So I finally put a few hours into it and got to Henosis and so far this is pretty impressive; the presentation, the music are highlights while the writing and the worldbuilding are decent. I get around 30 fps with the lighting and stuff turned off but unlike other games I'd say turning them off is a detriment in VB's case since the looks of the locations set the tone along with the music which at times reminded me of Mass Effect & Dying Light. I ran into a softlock situation where the robot in the very first counter wouldn't move after being defeated body blocking the player which stopped the other robot to appear and investigate effectively halting the progress and later realised this happened due accidental dialogue skipping during that segment. Another thing I noticed is that dialogue doesn't reflect the outcome of a situation or the decisions I make sometimes but I understand this is a in-development game, so no biggie. There's also the lack of an auto mode for the dialogue segments and since the game has a lot of dialogue in and out of combat events it gets tiresome having to click or press to progress the dialogue.
Putting all that aside tho my biggest question is.... why RPGM and not another multipurpose engine like Unity, Godot or an engine similar to what what Eiyuu Senki uses since that is also a hybrid VN/tbt game? I know this is a redundant question at this stage of the development and it isn't meant to haze you, rather it's a genuine inquiry on my part. Running all the complexity that is VB through rpgm mv feels like trying to pass a wide log through a thin pvc pipe. Or a better example would be (if you're familiar with doom modding) how some doom modders would cook up something extremely ambitious and try to run in through gzdoom even tho it can neither handle it well nor is the fanbase geared towards running stuff like that. I'm really curious if VB would've run better on older or gpu less machines if it was running on unity.
Also I was curious about the lighting system, given the effect on performance I assumed it's dynamic lighting of some sort but it doesn't look that complex visually so I was wondering if it could've been achieved through baked lighting (assuming that's possible). That way the levels look the way they meant to be while giving some fps for older rig owners. Unless the lighting system also uses parallaxing and large texture files, in which case the fps hit makes more sense without a gpu.
Anyways, I'm looking forward to playing more of it and reporting back on my findings. Apologies for the wall of text
and please understand that the engine and lighting related questions are out of mere curiosity rather than to question your decisions or argument.
