As a man who uses this script: it's a life saver. But it reduces the visual quality.
And the DPC created Ep.9 when he used 2xRTX 3090 in each build, which gave him 48GB of memory. I think that he had enough without this script.
Looking at the settings and their quantity this plugin/addon offer, I suppose you can tune it in the way, that you will not notice any degradation of image quality, since optimization could only touch things, that are not noticeable because of distance or their size, but still need to be calculated by rendering engine. For example objects on the backround or just small things, which takes a couple of pixels size in a final render. W/o optimizations rendering engine will spend a lot of time to calculate lighting/shadowing etc that will never be visible at least in image resolutions we have in BADIK. And even if it's not saving a lot of VMEM, such plugins reduce rendering time by several times. I think it's the only real and working option for animation sequences rendering tasks.
To render 1s animation (30 renders/frames total) if an average rendering speed is 30 minutes per frame you will need 15 hours to complete it. And only 5 hours if there are 10 minutes per frame average.
Depending on options such plugins/addons may reduce rendering time or VMEM usage or both, depending on settings, tuning and goals you targeting.
I mentioned it before, but DPC using webm video format for his animations, and it's not the best codec and format as well. I mean, it's useless to spend a lot of time to render a lot of frames with higher quality only to compress them later to levels, when artifacts of compression takes place. Look at animations which have dark areas or made in environments with dim lights. You will notice a lot of details loss and "J-P-E-G" things.
Finally it's a RenPy limitations too. Shame, but there are no HEVC H.265 or H.264 formats support or other similar ones.
Ren'Py is capable of using FFmpeg (included) to play movies using the video codecs:
- VP9
- VP8
- Theora
- MPEG-4 part 2 (including Xvid and DivX)
- MPEG-2
- MPEG-1
and the following audio codecs:
inside the following container formats:
- WebM
- Matroska
- Ogg
- AVI
- Various kinds of MPEG streams.
DPC uses VP8 codec and webm format/container, while, I suppose VP9 would produce better quality, since it simply newer. No AV1 and more modern codecs is supported though.
VP8 uses a fixed block size of 16×16 pixels, whereas VP9 supports block sizes ranging from 4×4 to 64×64 pixels. This flexibility allows VP9 to adapt better to different types of video content, resulting in more efficient compression and improved visual quality.
it's a pity that so much of the work done is packed into a crappy old format like VP8
I hope he have all the original frames/scenes, etc on hands, so it's easy to release a "remaster" version later when the game development will be finished.
