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As promised, here’s my statement to the matter of getting help and releasing updates faster.
Many believe in a miracle. They think that if you’ll get someone, the updates will immediately be released every month with over 1000 renders and no quality loss. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works! Especially not via Internet and in my case.
People also think that the market is full of erotic VN artists which have similar experience with Daz Studio and are similar stickler for details like me and also worked with so many characters and huge setup scenes and got the hardware to render them! A GPU which can handle most of my scenes is for example the Titan RTX with 24 GB VRAM. Price 3000€! I got two. Apart from that, the best artists already have their own projects!
So, why those updates take the time they take? That’s a question which is difficult to explain in just a few words.
First of all, all those details you notice in every scene take special time to be created. The scenes don’t look like that by accident!
Let’s start with the time I frequently spend thinking about how a scene should look like best. Thinking about the event course and the dialogues. When I’m creating scenes, I’m mutually adapting the script to the art and vice versa. Looking what’s possible. The planning of the story events takes up some time! Occasionally, I’m not even working on the current update but on the story, if an idea crossed my mind.
Even if I’d find the best artist in the world, I still would need to explain him how the scene should look like. The more precise the better. Via Internet! But the problem is that even I myself frequently don’t know this exactly before not start working on it. That’s why I also never know how many renders a scene will have. There will be as many as I need to tell that particular scene.
In the time which I’d need to describe him/her how a scene should look like in a language I don’t speak perfectly, plus checking the results via Internet, then his/her afterwork since there will be definitely some things I imagined differently, I could also create that scene myself!
By the way, I’m rendering while creating the scenes, while editing the renders in PS and also during the programming & translation part. So, my current hardware is actually good enough. The biggest part of my work takes the scene creation. Giving the scenes to someone else to render wouldn't help at all and would only slow down the time period between updates! To understand this, you need to know how I’m rendering the scenes so they look like that! First, I’m creating the scene and trying to adjust everything as good as I can right away. Checking the lighting for the scene, how the characters look like in it and also all the details. But every camera perspective needs another lighting adjustment, which I need to check before pushing the render button. Then I’m always noticing mistakes during the render process. So I write a list with those things I need to adjust in that scene before rendering. Be it the texture of a character which acts weird with the light, a wrong positioned prop, a wrong lighting setting, a bad positioned character, a prop which needs to be included, a cloth, hair or whatever which is not good enough adjusted etc. So, rendering overnight, isn’t!
Then I’m frequently re-render stuff because I noticed something which I don’t like or there’s a mistake.
Another problem is, that I have a lot of in-game places which all I additionally edited or created myself. I got around 2-3 TB data files including the save files which I’m using to load older scenes to create new ones. That means, my helper would need all those files which are additionally sorted and only I know their order and some stranger would lose track of it! If he/she doesn’t have all necessary files for a place, they will get errors during the loading process and things will be missing.
All of this shows that I set great store on that my product looks like something special.
I’m putting high attention to perfect posing and realistic facial expressions and always try to get better. It frequently takes some time to find and think of the appropriate pose for a particular scene. And there are tons of different poses and expressions in every update!
I’m now using a technique which allows me to create indentations of objects and also bodies of the characters. For example, objects where the characters are sitting on or body indentations (squeezing) like the breasts for example. That’s really challenging and takes a lot of time! I’m working a lot with dforce which needs to be simulated and loaded into every scene! That’s also very time consuming since it’s also a question of testing! And like I said, loading and saving huge scenes takes a lot of time as well! Plus, I’m using some other tools to adjust things in the scene which is again time consuming. Additionally, there’re frequently little “special effects” which also take time to be created.
Finding the right camera position and perspective can also be tricky sometimes.
People frequently admiring the nice renders without even asking themselves what’s actually behind them. Not understanding that this all is a product of hard meticulous work where you hardly can find any mistake as a result!
A render is not equal with a render. If you have two characters in the scene which are not even good posed or adjusted, no background, ordinary lighting, no attention to details etc., then of course this is much faster than if you adjust and edit everything possible, create own lighting systems, background life, working with a lot of different tools, postproduction (PS) etc.! Every scene has another own created lighting system by the way.
Also, the subsequent editing of the renders in PS takes time, since I also edit and convert every single render from png to jpeg! After all, it’s very important to me that my product looks good and I’m always trying to improve my art.
Furthermore, I got a lot of text which also needs to be well thought-out and translated from German to English which is not that easy for me since my German is perfect and there are so many phrases that aren’t existent in English and needs to be paraphrased!
And by the way, Daz Studio is a pretty buggy program and occasionally likes to crash with no reason. You’re working 45 minutes on a scene and suddenly BAM! “Daz Studio has encountered a fatal error and must close”! And again from the beginning! Saving big scenes can take up to 6-8 minutes and you don’t want to lose time on multiple saving processes. Frequently, I’m also overly under the spell of the creation process, and forget about it.
So, not only creating but also saving big scenes takes a lot of time. This is also the reason why not many are using such setup scenes at all to work faster!
Another thing which people forget to consider is my customers support which also takes time!
Then many people think that since I have much more experience now, I also have to work much faster. But that’s a fallacy! First of all, if you count the renders per time of my updates, my paste has always been the same! So, I’m not slower than earlier. Actually, even faster! Why? If you look at the renders of the beginning of the game and compare them with my last update 0.100, you will certainly notice some differences. The more you work with a program the more you learn its possibilities! So, with more skills you have more possibilities of what all you can do! So, the more techniques you use the more time it costs!
So, all in all, I would need to give responsibility of the creation of an event completely to my helper. Giving all my hard created/edited places, characters and scenes to a total stranger! And if I don’t like his/her results, I would need to accept it anyway to not losing time for the rework. Because reworking the events would only expand the time between updates! Working online on such an ambitious project would be extremely inconvenient in my opinion.
The only really productive and effective solution would be an office where we could work in the way all video game companies are working. Nobody’s working over the Internet as long as they want their product to look like something. This way we could talk and develop simultaneously and could have an eye on everything. The huge disadvantage would be giving up anonymity and paying much more taxes. And of course, if you’re throwing your free time away and work practically 24/7 on the updates, you also want that it pays off. After all, I need to save money for an own apartment and my pension later.
At the end, I think that it’s better to create a great game in 10 years which people will remember than an average game in 1 year nobody cares about afterwards.
Many people also don’t understand how exhausting it can be to work alone on such a game with that quality and extent!
I myself want the updates to being released faster and having more air to breath. What advantage do I have to release the updates later? Milking? I would highly likely get more money if I’d release them faster!
And about my vision of the game I already told everyone right from the beginning! That this is not the regular porn game! It’s an erotic VN where of course everything will happen later what you know from regular porn games too. But for me the way to the climax is very important and needs to be comprehensible. A married woman like Sophia won’t cheat on her husband after just a couple of days! There needs to be a long build up! And of course, it’s easier for a woman to approach other women than other men! And it’s also her own decision, either to reclaim her busy husband or looking for other “amusements”!
So, that was my detailed and extensive statement to how things are. You’re free to give me some feedback or ideas.
PS: I will remove the "Dylan twist" since many people took it negatively.
