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Happy Friday, everyone!
Warning! Today's post is a behemoth. If you're only interested in the normal weekly development content, you can stop reading after the development news section.
I will talk about the Steam/GOG news and try my best to clarify everything about the new 4K mode.
Development news
I've had a great week creating art. It's been smooth and fast, and I've been happy with my daily progress.
There are 21 scenes left to create for the free roam event. They vary in length, with some very long and others short. Some of these scenes are missing writing. I estimate I'm 65-70% done with the free roam event.
Way earlier in the development cycle, I mentioned a special feature that I had implemented. This week, I created the art it needed, tested it in-game, and made some tweaks to improve it. I had a lot of fun with the feature, and I think you will enjoy it too.
The 92-second-long cutscene animation is now 75% complete. The render speed has been very good this week.
22 animations and 478 statics are in the render queue, and two of my PCs are now rendering static renders because I want that part of the queue to deplete faster so I can show you some fresh previews.
I will continue working on the free roam event next week, too. We'll see how far I get. I might reach the point where I need to write more scenes for it.
Steam/GOG news
If you missed it, or couldn't see it because of regional settings - I know, it sucks - here's a recap of Wednesday's news for Steam and GOG.
The title of Episode 12 was revealed: "Smoke and Fire".
The overall Season 3 development is at 90% completion.
The overall development for episode 12 is at 60% completion.
Here are the new screenshots you may have missed.
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And if you'd like to view the NSFW trailer, it's in the attachments at the bottom of this post.
In the news, I also revealed that I've been working on a 4K mode this year. And that, my friends, is what the rest of the post will be about.
4K mode
I want to clarify what the 4K mode is and answer questions I've seen come up. It will get fairly technical at times, but I've tried my best to explain it.
What is the 4K mode?
Every render, GUI element, and animation frame from Season 3 has been reprocessed and tailored for a 4K experience. You can play the game in 4K resolution instead of full HD, and, while recommended, you don't need a 4K monitor to enjoy this mode, as RenPy will scale the game to your monitor.
The 4K mode is optional and modular. If you don't want it, don't download it.
The 4K mode requires roughly 90 GB of extra disk space and may not be suitable for older computers. You can enable the 4K mode in the settings menu if the game detects 4K files. It will look like this in-game.
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Why did you add the 4K mode?
I wanted to treat players to something special. The game looks beautiful in 4K. By making it 4K, I have future-proofed the game, so it should take longer for it to look dated.
After carefully evaluating how to make it a reality, I realized it wouldn't require much extra development time and that I could maintain a straightforward, automated development process to support both full HD and 4K modes. I didn't want to implement it if it meant a significant increase in development time.
Will it be available on Patreon?
I will investigate how to make this possible. I will be straight with you, distributing 90-100 GB of data outside of fast CDN servers that Steam and GOG use is a huge hurdle.
Some of you have already experienced the difficulties of downloading the current Season 3 version from Patreon, and it was less than 20 GB. I will investigate if and how it's feasible to achieve this distribution for patrons.
How is the 4K mode possible?
This will get fairly technical, but here's the full explanation of why I could create a 4K mode of Season 3 without re-rendering everything.
Ever since I started developing Being a DIK, I have rendered every render and animation in 4K (3840x2160) resolution. This might seem confusing, since the game you have played was in full HD (1920x1080) all this time. But once you understand my render-making process, it becomes clearer.
When you render an image in DAZ3D, you perform iterations of ray tracing. The results of each iteration are pooled, and from these calculations, you get clearer signals with each pooled iteration. You also get what's called noise, or maybe you know it better as grain. Noise works the opposite way of the signal with increased iterations. While the signal increases with every iteration, the noise dissipates. Here's an example.
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In this case, I've rendered the same image with 100, 1000, and 10,000 iterations of ray tracing. You can see that it becomes clearer as the iteration count increases, and the noise (grain) dissipates.
To get a beautiful, clear render, you need a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and there are several ways to achieve it.
- You can render with a high iteration count.
- You can downsample your final image from a higher-resolution image.
- You can apply a denoiser after rendering.
In my art, I use methods 1 and 2. I don't use method 3 because of reasons outside the scope of this text.
By removing method 2 - the downsampling - from my process, I could achieve a 4K mode without re-rendering.
When you downsample an image, you reduce its size by a factor. In my case, I reduced the 4K images to full HD. In this example, you can see how the noise is reduced by downsampling from 4K to full HD. You will lose resolution, but get a sharper signal and less noise.
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Downsampling uses what's known as the nearest-neighbor principle. In this case, 4 pixels will merge into 1, and the result is an average of the surrounding pixels (the nearest neighbors). The signal thus increases, and you can see this as another pooled result - much like pooled iterations.
By combining methods 1 and 2, I found that the render efficiency increased. I could get a higher quality render in a shorter time than if I were to render at the target resolution using only method 1.
To achieve 4K mode without re-rendering all art, I skipped the downsampling step, accepted a little bit of extra noise, and applied the remaining post-processing to the images. By doing this, nothing needed to be re-rendered (except for some botched animations that had missing frames on my backup disks, which store the raw files).
How does the 4K mode affect development times going forward?
This has not affected any render times. I do not render longer because of the 4K mode, nor would I render faster if I didn't create it.
Hardware capabilities determine render times, and they have improved with each GPU generation. It improved until the point where 4K mode was possible with Season 3 without me planning for it.
It feels weird to say the 4K mode was a hindsight feature, but it has been a happy coincidence. It was made possible by increasing the iteration count and render quality to the point where removing downsampling didn't significantly affect the render quality.
Every script I use will now automatically post-process an image in both 4K and full HD. I have even automated animation processing with a .bat file that runs on a double-click and puts everything together automatically.
Furthermore, I have written a script to cross-check images between 4K and full HD folders to ensure they are identical, removing time-consuming work.
I haven't changed how I manually work in DAZ3D or Photoshop. The changes are made at a script level, which is why I can say the 4K mode does not significantly impact development time.
Will Season 1 and 2 be in 4K mode too?
Not at the moment. I would much rather remaster Seasons 1 and 2 from scratch in the future than introduce a 4K mode right now. However, as I have mentioned in my Q&As, my main priority is to finish the game before any of those ideas are explored.
Phew
If you're still here, I hope this has been helpful, illuminating, comforting, interesting, or just a big wall of text.
If you have any follow-up questions, you can always fire away below, and I'll try to answer.
Thanks for your time reading this!
(And don't forget the trailer in the attachment below)
Have a great weekend.
Dr PinkCake
