As to wanting to know what's going on in the back-end...you and me both! I'm using Visual Novel Maker, and their engine is basically inaccessible. All I have to work with is the GUI/Scripting I can manipulate from the creator-side. And from what I can tell, their engine is a ^$#@%ing mess. I seriously regret choosing it but by the time I realized what a total piece of shit it was, I was too deep into development to change course. Honestly, you're better off downloading it, particularly as I've started trying to provide patches between versions. The online version was only ever intended to help people who didn't want to download the files, couldn't get the DL version to work, or who wanted to play on mobile. Considering how much my host is bitching about my data usage, I will probably discontinue the online deployment as soon as the game is actually finished.
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As for the size...I'm really really really tired of explaining this. So this will be the last time I do so. Period.
Rough Sizes:
Size of the Game Engine Itself: 1.5gb
Size of the 5+ HOURS worth of HD Video: 8.5 gb
Size of the thousands of still images: 1.5gb
ALL still images use JPEG compression. ALL movie snippets use WEBM compression (VP8 is used : Sadly VP9 is not supported by the VNM engine). All video is 24 fps 1080p, all jpeg images are similarly 1920x1080. And please keep in mind this is VIDEO, not the 3-5 frame animation loops you see in most games.
The simple truth is that this game is already heavily compressed. Sadly, compression isn't magic no matter what the people of the internet believe. This is also not your namby-pamby 3-hour visual novel. Unless you're skipping like a mad loon, the game probably has 10-15 hours of content, at minimum. And that WITHOUT grind mechanics. Frankly put, five-plus hours of 1080p HD video is large, even under compression. The download is large because the game has more content than virtually any other 2 or 3 adult games combined. The sheer number of encounters dwarfs even games like Harem Hotel or Mythic Manor. Though, I manifestly DO NOT claim the scenes are as high quality or original as those extremely good works. There's simply a genuinely massive number of such encounters. Somewhere around 285 unique encounters, plus variants.
I know the game is large. I know that sucks. But there's literally nothing more I can do to fix that, not without drastically lowering the quality to a level I find completely unacceptable. I provide multiple download mirrors, an online version, and most recently version upgrade patches, in an attempt to mitigate the pain of having to download such a large amount. Please do not bitch and moan, or worse accuse me of needing to optimize. From this post on, I will not respond to such comments again, as they show a lack of basic awareness and common sense about how compression works, or else that the poster hasn't played enough of the game yet to realize how freakin massive it is, content-wise. And, worse, that they haven't bothered to read any of my other numerous explanations on the subject.
And no, I'm not angry at you specifically. Actually, I'm not 'angry' at all. Just utterly fed up with that being the single most common comment and compliant, while I struggle to get even my most loyal patrons to tell me what they actually like about the game. Constructive feedback is amazing. Bitching about something beyond my control because I'm not a wizard or immortal space god that can warp reality to make problems go away, is not. You specifically weren't overly impolite about it, so I apologize for making this rant in reply to you directly. I've simply heard this unreasoning complaint too many times.
