Ren'Py Abandoned Lab Rats 2 [v0.51.1] [Vren]

[eldoen]

So, here's a summary of information I could find about what's going on with v0.52 for those who can't be bothered to look around for information. (Yes, I see the flaw, but oh well)
**TLDR Don't hold your breath for a June release of 0.52**

Vren is in the middle of switching character models to something called Live2D. There's a demo on the patreon available to the public with basic testing functionality. Vren made a post on the 1st of June saying that the next demo would be a single pose with every current outfit available for testing. Current Progress for that one pose is 53 out of 121 clothing items.
Now for what I can only call "the bad news." Vren is doing manual work on each piece of clothing, so excluding optimizing workflow, it probably isn't going to get too much faster. The importing of clothing to the new system was in the works before the May 24th post, which gave it over a week of progress before the most recent post. Even being really optimistic and saying that every other pose can be finished in less than a week, we're still looking at over a month before the import work is completed.

v0.52.0 (which is rapidly entering "it's ready when it's ready" territory; my time estimates have proven to be way off so far for this project). will be the full LR2 game but with only a single Live2D pose. That pose will support all of the clothing items currently in the game (and hopefully patterns, although I need to write some automation stuff to support those).

That will give me a good platform to work out any performance issues and figure out how to implement minor functionality (like how to do clothing fade-outs). It should also give modders a chance to dig through things, add their own stuff, and hopefully give me feedback on how to make things easier for them. From there I can start setting up the other poses and rendering out their clothing items.

Vren's response on clarification if V0.52 was going to be a tech demo, or a release so in 1 week 12 to 50. At same pace would be finished with clothing next week, and finish wiring the renpy stuff but it is the details stuff we don't know yet,

 

[NightlinerSGS]

Quick questions:

Is there a way to manually trigger the employee promotion? I want to give more duties to a certain employee, but she just isn't going for a promotion... console commands would be also great if there is no other way.

I think I'm stuck on Gabrielles questline. I found her stealing money, but from there it just never advanced. Any solutions?

Is there an overview over all the questlines that are ingame? There's no way to keep track of all of them apart from writing down what's going on, I'm pretty sure I missed a couple of things so far...

Thanks for any help.

 

[Diconica]

Quick questions:

Is there a way to manually trigger the employee promotion? I want to give more duties to a certain employee, but she just isn't going for a promotion... console commands would be also great.

I think I'm stuck on Gabrielles questline. I found her stealing money, but from there it just never advanced. Any solutions?

Is there an overview over all the questlines that are ingame? There's no way to keep track of all of them apart from writing down what's going on, I'm pretty sure I missed a couple of things so far...

Thanks for any help.

Try empoye review.

 

[NightlinerSGS]

Try empoye review.

Ah, I know how to change the duties, I want to increase her work experience level so she can take more simultanously. I also tried everything under performance review, there isn't any option to promote her. She's only on level 2, so there should be room for more.

 

[BonrAlternate]

What is the benefit of Live2D? Does it make the game perform / look better? Or is it easier to work with in the future? These questions are not rhetorical, I simply do not understand this new tech being used
Thanks in advance

 

[dalzomo]

What is the benefit of Live2D? Does it make the game perform / look better? Or is it easier to work with in the future? These questions are not rhetorical, I simply do not understand this new tech being used
Thanks in advance

More along the line of make it easier to work with. This may lead to better looking stuff because it won't be so daunting a task to add anything as it is now, which requires hundreds of renders for even a single item

 

[dalzomo]

Ah, I know how to change the duties, I want to increase her work experience level so she can take more simultanously. I also tried everything under performance review, there isn't any option to promote her. She's only on level 2, so there should be room for more.

She just needs to keep working and eventually she'll bring it up once she has enough exp

 

[redzadow]

More along the line of make it easier to work with. This may lead to better looking stuff because it won't be so daunting a task to add anything as it is now, which requires hundreds of renders for even a single item

When With what I've seen from the demo, I think people expecting "better looking stuff" are going to be disappointed. It more-or-less looks exactly the same. This opens the door however to more animations (like better titty physics) as well as facial animations. On the latter point in using a widely adopted standard like Live2D it may make importing new and different faces into the game a lot easier, but we'll just have to wait and see the final implementation.

 

[lewd_gamer_31415]

When when I've seen from the demo, I think people expecting "better looking stuff" are going to be disappointed. It more-or-less looks exactly the same. This opens the door however to more animations (like better titty physics) as well as facial animations. On the latter point in using a widely adopted standard like Live2D it may make importing new and different faces into the game a lot easier, but we'll just have to wait and see the final implementation.

Initial implementation of Live2D won't make things better, no. But it will make it easier to add more content in the future, mostly reducing time to render, splitting out pieces so layering is easier, etc. So if you wanted a sweet 100k poly set of clothing or dozens of new faces, they won't come for free with Live2D, but they will be easier to add.

 

[Diconica]

Ah, I know how to change the duties, I want to increase her work experience level so she can take more simultanously. I also tried everything under performance review, there isn't any option to promote her. She's only on level 2, so there should be room for more.

My bad that is tied to the number of days she has worked.
14 days, 26,46,74
line 29 of role_employee.rpy

 

[norbertmc]

v0.52.0 (which is rapidly entering "it's ready when it's ready" territory; my time estimates have proven to be way off so far for this project). will be the full LR2 game but with only a single Live2D pose.

This is looking more and more like HentHighSchool territory. They spent years doing paper dolls too. Endless refactoring and tinkering under the hood, no attention to content.

I'd almost prefer Vren make the mod official content and let them write the game so he do the programming/design work that is so clearly his main focus.

 

[Porrvald]

Is there a way to manually trigger the employee promotion? I want to give more duties to a certain employee, but she just isn't going for a promotion... console commands would be also great if there is no other way.

the_person.work_experience = xx

 

[NightlinerSGS]

the_person.work_experience = xx

Thanks!

 

[whitecode]

I kinda wanna know what all the live 2D is all about, anyone got a gif of it somewhere?

 

[Enfrize]

This is looking more and more like HentHighSchool territory. They spent years doing paper dolls too. Endless refactoring and tinkering under the hood, no attention to content.

I'd almost prefer Vren make the mod official content and let them write the game so he do the programming/design work that is so clearly his main focus.

It's happening to 95% of the ongoing games on this site, simple because making content, meaningful content, is hard. It's way easier to transfer your attention to something like doing absolutely horrid animation work that no one asked for and pretend that you are still "updating" your game so you can continue to leech money off your patrons. (One example that springs to my mind right off the bat is Lilith's Throne).

Imagine how cool it would be if Vren would turn his attention to making new storylines, new events at the office, adding more characters for the girls, working on making those characters to be at least somewhat different from each other, to have them talk and react diffirently depending on their individuality, to finally write more sex lines for each character.

But this all takes immense amount of time, this is precisely why content additions stopped at around mid 2020? And since then the only updates we had were new coding, new unnecessary mechanics, new clothes, new "animations" (if you can even call them that) and so on. That's a thing that sadly plagues majority of games on this website.

 

[cklaubur]

I kinda wanna know what all the live 2D is all about, anyone got a gif of it somewhere?

I can do one better, here's the demo posted by boobthief:

Sure, there you go:

You must be registered to see the links

It says 0.1 but this is from the public Patreon post and includes Demo 1 and 2.

Here are the mega links on Vren's public Patreon post:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[boobthief]

I can do one better, here's the demo posted by boobthief:

Looks like that link has expired, but I was just uploading it for someone who couldn't access Mega. Here are the Lab Rats Live2D demo links from

You must be registered to see the links

:

PC

You must be registered to see the links

Mac

You must be registered to see the links

Android

You must be registered to see the links

 

[eldoen]

It's happening to 95% of the ongoing games on this site, simple because making content, meaningful content, is hard. It's way easier to transfer your attention to something like doing absolutely horrid animation work that no one asked for and pretend that you are still "updating" your game so you can continue to leech money off your patrons. (One example that springs to my mind right off the bat is Lilith's Throne).

Imagine how cool it would be if Vren would turn his attention to making new storylines, new events at the office, adding more characters for the girls, working on making those characters to be at least somewhat different from each other, to have them talk and react diffirently depending on their individuality, to finally write more sex lines for each character.

But this all takes immense amount of time, this is precisely why content additions stopped at around mid 2020? And since then the only updates we had were new coding, new unnecessary mechanics, new clothes, new "animations" (if you can even call them that) and so on. That's a thing that sadly plagues majority of games on this website.

Can't win for losing, when every other comment is to do something with the graphics from the community. about everything you have mentioned, is in General in the gaming industry as a whole for those of us following games since the 1970's be it porn based or triple AAA. maybe a real gem every 3 years or so.

 

[whitecode]

Looks like that link has expired, but I was just uploading it for someone who couldn't access Mega. Here are the Lab Rats Live2D demo links from

You must be registered to see the links

:

PC
Mega

Mac
Mega

Android
Mega

This... just look like a replacement asset for the in game models.
So is he trying to make the little sex scenes at the right hand corner move or something? or is he just gonna play with poses?
With renpy's and the model's limitation I doubt how dynamic can it actually gets.

 

[eldoen]

This... just look like a replacement asset for the in game models.
So is he trying to make the little sex scenes at the right hand corner move or something? or is he just gonna play with poses?
With renpy's and the model's limitation I doubt how dynamic can it actually gets.

I am going to admit I am not the most adept graphics pipeline guru. well lets go novice. I understand some of the concepts but never in the line to practice them and it was never anything I was interested in fully exploring, so take my understanding from that point of view.

My understanding of the current graphics pipeline is that it is tied to some propriety assets and possible tools that Vren cannot easily release the assets to public open source. Adding Live2d starts a process that gives some wiggle room to allow mods more freedom from that aspect, It also greatly reduces the complexity of certain aspects of the render system, so it may be possible to add jewelry, tatoo's etc., finger nail polish was even talked as a possibility.

that said, some of the things shown in the tech demo require animation so I see this as a first step.

but the live2d stuff is suppose to be more open to modders