VN Ren'Py Being a DIK [v0.10.1] [Dr PinkCake]

[TheVengefulOne]

Interesting. You accuse someone of being wrong, but your argument is total bullshit.

If the fans didn't support DPC, DPC wouldn't be able to develop BaDIK full time because he would have to work a "normal" job to support his family. As a result, up to 10 hours a day would go to his "normal" job, which certainly wouldn't lead to shorter update times.

On the subject of employees
DPC can no longer hire employees and form them into a team. He should have done that before BaDIK was launched to ensure consistent quality. But he simply didn't have the money for it at that time and would have had to make large investments for a project whose success on this scale was not foreseeable, certainly not after AL's shitstorm.

Now DPC has the money to hire staff, but bringing those staff to his quality line would not work, as each person is different and different creative impressions would go into BaDIK, with the risk of losing the authenticity of the previous game. To prevent this, DPC would spend much more time on corrections, which would lead to longer update times.

DPC has already let it be known that it already has ideas for a game based on BaDIK. It would make sense for DPC to hire people and form a team before he starts producing a new game, because that team would establish a common level of quality that would apply from start to finish.

My personal thoughts
The people who don't support DPC financially, in my eyes, don't even have the right to complain about the way DPC operates. They are consuming his product without his permission and should be happy that they can get updates at all.

Many here in the thread are decent people who enjoy the game, appreciate DPC's work, and have stimulating discussions and debates about the game's content. That actually shows me that DPC has done everything right so far, because otherwise this thread wouldn't have reached this size.

These decent people are why I like this thread and am here regularly.
Yes I know that I am dalli_x.

I did support DPC though for about a year and sung his praises whenever I could, until I decided I didn't like how he operates and stopped.

And even if they didn't it's a free world, people are allowed to have an opinion on things.

Also you are mistaken, I never said people should not support him(as I supported him myself for a time)I said not many people spoke up as he kept extending the development time from update to update.

And those who did were harassed by jackasses like you, who think people shouldn't criticize what they enjoy.

And he most certainly can hire employees and bring them up to speed on his work ethic slowly, to ensure quality isn't lost.

I could go on a deep dive on your arguments and explain where you misunderstood me, but as I made a general statement about how I personally felt, I'm not going to.

 

[Heycock]

Wait, so before pandemic, he wasn't at 10k patreon or atleast close to that (like 5k)? I thought what made him popular was Acting Lessons?

Ep1 of Badik was launched on feb 2019 just before the pandemic, at that point DPC had 600 patreons. Althought this seems nothing today the truth is everyone had smaller numbers back than than they have today. You can have funchecking the numbers here:

You must be registered to see the links

 

[dalli_x]

I did support DPC though for about a year and sung his praises whenever I could, until I decided I didn't like how he operates and stopped.

Nice to have you support DPC once.

And even if they didn't it's a free world, people are allowed to have an opinion on things.

Each person may and should express his opinion, so I have my PERSONAL THOUGHTS PRESENTED. I have even written about it, that it is my personal opinion. Do you want to forbid me my personal opinion now?

Also you are mistaken, I never said people should not support him(as I supported him myself for a time)I said not many people spoke up as he kept extending the development time from update to update.

You're wrong. We should blame ourselves, i.e. people who supported him as he drew out the release dates further and further.

As far as I know when I cancelled my pledge he was still working alone and I think he still is, with the amount of money he is making he can upgrade his equipment to no end, or hire people to render for him, write the code and so many other things to shorten the development time, but he doesn't.

Because we love BAD.

I didn't write so you said (I read it, not heard it) that people shouldn't support DPC. I wonder where you read that in my response to your post.

In your post you didn't say (I didn't read it and didn't hear it) that not many people spoke up. You wrote that the supporters themselves are to blame because we supported DPC when he kept delaying the release dates.

And those who did were harassed by jackasses like you, who think people shouldn't criticize what they enjoy.

You should not insult anyone. This is a sign of weakness and the absence of arguments.

And he most certainly can hire employees and bring them up to speed on his work ethic slowly, to ensure quality isn't lost.

Slowly introduce employees to his work ethic? We want the updates faster, not slower. Besides, you even agree with me on this point, that it would not make sense for DPC to hire employees at this time, because it would take too long to bring them to its quality line. Exactly what I wrote, not what I said.

I could go on a deep dive on your arguments and explain where you misunderstood me, but as I made a general statement about how I personally felt, I'm not going to.

It's a pity that you don't want to respond to my argument and show me where I misunderstood you.

 

[Cricco]

These decent people are why I like this thread and am here regularly.

Dude, i'm here regularly. You're a 40 year old Timmy who writes in green and smileys, with 4k posts to his name.



Sorry, too much time in rpgcodex makes my assholery go wild. I promise i'm a Timmy too

 

[dalli_x]

Dude, i'm here regularly. You're a 40 year old Timmy who writes in green and smileys, with 4k posts to his name.

View attachment 1849096

Sorry, too much time in rpgcodex makes my assholery go wild. I promise i'm a Timmy too

When your asshole goes wild, you should pay a visit to Chad and Troy.

 

[LizaS]

Ep1 of Badik was launched on feb 2019 just before the pandemic, at that point DPC had 600 patreons. Althought this seems nothing today the truth is everyone had smaller numbers back than than they have today. You can have funchecking the numbers here:

You must be registered to see the links

Yep, like 600 patrons in 2019 is equal to like 6k patrons in 2022. Because Patreon still isn't that much of a household name before in 2019.

Looking at the site that you gave, he already had 3.3k patrons in January 2020, before late February, the month the pandemic started. So I think it's fair to say he was already in the rise even before BaDIK and the pandemic. 'Cause episodes 1 and 2 of BaDIK aren't that strong if it's a standalone and it's the first time you've seen it.
Because it is still in the early stages, and there are still no character developments whatsoever, even plot developments.

 

[TheVengefulOne]

It's a pity that you don't want to respond to my argument and show me where I misunderstood you.

As my comment was very broad it can easily be misunderstood.

He could easily hire people to write the code for him, there are many talented people who can do that and much better than DPC. By doing that he can focus on improving his script and render quality, that alone would not only decrease development time but also increase the quality. As a programmer myself it would not take me more than a few days to understand his code. A week tops.

As for the support thing. I never said monetary support, I meant like you are doing. At the start I defended him as well, no matter what anyone said, when I should have criticized some things, but didn't.

As for monetary support, these devs bill people monthly even though they don't release monthly updates. So am of the opinion that people should only support for a certain amount and no more.

Support comes in many ways. I wrote a general comment, not a review, so stop bugging me with technical issues it is annoying.

Learn to read between the lines, you'll be happier that way.

 

[Heycock]

As my comment was very broad it can easily be misunderstood.

He could easily hire people to write the code for him, there are many talented people who can do that and much better than DPC. By doing that he can focus on improving his script and render quality, that alone would not only decrease development time but also increase the quality. As a programmer myself it would not take me more than a few days to understand his code. A week tops.

As for the support thing. I never said monetary support, I meant like you are doing. At the start I defended him as well, no matter what anyone said, when I should have criticized some things, but didn't.

As for monetary support, these devs bill people monthly even though they don't release monthly updates. So am of the opinion that people should only support for a certain amount and no more.

Support comes in many ways. I wrote a general comment, not a review, so stop bugging me with technical issues it is annoying.

Learn to read between the lines, you'll be happier that way.

This is my opinion about this issue.
Here is a random piece of the code:



The green part (most of it) it's part of the story script, the rest is the actual code.

Personally, I don't want anyone but DPC to write the story script. Some may disagree, but for me he is a great writer (for this place) and his writing it's what it makes the game good. Most importantly I don't see how DPC would want to see someone writing his story for himself.
Personally I dont see how anyone would making this kind of games would want to give the writing of the story to a different guy. It's your story, your vision, the writing should be the most important part for the creator. If it's not, then you clearly don't care for your own story. Like Icstor for example or even Darkcoockie were the story is completely secondary.
With that clear out...
How it's going to win time that someone write the code for you if hald the "code" it's actually story writing and the other half it's game design and visual design? How it's going to win time ifboth things are mixxed up to a point that one or two lines of code are next to one or two lines of writing?.
Can you imagine trying to give your script to a coder so he can write the code? You will need to add a note every one or two lines and say "Put this image here, put this music there". It's more easy to directly write the code!.
Besides the code itself it's quite a mechanic thing. In this example out of 11 lines of actual code (I mean no story script), 9 off them are the practically the same. When you write story, you don't write like if everything were in your head from the get go, you write one line or two, maybe 3 4, 5... andf then you stop to think. At some point you get blocked, and need some time before continue. All this free times you simple go ahead and write the code since it's a mechanic thing who doesn't demand creativity. You don't get blocked couse it's the same 4 or 5 commands that you need to repeat once and again and again.
And yes, not all the code its like that. But 80%, 90% it is like that. And he seems to personally enjoy the other 10,20.

Honestely taking into account how Badik is, what we like about it, and how DPC is, the only thing i see could actually speed things up are more artirt, no more coders. More coders works for games who demands more complicate codes (less story script intense) or were the story it's a generic pretext to deliver porn.

 

[shazba]

In this never ending debate on DPC hiring staff to speed up production:

One major factor that doesn't get discussed enough (or maybe it does and I'm just not paying attention) is there is still the main bottleneck in the rendering of images and animations.

DPC provided a critical comment in his May 13 status update:

I still have 26 animations in the queue, and with most of them being fairly long, I think I have at least two more weeks before the queue finishes.

So 26 (lengthy) animations are gonna take two weeks?

Once again, referencing mpa71's BigTable™ for the data, episode 8 had 358 animations. So if you take two weeks for 26 animations, extrapolate that out for 358 animations, and guess how many weeks you have? Just over 6 months worth!

Now it's not a perfect science, the run time of each animation is obviously a key factor in determining rendering times, but regardless, DPC (last I heard) has 8 x RTX 3090 GPUs at his disposal. He is a rendering machine!

So while all that shit is rendering away (and I've only talked about the animations, there were also 4158 images rendered for the last episode too) he's working on other things (and sleeping occasionally I presume).

From most of his reports, DPC has renders (images and/or animations) queued up and processing pretty much all the time. He has 8 of the most powerful GPUs money can buy, and I presume he doesn't have 7 of them idling away while he presses "Next to Continue" on the one rendering PC for each item; obviously he'd be utilising the shit out of them all.

What good would employing more people do? Why not just buy more and more GPUs; every time someone whines things aren't coming out fast enough, just buy another GPU. Obviously I'm getting facetious now...

Based on some data that ename144 has provided for CoBD, Phillygames is averaging 55 renders and 2.8 animations per week (since chapter 11).

ename144 again has summarised some data on previous releases of Pale Carnations, at the time the episode averaged 82.4 static and 4.5 animation renders per week.

I understand Pale Carnations is done by a two-man band. I'm not sure if Phillygames is a solo artist or if he has people on the books.

DPC has been churning out on average 138 renders and 8 animations per week since episode 1 was released. While the image render rate hasn't changed much over the years, the animation render rate just keep going up (and they are getting bigger), last episode averaged almost 12 per week.

So I could hunt through all the other games out there that people consider good quality, and try to find the details on each one of them, but what would I be achieving? Proving that on his own, DPC's output is 2-3 times faster than other developers who already have teams? I think that's what we'd find.

Employing people would just prove to be a headache with very little positive impact on delivery time since DPC is doing all the work himself in parallel to the rendering process.

And anyway, knowing DPC, if he did employ people and magically streamlined shit so productions was even faster, he'd just decide to deliver more over the same time frame. Eventually the whole game would be animated with no static renders.

TL;DR?

• DPC churns out a lot more images and animations per week than other developers.
• DPC queues up the images and animations and has them running 24/7 on 8 RTX3090 GPUs.
• DPC works on everything else while these renders are processing.
• People are whining he should get others involved to make it a faster process.
• People don't get that the payoff would be little if he did that.
• DPC would just make the game bigger if things got faster.

 

[PashafromRussia]

This is my opinion about this issue.
Here is a random piece of the code:

View attachment 1849175

The green part (most of it) it's part of the story script, the rest is the actual code.

Personally, I don't want anyone but DPC to write the story script. Some may disagree, but for me he is a great writer (for this place) and his writing it's what it makes the game good. Most importantly I don't see how DPC would want to see someone writing his story for himself.
Personally I dont see how anyone would making this kind of games would want to give the writing of the story to a different guy. It's your story, your vision, the writing should be the most important part for the creator. If it's not, then you clearly don't care for your own story. Like Icstor for example or even Darkcoockie were the story is completely secondary.
With that clear out...
How it's going to win time that someone write the code for you if hald the "code" it's actually story writing and the other half it's game design and visual design? How it's going to win time ifboth things are mixxed up to a point that one or two lines of code are next to one or two lines of writing?.
Can you imagine trying to give your script to a coder so he can write the code? You will need to add a note every one or two lines and say "Put this image here, put this music there". It's more easy to directly write the code!.
Besides the code itself it's quite a mechanic thing. In this example out of 11 lines of actual code (I mean no story script), 9 off them are the practically the same. When you write story, you don't write like if everything were in your head from the get go, you write one line or two, maybe 3 4, 5... andf then you stop to think. At some point you get blocked, and need some time before continue. All this free times you simple go ahead and write the code since it's a mechanic thing who doesn't demand creativity. You don't get blocked couse it's the same 4 or 5 commands that you need to repeat once and again and again.
And yes, not all the code its like that. But 80%, 90% it is like that. And he seems to personally enjoy the other 10,20.

Honestely taking into account how Badik is, what we like about it, and how DPC is, the only thing i see could actually speed things up are more artirt, no more coders. More coders works for games who demands more complicate codes (less story script intense) or were the story it's a generic pretext to deliver porn.

Programming is not only "writing a story", but also creating mini-games, programming the code of free roams and much more. Programming does take up a smaller part of his work, but he could easily shift the work of creating mini-games to someone else. As I have already said, writing code for mini-games being studied in any basic programming course.

 

[Heycock]

Programming is not only "writing a story", but also creating mini-games, programming the code of free roams and much more. Programming does take up a smaller part of his work, but he could easily shift the work of creating mini-games to someone else. As I have already said, writing code for mini-games takes place in any basic programming course.

Yeah, that's why I sayd 80, 90% of the code, couse minigames, the phone, the free roams. But even so, my guess it's that just takes a fraction of what it need to make the renders, tha animation and to write the story.

 

[tewinter]

In this never ending debate on DPC hiring staff to speed up production:

One major factor that doesn't get discussed enough (or maybe it does and I'm just not paying attention) is there is still the main bottleneck in the rendering of images and animations.

DPC provided a critical comment in his May 13 status update:

So 26 (lengthy) animations are gonna take two weeks?

Once again, referencing mpa71's BigTable™ for the data, episode 8 had 358 animations. So if you take two weeks for 26 animations, extrapolate that out for 358 animations, and guess how many weeks you have? Just over 6 months worth!

Now it's not a perfect science, the run time of each animation is obviously a key factor in determining rendering times, but regardless, DPC (last I heard) has 8 x RTX 3090 GPUs at his disposal. He is a rendering machine!

So while all that shit is rendering away (and I've only talked about the animations, there were also 4158 images rendered for the last episode too) he's working on other things (and sleeping occasionally I presume).

From most of his reports, DPC has renders (images and/or animations) queued up and processing pretty much all the time. He has 8 of the most powerful GPUs money can buy, and I presume he doesn't have 7 of them idling away while he presses "Next to Continue" on the one rendering PC for each item; obviously he'd be utilising the shit out of them all.

What good would employing more people do? Why not just buy more and more GPUs; every time someone whines things aren't coming out fast enough, just buy another GPU. Obviously I'm getting facetious now...

Based on some data that ename144 has provided for CoBD, Phillygames is averaging 55 renders and 2.8 animations per week (since chapter 11).

ename144 again has summarised some data on previous releases of Pale Carnations, at the time the episode averaged 82.4 static and 4.5 animation renders per week.

I understand Pale Carnations is done by a two-man band. I'm not sure if Phillygames is a solo artist or if he has people on the books.

DPC has been churning out on average 138 renders and 8 animations per week since episode 1 was released. While the image render rate hasn't changed much over the years, the animation render rate just keep going up (and they are getting bigger), last episode averaged almost 12 per week.

So I could hunt through all the other games out there that people consider good quality, and try to find the details on each one of them, but what would I be achieving? Proving that on his own, DPC's output is 2-3 times faster than other developers who already have teams? I think that's what we'd find.

Employing people would just prove to be a headache with very little positive impact on delivery time since DPC is doing all the work himself in parallel to the rendering process.

And anyway, knowing DPC, if he did employ people and magically streamlined shit so productions was even faster, he'd just decide to deliver more over the same time frame. Eventually the whole game would be animated with no static renders.

TL;DR?

• DPC churns out a lot more images and animations per week than other developers.
• DPC queues up the images and animations and has them running 24/7 on 8 RTX3090 GPUs.
• DPC works on everything else while these renders are processing.
• People are whining he should get others involved to make it a faster process.
• People don't get that the payoff would be little if he did that.
• DPC would just make the game bigger if things got faster.

Only way to actually make it faster, or more efficient, would be making it a game studio, everyone works in the same building, so while he works on the story, someone is coding, another is animating, etc. But he would need to either rent or buy a place to make that happen and pay a decent salary to all people working in the game, with the money he earns from Patreon alone, that should be possible, but his profit margins would decrease as I doubt his patron numbers would increase enough to cover the costs.
All in all, no real benefit in his case. A team would be useful for anyone without a setup like DPC's, a newer dev/game, or if you're doing an Oceanlab reworking one game and working on another.

 

[grandtalon]

Only way to actually make it faster, or more efficient, would be making it a game studio, everyone works in the same building, so while he works on the story, someone is coding, another is animating, etc. But he would need to either rent or buy a place to make that happen and pay a decent salary to all people working in the game, with the money he earns from Patreon alone, that should be possible, but his profit margins would decrease as I doubt his patron numbers would increase enough to cover the costs.
All in all, no real benefit in his case. A team would be useful for anyone without a setup like DPC's, a newer dev/game, or if you're doing an Oceanlab reworking one game and working on another.

He's never going to give up on that extra income to pay people to finish his game faster. Unless he has something coming up in mind, and it's driving him crazy to start it, he's just going to keep working at this pace and making bank.

 

[Skeltom]

20 gb it alot i already have 14 gb tell v 7

That may be true, and if your short of space you may want to get the compressed version if you can deal with less image quality. It's ~20GB now and we are only at the half way mark. It's very conceivable that having both halves will be upwards of 40GB if not larger. It's definitely the beefiest AVN that I'm playing right now.

 

[felicemastronzo]

In this never ending debate on DPC hiring staff to speed up production:

One major factor that doesn't get discussed enough (or maybe it does and I'm just not paying attention) is there is still the main bottleneck in the rendering of images and animations.

DPC provided a critical comment in his May 13 status update:

So 26 (lengthy) animations are gonna take two weeks?

Once again, referencing mpa71's BigTable™ for the data, episode 8 had 358 animations. So if you take two weeks for 26 animations, extrapolate that out for 358 animations, and guess how many weeks you have? Just over 6 months worth!

Now it's not a perfect science, the run time of each animation is obviously a key factor in determining rendering times, but regardless, DPC (last I heard) has 8 x RTX 3090 GPUs at his disposal. He is a rendering machine!

So while all that shit is rendering away (and I've only talked about the animations, there were also 4158 images rendered for the last episode too) he's working on other things (and sleeping occasionally I presume).

From most of his reports, DPC has renders (images and/or animations) queued up and processing pretty much all the time. He has 8 of the most powerful GPUs money can buy, and I presume he doesn't have 7 of them idling away while he presses "Next to Continue" on the one rendering PC for each item; obviously he'd be utilising the shit out of them all.

What good would employing more people do? Why not just buy more and more GPUs; every time someone whines things aren't coming out fast enough, just buy another GPU. Obviously I'm getting facetious now...

Based on some data that ename144 has provided for CoBD, Phillygames is averaging 55 renders and 2.8 animations per week (since chapter 11).

ename144 again has summarised some data on previous releases of Pale Carnations, at the time the episode averaged 82.4 static and 4.5 animation renders per week.

I understand Pale Carnations is done by a two-man band. I'm not sure if Phillygames is a solo artist or if he has people on the books.

DPC has been churning out on average 138 renders and 8 animations per week since episode 1 was released. While the image render rate hasn't changed much over the years, the animation render rate just keep going up (and they are getting bigger), last episode averaged almost 12 per week.

So I could hunt through all the other games out there that people consider good quality, and try to find the details on each one of them, but what would I be achieving? Proving that on his own, DPC's output is 2-3 times faster than other developers who already have teams? I think that's what we'd find.

Employing people would just prove to be a headache with very little positive impact on delivery time since DPC is doing all the work himself in parallel to the rendering process.

And anyway, knowing DPC, if he did employ people and magically streamlined shit so productions was even faster, he'd just decide to deliver more over the same time frame. Eventually the whole game would be animated with no static renders.

TL;DR?

• DPC churns out a lot more images and animations per week than other developers.
• DPC queues up the images and animations and has them running 24/7 on 8 RTX3090 GPUs.
• DPC works on everything else while these renders are processing.
• People are whining he should get others involved to make it a faster process.
• People don't get that the payoff would be little if he did that.
• DPC would just make the game bigger if things got faster.

it's all very well for DPC to want to continue this way. however, now let's not turn the world upside down to prove that it's the only way forward and that otherwise we would all be harmed, because that's not the case, the history of humanity proves it.

Would DPC waste time in organizing?
certainly yes, but any planning involves an initial slowdown, but in human history it has always proved to be an effort that time has amply repaid

could he hire someone who would prove to be a problem?
certainly possible, but this has never been an insurmountable problem, in case he fires him

the whole thing could be resolved without any appreciable speedup?
unlikely but possible, but in the end the product would still be, if not better overall, technically superior, so it would still be an improvement

normal at this time for DPC to be in charge of every phase, but it seems to me highly unlikely that his hand is essential in each of these, even just checking that the development of renders is proceeding well (and we know that on the result for time issues it is not that there is all that much control) I don't think it is the most exciting phase of the creative process.

no artistic issue is at stake either, heck even writers have people collaborating in their work and this is not that it devalues them in their creation process, on the contrary it helps them. most of the art we enjoy is the child of group work, formed by talented people, but also by many craftsmen working in the shadows.

DPC doesn't want to do it, it doesn't benefit him to do it (economically), and he won't do it. there's little else to say, but let's not make it the only viable choice in defense of art and earth rotation

 

[PashafromRussia]

In this never ending debate on DPC hiring staff to speed up production:

One major factor that doesn't get discussed enough (or maybe it does and I'm just not paying attention) is there is still the main bottleneck in the rendering of images and animations.

DPC provided a critical comment in his May 13 status update:

So 26 (lengthy) animations are gonna take two weeks?

Once again, referencing mpa71's BigTable™ for the data, episode 8 had 358 animations. So if you take two weeks for 26 animations, extrapolate that out for 358 animations, and guess how many weeks you have? Just over 6 months worth!

Now it's not a perfect science, the run time of each animation is obviously a key factor in determining rendering times, but regardless, DPC (last I heard) has 8 x RTX 3090 GPUs at his disposal. He is a rendering machine!

So while all that shit is rendering away (and I've only talked about the animations, there were also 4158 images rendered for the last episode too) he's working on other things (and sleeping occasionally I presume).

From most of his reports, DPC has renders (images and/or animations) queued up and processing pretty much all the time. He has 8 of the most powerful GPUs money can buy, and I presume he doesn't have 7 of them idling away while he presses "Next to Continue" on the one rendering PC for each item; obviously he'd be utilising the shit out of them all.

What good would employing more people do? Why not just buy more and more GPUs; every time someone whines things aren't coming out fast enough, just buy another GPU. Obviously I'm getting facetious now...

Based on some data that ename144 has provided for CoBD, Phillygames is averaging 55 renders and 2.8 animations per week (since chapter 11).

ename144 again has summarised some data on previous releases of Pale Carnations, at the time the episode averaged 82.4 static and 4.5 animation renders per week.

I understand Pale Carnations is done by a two-man band. I'm not sure if Phillygames is a solo artist or if he has people on the books.

DPC has been churning out on average 138 renders and 8 animations per week since episode 1 was released. While the image render rate hasn't changed much over the years, the animation render rate just keep going up (and they are getting bigger), last episode averaged almost 12 per week.

So I could hunt through all the other games out there that people consider good quality, and try to find the details on each one of them, but what would I be achieving? Proving that on his own, DPC's output is 2-3 times faster than other developers who already have teams? I think that's what we'd find.

Employing people would just prove to be a headache with very little positive impact on delivery time since DPC is doing all the work himself in parallel to the rendering process.

And anyway, knowing DPC, if he did employ people and magically streamlined shit so productions was even faster, he'd just decide to deliver more over the same time frame. Eventually the whole game would be animated with no static renders.

TL;DR?

• DPC churns out a lot more images and animations per week than other developers.
• DPC queues up the images and animations and has them running 24/7 on 8 RTX3090 GPUs.
• DPC works on everything else while these renders are processing.
• People are whining he should get others involved to make it a faster process.
• People don't get that the payoff would be little if he did that.
• DPC would just make the game bigger if things got faster.

In this never ending debate on DPC hiring staff to speed up production:

One major factor that doesn't get discussed enough (or maybe it does and I'm just not paying attention) is there is still the main bottleneck in the rendering of images and animations.

DPC provided a critical comment in his May 13 status update:

So 26 (lengthy) animations are gonna take two weeks?

Once again, referencing mpa71's BigTable™ for the data, episode 8 had 358 animations. So if you take two weeks for 26 animations, extrapolate that out for 358 animations, and guess how many weeks you have? Just over 6 months worth!

Now it's not a perfect science, the run time of each animation is obviously a key factor in determining rendering times, but regardless, DPC (last I heard) has 8 x RTX 3090 GPUs at his disposal. He is a rendering machine!

So while all that shit is rendering away (and I've only talked about the animations, there were also 4158 images rendered for the last episode too) he's working on other things (and sleeping occasionally I presume).

From most of his reports, DPC has renders (images and/or animations) queued up and processing pretty much all the time. He has 8 of the most powerful GPUs money can buy, and I presume he doesn't have 7 of them idling away while he presses "Next to Continue" on the one rendering PC for each item; obviously he'd be utilising the shit out of them all.

What good would employing more people do? Why not just buy more and more GPUs; every time someone whines things aren't coming out fast enough, just buy another GPU. Obviously I'm getting facetious now...

Based on some data that ename144 has provided for CoBD, Phillygames is averaging 55 renders and 2.8 animations per week (since chapter 11).

ename144 again has summarised some data on previous releases of Pale Carnations, at the time the episode averaged 82.4 static and 4.5 animation renders per week.

I understand Pale Carnations is done by a two-man band. I'm not sure if Phillygames is a solo artist or if he has people on the books.

DPC has been churning out on average 138 renders and 8 animations per week since episode 1 was released. While the image render rate hasn't changed much over the years, the animation render rate just keep going up (and they are getting bigger), last episode averaged almost 12 per week.

So I could hunt through all the other games out there that people consider good quality, and try to find the details on each one of them, but what would I be achieving? Proving that on his own, DPC's output is 2-3 times faster than other developers who already have teams? I think that's what we'd find.

Employing people would just prove to be a headache with very little positive impact on delivery time since DPC is doing all the work himself in parallel to the rendering process.

And anyway, knowing DPC, if he did employ people and magically streamlined shit so productions was even faster, he'd just decide to deliver more over the same time frame. Eventually the whole game would be animated with no static renders.

TL;DR?

• DPC churns out a lot more images and animations per week than other developers.
• DPC queues up the images and animations and has them running 24/7 on 8 RTX3090 GPUs.
• DPC works on everything else while these renders are processing.
• People are whining he should get others involved to make it a faster process.
• People don't get that the payoff would be little if he did that.
• DPC would just make the game bigger if things got faster.

I think we all don't fully understand what the development of such a large project as BAD alone is fraught with.

* The load increases with each release, his mental and physical capabilities are depleted and the probability of simply getting sick from overwork is high. One day off is clearly not enough, the guy needs a full 2 days off and the working schedule is 8-9 hours a day.. But he can't afford it because he works alone.
* Lack of a fresh look from the outside. Pink has surrounded himself with an army of fans who accept any controversial decision he makes. There is practically no feedback, he does not perceive any criticism (he bans for criticizing the game). Such insensitivity will lead to the fact that much more strange plot solutions will appear that Maya's credit will seem to us a good plot twist. Any creator needs an editor, be it Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy.
*As I have already said, the team is needed not to reduce the development time, but to improve quality and reduce the load. Will the game suffer if some freelancer does the environment? Will Pink's creative vision be destroyed if someone will devoloper a mini-game on Pink's technical assignment? Does DPC need to polish the game itself and prepare it for release in GOG and Steam instead of doing creative work? Just imagine that rough work like polishing will be transferred to freelance. Pink then would not have lost 2 months to prepare the game for digital release.
*I think that the disadvantages of working alone are already noticeable, but over time they will become more and more. Big projects are always done by a team. Summer Saga is made by a team of several people, NLT Games also employs several people. The team allows you to distribute responsibilities evenly, as a result of which one aspect of the game does not look better or worse than the other. DPC will not be able to evenly give the same quality in all aspects of the game.
Branching will be under attack. He will not be able to implement all branches equally well. Maya and Josie's path is still the weakest, which even Pink himself doesn't seem to care about, and the freeroams in episode 8 was incredibly boring.

 

[Arigon]

I think we all don't fully understand what the development of such a large project as BAD alone is fraught with.

* The load increases with each release, his mental and physical capabilities are depleted and the probability of simply getting sick from overwork is high. One day off is clearly not enough, the guy needs a full 2 days off and the working schedule is 8-9 hours a day.. But he can't afford it because he works alone.
* Lack of a fresh look from the outside. Pink has surrounded himself with an army of fans who accept any controversial decision he makes. There is practically no feedback, he does not perceive any criticism (he bans for criticizing the game). Such insensitivity will lead to the fact that much more strange plot solutions will appear that Maya's credit will seem to us a good plot twist. Any creator needs an editor, be it Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy.
*As I have already said, the team is needed not to reduce the development time, but to improve quality and reduce the load. Will the game suffer if some freelancer does the environment? Will Pink's creative vision be destroyed if someone walks a mini-game on Pink's technical assignment? Does DPC need to polish the game itself and prepare it for release in GOG and Steam instead of doing creative work? Just imagine that rough work like polishing will be transferred to freelance. Pink then would not have lost 2 months to prepare the game for digital release.
*I think that the disadvantages of working alone are already noticeable, but over time they will become more and more. Big projects are always done by a team. Summer Saga is made by a team of several people, NLT Games also employs several people. The team allows you to distribute responsibilities evenly, as a result of which one aspect of the game does not look better or worse than the other. DPC will not be able to evenly give the same quality in all aspects of the game.

Again
You wonderful gentle people prove the point that this simply can't continue.
I don't care if DPC swore on his mother's grave or similarly serious oath, there will never be 20 episodes of THIS GAME.

He will have to do some drastic paring back on all the branching soon just to retain his sanity. Or maybe that is already lost lol?

In any case, this will end in a disappointingly abrupt way, and yes, I will be here to pass out the tissues. Just read what these guys wrote! DPC is not going to relinquish any kind of responsibility. That is not who he is.

As a result, just like the Death Star II was fully operational, when everyone thought it wasn't, you all are going to have to severely adjust your thinking to just how much DPC will be able to do and for how long before terminal burnout sets in, if it hasn't already.

Sigh...
Facepalm away
Peace

 

[LizaS]

Again
You wonderful gentle people prove the point that this simply can't continue.
I don't care if DPC swore on his mother's grave or similarly serious oath, there will never be 20 episodes of THIS GAME.

He will have to do some drastic paring back on all the branching soon just to retain his sanity. Or maybe that is already lost lol?

In any case, this will end in a disappointingly abrupt way, and yes, I will be here to pass out the tissues. Just read what these guys wrote! DPC is not going to relinquish any kind of responsibility. That is not who he is.

As a result, just like the Death Star II was fully operational, when everyone thought it wasn't, you all are going to have to severely adjust your thinking to just how much DPC will be able to do and for how long before terminal burnout sets in, if it hasn't already.

Sigh...
Facepalm away
Peace

Never change, Arigon.

I always laugh at your posts in this thread. Not because I think that you're wrong (you have pretty fair reasoning), but because I always find your comments entertaining! The way you deliver your arguments are impeccable.

If it does end like the way you say (I hope not), I will also be there, eating popcorn and laughing at the turn of events.

 

[TuffyTenToes]

Gee, I wonder why Mr. Pink doesn't want to show up his face around here

 

[Arigon]

Gee, I wonder why Mr. Pink doesn't want to show up his face around here

He used too... He got insulted and said fuck off basically. He still has his secret service monitoring all us DPC fans but seriously not worshiping him fans.
I wouldn't come here. He banned me from his Discord, Patreon, and Steam comment sections, and I paid for his game lol.
Anyhow.!!!

Never change, Arigon.

I always laugh at your posts in this thread. Not because I think that you're wrong (you have pretty fair reasoning), but because I always find your comments entertaining! The way you deliver your arguments are impeccable.

If it does end like the way you say, I will also be there, eating popcorn and laughing at the turn of events.

Count on it! 70-100 characters needing some kind of input??? That is insanity. He has painted himself into a corner.
Death by sheer porn overload.
I guess there are worse ways to go, but there are a lot better!
Peace