to make it happen. Anyway, thank you all very much for your continued support! See you in next week's update!