Aether Suite 3.9.1 - Project Anubis

It's finally here. It's not nearly as big as I'd have liked, but honestly, this AS update has been through so many kinds of hell, and so many personal policy changes that it's a miracle it's here at all. This is the first "official" SE release, too. I might have broken some stuff, but I did a fairly thorough runaround and didn't find anything. The AS will now be prepared in multiple parts so you can DL from either source and in smaller, safer sized downloads.

For those of you who don't give a crap about a devblog, the DL links are right here for your quick fix: 

LE: My Server Pt1 | My Server Pt2 | Google Drive Pt1 | Google Drive Pt2 

SE: My Server Pt1 | My Server Pt2 | Google Drive Pt1 | Google Drive Pt2 

Changelog is in the readme.

For those of you who want to hear a little about the last 3 years of AS mess, or about the future of AS, read on.

First of all, this AS release wasn't originally supposed to happen. When I started up this Patreon, there were only going to be 2 more AS releases, but after talking it over with friends and patrons, I came to the conclusion that I should take a different tactic. From now on, the AS is going to be on a semi-regular release schedule. It will begin to make up a large portion of the monthly releases I do.

Instead of 2 big updates, I will be releasing the originally planned final update in small parts, frequently, as I work on the other update in a separate esp that will be merged back in eventually.  This means you're gonna start seeing AS updates a lot like the ones you used to get back in the early days, where I make a lot of updates which add a few things at a time. The feedback I got is that people would prefer that, and if the AS is actually the main mod release for a month, it will always be the main focus instead of something I do on the side while pulling new mods out of my ass. So that's the future of the AS.

This release has been ridiculous in development. Not long after the last release of the AS, 3 years ago, I started looking into medicating my mental issues, and for a year, I took a total break from the AS. When I came back to it, I had a ton of ideas, but no time to work on it, so it was being worked on in tiny bits on and off. This resulted in a total mess, a lot of which I ultimately wiped and rolled back to the last public release.

A while before I started this Patreon, I had begun work on the AS again, and created some new assets for a planned update, but that update ended up being the one that I set to the side, so none of that work ended up being reflected in the AS proper, and I'd used a huge chunk of time on it.

That in itself wasn't too big of an issue, but once I started developing a different update, you may remember from a few months back, I made a post about losing a chunk of work. A big part of that was new assets for the AS, which no longer exist, and set me back a couple of months of work on it.

Even as I worked on this update the past 2 months, I've been having severe stability issues, which I have thankfully managed to solve. What's actually in this update is the product of multiple time periods.

Lastly, about policy changes on how I work on the AS. I used to force myself to use the same textures over and over again for the sake of optimization. Keeping mod sizes down, keeping VRAM usage low. That's been the AS policy for nearly 10 years. That policy is gone. Even old PCs now have significantly more VRAM than the AS was made to work with, hard drives get bigger and faster, and internet connections improve all the time. 

That means from now on the AS will be seeing a lot more unique texture assets, and in higher resolutions, as I gradually upgrade, update, and overhaul meshes and textures that I'm unhappy with, or feel could use better presentation.

This update may not seem too big in terms of new areas, but I have chosen to include assets from Modernicity that I originally planned to avoid using because of those reasons, as well as doing a lot of under the hood mesh and texture overhauling that you'll see particularly in the furniture this time.

If you got this far, thanks for reading my blogging. The AS links are at the top, but the bonus goodies I said people would get by way of apology for the delay are down here:

Goodies 

The contents of this gdrive folder are things I've had for varying amounts of time. They're unpolished, various ages, and somewhat incomplete. Why did I never release them before? Reasons!

Enjoy the AS update, and you might even get a quick kick out of the goodies!

Halo.