I've spoken before about the importance of standardization in VNgen. It's so important, in fact, that multiple times I've discarded working solutions purely because they didn't conform well enough to established guidelines. A while back, one of these solutions involved using a shader to dim characters while they're not speaking—a method that was quickly replaced by blending in a transparent black rectangle instead. And yet, at the time, I said the effort to incorporate shaders into VNgen wasn't wasted, but that it served as a proof of concept for shaders possibly finding their way back into VNgen in the future. Well, my friends, the future is now. That's right: as of version 0.9.8, shaders are now implemented into VNgen as first-class citizens alongside transitions, animations, deformations—the whole lot. Shade-what? If you're familiar with shaders, I don't need to tell you what a big deal this is. If you're not, this might sound either compl...

VNgen's backlog was one of the first things written for the engine well over a year-and-a-half ago. While it might seem like putting the cart before the horse, the backlog was actually a convenient testing ground for some of the new concepts necessary to make VNgen a reality. But then that reality materialized, and the backlog was left the oldest feature, requiring more than one overhaul to keep it up to date. Nowadays, standardization is the name of the game. VNgen's codebase has been cut in half despite more features being added since the first Early Access release. For the past two weeks, it was the backlog's turn yet again—and this time, other problems were also solved in the process. Two Birds While you might not have noticed, text labels have been broken in VNgen for a long time. This was hidden by a dirty hack that forced labels to refresh every single frame, but even so, under certain specific, but very reproducible conditions the works were sprung. Linebreaks w...