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

[nyrek]

In such a scenario, and you can only save one or the other, do you save DPC or his computers which contains his work?

you beat me to it

 

[phxpoo]

How are you team Halloween release? DPC really needs to lower his own demands for every new episode. By season 4 we can expect new episode in 18 months if he continues like that, lol

 

[Oliver Wendell Homely]

Another nice write up but the only thing that I would consider "good" is the fact that it relatively close to a release. If it is a December release it will still be nine months for a single episode to be playable. At the current rate the second half of the game will likely be in development for close to a decade. That's a ridiculously long time for one game, I think.

For me personally, the extended dev times of the updates won't be worth it. I'm in these things for the stories but to me it looks like DPC's mind set has switches to quantity over quality. I wont know until I play it of course but the outlook for this is grim in my book.

There certainly is a lot of quantity, in terms of special renders and other features, but the story itself is also forcing longer development times. That is, the quality of the game is driving increases in quantity. With all the choices players have, DPC has to create several branches, each with their own plots and details. If you compare BaDIK with other games that also offer choices, BaDIK is much more sophisticated. Most games offer binary choices (yes or no) to engaging in sex, for example, but the story itself doesn't change (maybe only some dialogue does). DPC says players will need to have at least ten saves to see all possible content in this episode. So in a way, he's creating 10 episodes. They all share a lot of the same scenes and storylines, but the unique elements of each require a lot of work. Future episodes may get even more complicated, depending on how much choice we get. I suspect that at some point DPC will need to pare down the choices or have some outside force change the story in a way that supersedes our choices, just to prevent the branching from becoming totally unmanageable. Otherwise, development times will become exponentially longer with each episode.

 

[schinoize]

Ok I used the Search function to find an an update on the game but saw nothing in the first few pages. So, has anyone leaked the Status Update from today yet?

Here.

 

[binbo3126]

The chain is a bit involved, but essentially if you tell Heather about the jock unconscious on her bed (after he's done talking with Lily) you'll have the option to get her a drink. Mix Heather something with Absinthe (found in Lily's desk) and you can choose to tell her about Tommy.

The catch is that you can only tell Heather about the jock if you picked the DIK Major Decision to make the alphas leave the party; otherwise the jock will be in the bed, but you can't tell Heather about it. Also, you can't make that Major Decision if you already have permanent CHICK Affinity.

I cant choose the Absinthe in the table why ?

 

[nyrek]

I cant choose the Absinthe in the table why ?

1. have you taken it from lily's room?
2. did you choose to get rid of the alphas?
3. did you tell heather jimmy is passed out drunk on her bed?
4. did you tell heather tommy fucked tanya?

 

[Geralt From Rivia]

It will be ironically funny if this leads to a fire in which Dr PinkCake dies

Imagine that you come to the rescue during a fire and get options:
1. Save DrPinkCake
2. Save his hard drives with the game code and all materials
3. Save his feminist wife
Acting Lessons vibes intensifies

There certainly is a lot of quantity, in terms of special renders and other features, but the story itself is also forcing longer development times. That is, the quality of the game is driving increases in quantity. With all the choices players have, DPC has to create several branches, each with their own plots and details. If you compare BaDIK with other games that also offer choices, BaDIK is much more sophisticated. Most games offer binary choices (yes or no) to engaging in sex, for example, but the story itself doesn't change (maybe only some dialogue does). DPC says players will need to have at least ten saves to see all possible content in this episode. So in a way, he's creating 10 episodes. They all share a lot of the same scenes and storylines, but the unique elements of each require a lot of work. Future episodes may get even more complicated, depending on how much choice we get. I suspect that at some point DPC will need to pare down the choices or have some outside force change the story in a way that supersedes our choices, just to prevent the branching from becoming totally unmanageable. Otherwise, development times will become exponentially longer with each episode.

Simple solutions that can speed up development without cutting the game:
- Hire help for a certain kind of work. For example a drawer(hello Heycock) or a coder.
- Upgrade hardware, like changing graphics cards to RTX 4090, which is a huge performance boost
- Stop improving the graphics. It is already good and not inferior to AAA games. It won't take that long to render animations.

 

[nyrek]

Imagine that you come to the rescue during a fire and get options:
1. Save DrPinkCake
2. Save his hard drives with the game code and all materials
3. Save his feminist wife
Acting Lessons vibes intensifies

OR

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[Geralt From Rivia]

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You are a cruel person, you want me to remember this scene and cry

 

[ename144]

Another nice write up but the only thing that I would consider "good" is the fact that it relatively close to a release. If it is a December release it will still be nine months for a single episode to be playable. At the current rate the second half of the game will likely be in development for close to a decade. That's a ridiculously long time for one game, I think.

For me personally, the extended dev times of the updates won't be worth it. I'm in these things for the stories but to me it looks like DPC's mind set has switches to quantity over quality. I wont know until I play it of course but the outlook for this is grim in my book.

It's all relative; I had been worried we'd be staring down the barrel of a January release the way DPC kept upping the targets. This time he actually reduced the animation targets slightly (with only a minor increase in statics). That's a good sign in my book, even if the rosy scenario (a late November release) is still well short of ideal.

As for the long development cycles, they honestly don't bother me as long as I have faith that a) the work will eventually be finished, and b) I'll enjoy the end result. I not worried that DPC will abandon the game before finishing Episode 9, so that's not an issue. But the way Episode 8 ended makes me extremely nervous about whether I'm going to like Episode 9.

My fear is that Season 3 is going to be a grueling slog where DPC pulls out every trick in the book to avoid advancing the relationship we supposedly just started until Season 4. IMHO we already had too much of that in Season 2. I'm not up for waiting another 3-4 years before we get to the good bits; I'll just put the game on the backburner until Season 4 is underway. But it's entirely possible my read is wrong and DPC does intend to flesh out the various branches, in which case I'll be happy to follow the news as we go.

Sadly, we've now spent nearly a year in limbo with no clear idea of where Episode 9 (and thus Season 3 as a whole) is headed, which has not made me a happy camper. So I'll take any indication this particular dev cycle is nearing an end as a good sign.

 

[nyrek]

You are a cruel person, you want me to remember this scene and cry

no, I want you to imagine you can tell that asshole
LISTEN HERE, UPDATE EVERY 4 MONTHS OR I GO HODOR ON YOUR ASS

 

[Geralt From Rivia]

no, I want you to imagine you can tell that asshole
LISTEN HERE, UPDATE EVERY 4 MONTHS OR I GO HODOR ON YOUR ASS

I will say that 6 months, that is, twice a year will be ok, I understand the level of this game and how it rises above other VN. 9 months is too long, with all due respect to his work. Not because "I'm tired of waiting", but because the release of the third season will then take too long and the game turns into a long-term construction. Like GTA VI

 

[ename144]

I cant choose the Absinthe in the table why ?

As nyrek suggested, you need to get the bottle of Absinthe from Lily's desk before you can mix drinks with it.

Once you have the bottle it should be an option.

 

[Ilhares]

The power consumption of 8 4090s alone is absurd, not to speak about the initial investment which is also huge even if he sells all the 3090s at a decent price. I hope he does it but I won't hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

90.
The 40XX series gives a big performance boost,
but I hope he doesn't think of improving the graphics again and adding Ray-tracing to animations, for example.
As someone who understands a little about electrics: 4090s will consume a lot of electricity.

While it's true they do have a slightly higher max TDP, the hardware requirements for the 4090 are the same as a 3090FE card. If he's got his stuff set up to handle 8 machines already, he's going to be fine even if he replaces all the cards. Yank the old, drop in the new, update your drivers, and off you go.

As far as the "investment cost", he's bringing in at least $10,000 USD/month (assuming bare minimums for pledges). Let's assume for whatever reason he's got an exceptionally expensive monthly cost of living (due to electricity usage) and call that 1500/mo. Okay, that brings our minimum down to 8500. The Zotac 4090 Trinity is going for roughly (allowing for Euro to USD conversion) $1,940 each.

Granted, I don't know his income taxation rate, but regardless of what it is, I would wager he's got a fair amount of money banked up to cover emergencies or other 'needs' (like future hardware replacement). Let's round the cost up to an even $2,000 each. If he's truly using 8 machines full-time, that's a $16,000 upgrade cost, which absolutely sounds painful, but that still falls under 2 months worth of income for him (at minimum) after you've already deducted estimated living expenses.

In the US, that would be $16k of business expense writeoffs, on top of whatever he got in credit for the 3090s, which he can now sell to recoup some money. He could probably offload them for $1,000 each and watch them disappear over night, just to get the junk out of his home/workspace, and in the big picture, it has barely made a dent in his net profits, and now he can produce a hell of a lot more. Maybe he'll only start with 4 cards, and do some in-house side-by-side becnhmarking, to decide if he can instead scale-down how many computers he's using at once because of the performance gains.

One way or another, I expect he'll be looking to replace every 3090 card he's using, either in all in the machines, or in the machines he intends to keep, before dismantling/repurposing the other ones. Unless he takes it a step further and decides to build all-new workstations from the ground up with better processors and such as well, but that's a bit extreme when your GPU is doing all the heavy lifting.

 

[Geralt From Rivia]

While it's true they do have a slightly higher max TDP, the hardware requirements for the 4090 are the same as a 3090FE card. If he's got his stuff set up to handle 8 machines already, he's going to be fine even if he replaces all the cards. Yank the old, drop in the new, update your drivers, and off you go.

As far as the "investment cost", he's bringing in at least $10,000 USD/month (assuming bare minimums for pledges). Let's assume for whatever reason he's got an exceptionally expensive monthly cost of living (due to electricity usage) and call that 1500/mo. Okay, that brings our minimum down to 8500. The Zotac 4090 Trinity is going for roughly (allowing for Euro to USD conversion) $1,940 each.

Granted, I don't know his income taxation rate, but regardless of what it is, I would wager he's got a fair amount of money banked up to cover emergencies or other 'needs' (like future hardware replacement). Let's round the cost up to an even $2,000 each. If he's truly using 8 machines full-time, that's a $16,000 upgrade cost, which absolutely sounds painful, but that still falls under 2 months worth of income for him (at minimum) after you've already deducted estimated living expenses.

In the US, that would be $16k of business expense writeoffs, on top of whatever he got in credit for the 3090s, which he can now sell to recoup some money. He could probably offload them for $1,000 each and watch them disappear over night, just to get the junk out of his home/workspace, and in the big picture, it has barely made a dent in his net profits, and now he can produce a hell of a lot more. Maybe he'll only start with 4 cards, and do some in-house side-by-side becnhmarking, to decide if he can instead scale-down how many computers he's using at once because of the performance gains.

One way or another, I expect he'll be looking to replace every 3090 card he's using, either in all in the machines, or in the machines he intends to keep, before dismantling/repurposing the other ones. Unless he takes it a step further and decides to build all-new workstations from the ground up with better processors and such as well, but that's a bit extreme when your GPU is doing all the heavy lifting.

I generally consider replacing the CPU to be pointless, especially if it has the penultimate generation of top-end Ryzen / Core. In each generation of new CPUs, we get only a small increase in performance, Moore's law is dead, and even more so, as you said, the main work is done by GPUs. It would be an extra expense for no purpose.
I still have the old Haswell gen Core i5, it's only 4/4 and it handles most tasks, even modern games.

 

[exazubi]

Hi guys. I have a question. I've already used the search function. But somehow I'm too stupid to find the right search terms. In the past the minigames didn't work properly in the compressed version. At least in the class tests, the pictures were often not displayed correctly and you got stuck. Has this error been fixed in the meantime?

As awesome as the game is, it just keeps getting bigger. And it's gradually becoming a real hard drive eater. The compressed version would help there.

 

[always86]

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So, turns out i misread the animations total last week and infact the average hadn't improved over the last few weeks. (I'd counted posed as rendered). That means teh average is holding at about 7.3 rendered per week. That means rendering complete sometime between the 16th and 23rd of December. Which could very well push release to December 30th or even January 6th. In Episode 8 he did manage an a 12.8 average by the time he hit the final episode count. Obviously this could bring things forward but, I don't see any reason to presume DPC is suddenly going to nearly double his weekly animation average.

 

[Hahn1900]

Bummer... just read the status report, looks like Release will be 2023. Thats a hard one... i really thaught he can deliver late november or at least early december... but with this animation count left, he will need at least two months from now to finish it... grmpf. 8 weeks for the animations left, add another two weeks for everything else before the actual release... and we are late january or early february, thats a real bummer...

 

[Geralt From Rivia]

So, turns out i misread the animations total last week and infact the average hadn't improved over the last few weeks. (I'd counted posed as rendered). That means teh average is holding at about 7.3 rendered per week. That means rendering complete sometime between the 16th and 23rd of December. Which could very well push release to December 30th or even January 6th. In Episode 8 he did manage an a 12.8 average by the time he hit the final episode count. Obviously this could bring things forward but, I don't see any reason to presume DPC is suddenly going to nearly double his weekly animation average.

Last week there were 230 animations, now 240 are ready. 10 per week is more than average, but not enough to finish the game quickly, for example before the end of November.

 

[Ilhares]

I generally consider replacing the CPU to be pointless, especially if it has the penultimate generation of top-end Ryzen / Core. In each generation of new CPUs, we get only a small increase in performance, Moore's law is dead, and even more so, as you said, the main work is done by GPUs. It would be an extra expense for no purpose.
I still have the old Haswell gen Core i5, it's only 4/4 and it handles most tasks, even modern games.

It depends what he's got, but in general, yes, you're right. It really depends on the tasks at hand. For instance, for most of my gaming, my Ryzen 9 3900X is absolutely beastly, it runs like a solid champ. When it comes to something like Star Citizen, though, I'd be better off with a 5600 3D or whatever it is. It can't be clocked up as well as my chip, and doesn't have the raw computational output, but that huge cache drastically boosts performance over most standard chips.

Most games, not unlike what we all play here, are quite adequately run on much older hardware. My last desktop was an i7-7700k, the one before that (which I gave to my housemate) is an i7-970. Six cores, 48GB of DD3 in triple-channel mode. The base clocks are lower, but despite that, it is still a beast of a processor. Very few programs that we run on our machines are really running into significant hardware bottlenecks. Prior to AMD pushing out the Ryzen 2 series, despite many revisions in their CPU lineups, processor improvements had been practically dormant for a decade.

Given a choice, though, I would absolutely still do all the rendering with a machine that was at least no more than 4 years old on the CPU/mobo architecture if I had a choice, and that's where DPC is at right now. He's got a choice. As long as the new GPUs don't need better than what he's got (PCIe 4.0, for instance) then I suspect he'll be just fine doing only GPU upgrades for his rendering work.

If they come out with a significant memory architecture change/boost, that would be cool. Anything that speeds up the moving of the data is a good thing, but it also needs to be cost effective and semi-practical. I don't expect anyone, gamer or developer, with any sense to pay 3x the cost for only a 10% conditional improvement.


But since we won't see the new episode until next year now, I guess we'll see what DPC gets himself for Christmas.