I went back to an older project today to see if I could crack it: hard pixel texture sampling with vertex paint support.

It's 95% working now, supporting ^2 sample counts above 16, diffuse, normal & roughness + height.

By default, Pixomatic outputs at half res, but after reading the documentation (boo, hiss) it's trivial to turn that off in the ini, at which point my test shows it running around 16-24 fps.

This is honestly about 5 times faster than I was expecting.

That new Silent Hill movie trailer certainly is something.

Next on the list is adding some screen shake, and it's going *very well* (marked as "graphic" due to sort of flashing lights).

Much more work on the buff screen is needed, but the first step, updating the particles so that they pretend to glow, is done. For the right look I've also had to increase the spawn rate by... ten times, but there's plenty of performance headroom on the menus.

Decreased base brightness to .2 instead of .3, fixed the invisible hover buttons that had stopped working (because of me), switched the post-its to match the album cover-art not the casing (badly drawn instead of CG), made the font more readable & adjusted animation timings.

I just made one small tweak, brightening and dimming the choices on the level-up screen to help highlight the selected one, and it's made it feel approximately 3 times as polished as it did before.

There's something I find immensely funny about having an idea about how you want to do something, implementing said idea, and having the result absolutely *suck*.

Back to the implementation mines!