Current state of [DME], inactivity last month, upcoming updates and Halloween

Hey everyone

It has been quite a while since we last did a announcement or update, I believe almost 2 months ?
Sorry about that, we had a situation at hand. My other-half of the team (eff) met a small accident and was on rest for initial 2 weeks. We actually had the Workshop's UI completed around June end.
While he was recovering, I tried to work alone on DME but couldn't focus properly, which led to almost a month's procrastination. That and the new Ryzen machine we build just in July itself to train the AI's conversation system (Machine Learning), ended up crashing. Whole HDD crashed.
I won't lie, but these 2 incidents back to back almost made me lose focus and passion to keep working on DME. I just couldn't put my mind to do it alone.

By the time eff recovered, we had a little talk that maybe we were trying to go too fast all alone and pushing ourself too much since initial launch. As such, both of us decided to talk a small break during August and perhaps prototype some new ideas, we actually ended up creating 3 new game ideas and some cool stuff for DME itself (Living Environments).

Come September, we had resumed the work on DME, wrapping up Steam Workshop's backend integration, which actually is way more complicated than you might think. Lots of trial and errors, crashes and small problems.
But finally, we finished the Workshop integration today morning (you can actually see some test workshop submissions we did).

Well, not a lot to talk about what happened and time which is lost. We wish we had a few more folks in our team, as a 2-man team, both of us are more or less programming side. Having a round about team is always better.
We also incorporated a company in US around June (that costed quite some $$$) to do a Kickstarter campaign but decided to postpone it till a few core features we want to add to DME before that. We hope we can do a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise some funds to increase our team size.

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Now, coming to actual technical stuff about DME, its state and future.

Current Major problems (that we are aware of)

- New rendering system improved performance and resource usage but broke support for Windows 7/8
- Windows 32/x86 bit compatibility (we will do it when we get on fixing the Windows 8 support)
- 3D Workshop Support (we clarified this in some posts in community topics, but whats holding this back currently is having a bullet proof way to do sanity check of various aspects of the 3D model submitted to make sure it can work with DME as easy as plug and play. We do not want users to do extra work to make 3D models from workshop work.
- 2D Workshop Support is completed as of today, after a few more tests, we hope to push out its update by tonight/tomorrow
- Intrusiveness/Cannot click on desktop/icons, we believe this issue is isolated to Windows 7/8 users
- Hide Taskbar Icon broken again, this and the system tray are causing quite some issues and random crashes. We are trying to make this work but we might have to ditch System tray icon for a Desktop based overlay icon instead (docked to bottom right)
- Dual Screen/4k, we believe we had fixed all issues related to this but one or two users recently reported it. We will check it again.
- Game Mode, we know many users want a auto-disable feature when playing game to preserve their resources. We are working on it.
- Remembering Settings

Upcoming Updates/Features

-2D Workshop/Shimeji Support (September 2018)
Workshop integration is done and so far its working perfect (both upload and download). We have created whole 2D system support using Shimeji as a model, since many users asked for it and wanted compatibility with Shimejis.
We are happy to confirm that you would be able to use Shimeji's with our 2D Mascot System.
Full functionality and animation types are not available yet but we will be improving it with your feedback. Once we have confirmed the workshop integration is working flawless, we will continue updating and improving the 2D Mascot System instead (animations, interactions, sounds, physics, etc.)

-AI Conversation (Voice based chatbot) (October-November 2018)
We are re-training all our conversation data (Machine Learning) so this might take as much as 1-2months to be complete again, but would be worth the wait.
You would be able to have small-talks (conversations) with your mascot using voice (chat). It will be a fun companion and something which we will extend to full voice-based AI-assistant.
A small preview can be seen here, please do know that the video was for promotion and reference purpose only and that the actual Conversation Bot may or may not be as intelligent xD
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433471501

-3D Workshop (TBA)
Its more or less done with some technical hiccups, however, it will not be released till our sanity check and model checking algorithms are satisfactory. We want the workshop to be read-to-use, instantly and freely available and for that, the sanity checks are necessary to make the models work right out of the box once you download them. We do not want a curated workshop model where users submit, vote and then we manually add models.

-Utilities, Services and API Integration (October-December 2018)
We will be starting work on actual productivity and utility features of DME, including integrating service providers like Twitch, Soundcloud, etc. and utility features. Again, development for this will more or less go hand-in-hand with the AI-Assistant feature

-Living Environments (October 2018)

These will be hand-made (not literally) and curated desktop backgrounds. But unlike normal backgrounds/wallpapers, these will be living (in a sense) and interactive. It will be something like what wallpaper engine does, except in a more advanced and modern sense.
We are still discussing on whether to keep this feature as free or a separate DLC as adding it within DME might over complicate DME and make it more hard to understand/use for many users.
Keeping it as a separate DLC would allow us to pivot it from DME and create it as a standalone system, based on and integrated in DME.
We have quite some ideas for Living Environments, from highly interactive and living backgrounds to living stories where you can actually go to your desktop, interact with objects in your background/wallpaper and a story unfolds. Interactive Stories meet backgrounds.
These Environments will take time and effort to make as each one of them will be like a game itself.
We want to keep its development properly going and regular new content added, we are thinking to make this a paid DLC (with free environments available to have a feel what its about).
We are still talking with a few artists to see if we can price the whole feature as a one time DLC ($4.99) rather than selling the environments via micro transactions ($0.49-0.99).

We currently cannot show you a exact preview of the actual feature as we are working hard to release the feature in time for Halloween and release our first environment as a seasonal environment (Halloween theme).
But here is a prototype we did during our resting period.

Just think of it this way, while DME's mascots live on top of every other window like a overlay, the Environments will live below every other window, just like your wallpaper.

We would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, problems and suggestions on Halloween themed environment.

Here is discussion topic for Living Environments:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/821060/discussions/0/3220528325729672163/