Good Evening everyone! We hope you've been having a good holiday season so far and we wish you the best of luck on your exams, if that sorta thing seems to be consuming your life lately.

Silly title aside, we actually have some important news to share with you today. For the last several months, Solstice Game Studios' donations have been trending downward. As you may know, our servers, websites, emails, domain names, developers, and the rest of our expenses are all paid for by our community through donations.

Donations from the community are what let's us keep both YukiTheater and GMod Cruise Line running, and are what allows us to continue developing for both of them. Thank you Donators, for believing in us and supporting us.

As our donations have gone down, we've made several cost-saving measures in an attempt to make running all of this a little less burdensome. Chiefly among these are that we haven't paid our Developers in several months, we haven't been making donations to charities, our servers have been downgraded to reduce cost, and almost all of our Developers don't have an SGS email address now.

These cost-saving measures somewhat worked for a while until October, where we started cutting it close. But, in November, last month, our donations did not cover our base expenses; the bare minimum we need to keep everything running. Due to some money I had saved from previous months, and income from some other sources, I was able to cover it out of my own pocket.

This is obviously not a sustainable situation.

Although it is not ideal, Developers have been working without pay for quite a while now, because they believe in this community and our future. We can't ask them to do that forever, but we certainly can't keep our projects running forever without the ability to pay for them.

Ultimately, I despise asking for more of your financial support when many of you have already given so much, which is why I waited until now to alert any of you about it, but we really need it right now.

If you have been considering donating or are willing to donate again, please consider doing so here. You can even donate using Bitcoin, should you wish. We literally cannot continue without your support.

You'll get all of the Donation Perks listed, but you'll also help us develop these upcoming features:

• YukiTheater
  • Holiday Update and Map
  • Updated New Years Event
• GMod Cruise Line
  • New Minigolf Physics
  • 2 New Minigolf Maps
  • Media System Video (YouTube, etc) Support including Splendor Cinema
• And more!

Thank you for reading! We love you all! <3

Hello and Good Evening everyone! We have some stuff to share today about updates to the Donation System, our (tentative) roadmap for GMod Cruise Line, our new Moderator Recruiting Process, and retiring YukiTheater's old social media accounts! Please bear with us, this is going to be a long post.

Donation System Changes
Starting today, we will be merging the old $5 Donator and $15 Power Donator ranks back into a single rank, Donator, which is now $10 USD.

The Perks for the new Donator rank have also been updated and you will now get, in addition to Donator rank in YukiTheater:

• Donator rank in any Solstice Game Studios servers going forward, including GMod Cruise Line.
• Access to GMod Cruise Line's Closed Beta.
• Recognition as a Donator on our Discord Chat and Forums.

If you donated before May 1st, 2017, you are now known as a Legacy Donator. This means:

• In YukiTheater, the Power Donator and Donator ranks are now merged into a single rank called Donator. Please note there is no difference between Legacy Donators and new Donators in YukiTheater; they all have the same rank and the same perks there.
• Your Donation only counted toward YukiTheater and is not eligible for Donator rank on Discord, the Forums, or in GMod Cruise Line. You will have to donate again to get those perks.
• However, if you had a Donator rank and over 48 Hours of Playtime in YukiTheater as of May 1st, 2017, which was 1,082 of you, you will be getting some Exclusives in GMod Cruise Line, including a Snow Particle Effect (not purchasable in the Shop), TBD Loot, and a special "Legacy Donator" tag on GMCL's Scoreboard. You will also have access to GMod Cruise Line's Closed Beta (more info below).

GMod Cruise Line's Roadmap
We have been asked several times about the progress of GMod Cruise Line as well as when it's scheduled to be released. As such, we thought it might be a good idea to at least share a tentative roadmap to give you an idea of where we are and where we're heading.

• Pre-Alpha Testing (Right Now) - Developers are able to test new content and code in a GMCL Development Server hosted on the same machine as YukiTheater. This allows us to work together and discover bugs quicker due to there being multiple players testing and doing things on the server.
• Alpha Testing (July 14th, 2017) - All Staff members will be given access to the server to allow Devs to test content and code more thoroughly as well as gain feature feedback from members outside of the development team.
• Beta Testing (September 29th, 2017) - Donators starting today, as well as Legacy Donators that had over 48 hours of Playtime in YukiTheater as of May 1st, will be given access to the server. This is the first time anybody outside of SGS Staff will be able to playtest the gamemode. Players will be able to give extensive feedback to the developers as well as strain all of the systems so we have an idea of what we need to optimize, change, and improve.
• Public Release ("When It's Ready" (Late 2017/Early 2018)) - Everyone will be able to play on the server at this point.

New Moderator Recruiting Process
To address complaints about how we used to process moderator applications, as well as allow us to better provide feedback to applicants, we have changed our recruiting process into a rolling system with existing Staff voting on Moderator Applications every other Saturday. All Applicants will now get a response within a certain time-frame, whether it be a Denial or an Acceptance.

You can read more about our updated process in the Staff Application Sticky.

Retiring YukiTheater's Old Social Media Accounts
We have had, for a long time now, social media accounts for YukiTheater. As we've grown and eventually became Solstice Game Studios, with has own set of social media accounts, we've used YukiTheater's less and less.

As such, we will be retiring YukiTheater's Facebook and Twitter accounts in favor of using SGS's Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts exclusively going forward. However, please note that we will be continuing the trend of having separate Steam Groups for SGS, YukiTheater, and GMod Cruise Line.

Phew! That was a lot. If you have any questions, don't be afraid to reply to this topic. We'll be sure to answer them all as quickly as we can.

Thanks for Reading! Love You All! <3

Hello there! If you don't know, over the last few days, YukiTheater has been encountering several issues with all of our Video Services. These are mostly resolved, except for the fact that Kiss services no longer support seeking, Twitch VODs don't sync players anymore, and YouTube's watermark is now permanently large/visible.

At the core of all of these issues is the Web Framework in Garry's Mod, known as Awesomium. Awesomium is what allows developers to load web pages and web content in GMod, and in Cinema, it is what powers all of the theater screens and the "preview thumbnails" that you see outside of the auditoriums. It's what powers the whole thing.

Unfortunately, Awesomium is very old (based on Chrome 18, which was released in 2012) and doesn't support many of the new features that power videos and multimedia in the modern age of HTML5, forcing us to use Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Flash Player, as I'm sure you've heard, is being phased out of almost everything nowadays including YouTube, Twitch, and even entire web browsers such as Google Chrome. This all puts us in a pretty bad situation.

So what's the solution to it?

Well, there's a few solutions, but anything that's permanent and easy for players and developers requires the help of GMod's devs. That's why we, as a community, are throwing our support behind the request to Add an Alternative VGUI Browser Panel that uses the ISteamHTMLSurface API.

As such, I'd like to ask you all to Please Support That Request in the GitHub Issue that's linked above or in This Facepunch Thread. The more support that we get for this, the more likely it'll be that something will be done.

If you have anymore questions about this whole thing, please feel free to reply to this thread.

Love You All! <3

Edit: We've gotten a response from one of the Devs that says, firstly, that they aren't against the idea, and secondly, requesting that responses posted in the GitHub Issue be useful to the conversation. So please don't comment on it if you don't have something more to add than "+1" or "supporting this." Just Vote on the Original Post with a Thumbs Up to show support instead.

Over the course of the last week or so, we've been working on completely redoing the website for YukiTheater. Mainly, the front page is now full of useful information telling you just what on earth it is.

But it's also much faster than before, as it leverages CloudFlare's caching system as much as possible; links from the website now spit out any relevant "extended information" on services such as Discord, Facebook, Twitter, etc; and overall it's just much nicer.

And now when you're trying to tell a friend about YukiTheater, you can just link them to the website instead of trying to explain it!

Go check it out now! http://www.yukitheater.org/

Love You All <3

GMod's web framework doesn't support features we need for Cinema to continue to survive, it prevents developers from doing a lot of things that were possible in other web browsers 5 years ago, and it has incredibly poor performance. It needs to be replaced.

View the full post here. Please support the Replacement of Awesomium in That Thread or in This GitHub Issue! Thanks! <3