Enthralled & Consent: Development Thread, and my other works & projects.

[whateverbruh3575]

I peeled off SU Re-Imagined into it's own proof of concept development thread, here:

https://f95zone.to/threads/renpy-su...unity-development-thread.144779/#post-9852725

The 0.20 demo version is in the OP of that post, for those that might be interested in checking it out.

Enjoy!

You can access the management screen... from the main map... OHWEE WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T STOP BEING AWESOME!!!

 

[OhWee]

You can access the management screen... from the main map... OHWEE WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T STOP BEING AWESOME!!!

Figuring out how to 'show/hide' the Lexcon interface buttons without clicking was a pretty nice google find. I'll probably use that in my other projects, now that I know how to do it.

My work on Brothel King 0.14 several years back now was all about reducing the number of button clicks to do things. I added a few clicks in the 'end of day' routines, which theoretically I could bypass, but I think it's worthwhile to get a nightly report, plus random events might happen during that sequence, sooo...

So yeah, unnecessary clicking usually annoys me, hence why I look for ways to do things faster a lot of the time...

 

[whateverbruh3575]

Figuring out how to 'show/hide' the Lexcon interface buttons without clicking was a pretty nice google find. I'll probably use that in my other projects, now that I know how to do it.

My work on Brothel King 0.14 several years back now was all about reducing the number of button clicks to do things. I added a few clicks in the 'end of day' routines, which theoretically I could bypass, but I think it's worthwhile to get a nightly report, plus random events might happen during that sequence, sooo...

So yeah, unnecessary clicking usually annoys me, hence why I look for ways to do things faster a lot of the time...

So far it feels really good, still in the beta stage of course. I will note I found this little bug

Keep up the awesome work!

 

[OhWee]

So, quick update:

The next story for FmF (the riding story) is still on my backburner. There's a few things I still need to tackle with that, but I've been 100% focused on SU ReImagined for the last few weeks...

Speaking of which, I just uploaded a new demo build (0.23). Details here:

https://f95zone.to/threads/renpy-su...unity-development-thread.144779/post-10150751

It's still a bit of a buggy mess, but I did a LOT of coding to get that working as well as it is now. It's by far the most ambitious thing I've ever tackled coding and design wise. If you like checking out proof of concept demos, it's worth a looksee...

The character sprite art, well that's SR7's art, but the interface here is my design. It's been coming along nicely!

Anyways, yeah I need to get back to FmF soon, but I need to get this a little farther along so that the community can pick up where I left of with a decent sandbox to play in.

Back to work!

 

[OhWee]

Sooo... we need to talk...

(repost of one of my favorite renders from 2022)

So as those that are following this thread probably are aware of, I've been 100% focused on coding a backbone for SU ReImagined for months now, as shared in the previous few posts.

That effort is coming along very nicely. As I've mentioned, the game mechanics under the hood are fairly involved, (when kitties aren't getting tangled in my headphones like what happened just now, I have a particularly hard headed kitty...) so it's required full focus on my part.

So I'm sure that a number of you have also noticed that I've been doing less and less rendering lately. There are a few driving factors behind this, but a major driving is I'm just burned out on Daz rendering atm.. That and I'm constantly beating myself up for not grabbing an RTX 3090 for cheap back in October. The new ones are around $1.5K these days, and I haven't been able to bring myself to pay that much (again) for said graphics card, and I refuse to buy such hardware if it's used/refurbished. I have an RTX 3060 12GB in the meantime, but an NVIDIA GPU with 24GB of VRAM would have been nice...

Food got expensive and all that...

Coding in RenPy is very mild on hardware, so you don't need a fancy computer to do it. Even working with pictures/artwork in Photoshop is pretty easy on hardware as well, which is why I'm still using a very outdated version of Photoshop. I can't imagine that Adobe Photoshop CC is much more hardware intensive than say CS2, but the 'subscription model' just isn't something I'm interested in.

Anyways, so I let RustyV and Big Rooster know a couple of days ago now that for now, FmF just isn't something that I want to work on right now. Story ideas isn't the problem, my desire to make new renders for those story ideas is, and has been for a while now.

Looking back at some of the artwork I've done over the years, IMHO I've done some pretty interesting stuff, but that's not where my artistic drive is atm..

So what does this mean?

When I'm ready, I'll fall back into doing renders and such, but for now, and for several months now, I've pretty much stopped rendering stuff in Daz Studio altogether. Sure, I'll do a whim render every so often, but yeah I'm going weeks at a time between Daz Studio sessions now...

I've been the holdup for the next chapters of FmF for a while now. RustyV did a bunch of renders for Part 2 a long time ago, but I simply haven't completed the renders for the stories that I wanted to do for FmF. so going forward, I've suggested that RustyV release the material that he's done for FmF as it's own thing. Preferably in chronological order (based on the story that we worked out) but it's been sitting on the backburner for almost two years now, which is simply unforgivable IMHO.

BigRooster has also done some renders for FmF, I've told him to do the same. He put a lot of work into those renders, and they should be shared.

As for the renders that I've done for FmF so far, other than what you've already seen in Part 1, there aren't that many that I've done for Part 2 of FmF actually. Thanks to my needing to bounce between projects, and get various chapters of Enthralled out, yeah...

So I'll probably trickle these out over the coming weeks, and try to coincide these with the release of various RustyV parts, as my time allows.

My artistic desire to work in Daz Studio just isn't there right now. And I'm not going to try to 'force' anything that I don't really want to do. I do this stuff as a hobby, for free, for reasons, so at the end of the day it's what I want to do, I'm not beholden to anyone (Patreons, etc.) so that I can maintain that freedom.

Anyways, I just wanted to give y'all a heads up r.e. where my artistic endeavors are right now.

I'm not going anywhere, I'm pretty passionate about coding SU ReImagined right now and creating interface artwork and such for it, but yeah, it may be a while before you see more Daz renders from me...

With apologies!
OhWee

 

[OhWee]

Random Jen render...



Archiving more pics...

 

[OhWee]

This is probably as good a place as any to mention something that's coming out soon that I'm excited yet cautiously optimistic about...

You must be registered to see the links

Babylon 5: The Road home is an animated film coming out sometime this Summer!

I was going to try to cobble together a B5 uniform for Jen, but this will have to do for now...



In other news, I suppose that I should update my project schedule.

1) SU ReImagined:

This is probably the thing I'm piddling around the most with atm.

There's a few things on my personal 'to do' list for the backbone, but atm what I'm mostly hoping for is that more people will tackle 'girl pack' content. I set up ReImagined so that each girl's content could be 'self contained' in her own folder and .rpy file, which is good to go, so now it's up to others to continue to tackle said 'girl pack' content.


2) The next FmF thing:

There are two stories that are mostly ready to go, but I need to fill in a few blanks in these stories, so I'm doing renders here and there as ideas come to me.

3) Enthralled Pt 5:

Someone asked me about this in the Enthralled thread. Still on the backburner pending completion of other projects, as my time and energy allows...

That's about it! Mainly I'm just excited and cautiously optimistic about the new B5 Animated movie!


Archiving more pics:

 

[OhWee]

A quick update:



While the Pentagon continues to investigate the whole UAP thing, my creative muse keeps getting sucked into SU ReImagined...

I posted Version 0.27 a couple of days ago, and am still hard at work trying to make things look prettier and of course chasing down bugs and typos, btw thanks to everyone that is trying to help out with that!

https://f95zone.to/threads/renpy-su...unity-development-thread.144779/post-10917436

This of course means that I haven't been working on Enthralled of FmF, 'cuz I really want to see this ReImagined thing get across the finish line. My hope is that if other people are seeing steady progress with ReImagined, this might inspire a few more people to help with the girlpack situation.

Also, Daz3D.com nerfed the Daz+ June sale, so normally I'd be buying a lot of stuff which inspires me to use said stuff in Daz Studio, but since I'm not really inspired to buy anything, this just keeps me in a 'I really don't want to mess with Daz Studio right now' mood. I'm feeling much more creative with ReImagined right now, so Daz Studio continues to mostly take a back seat. Sure, I did the render you see above a couple of days ago (BTW, think Forbidden Planet if you are wondering about the saucer), but yeah...

Anyways, I'll get back into the mood to make more Daz Studio renders someday...


Edit: Archiving more pics...

 

[OhWee]

Sooo, 6 years and 5000 posts later, and I'm still here...



I actually put together the render above in 2019, but I wasn't coming up with any cool ideas for my 5000th post, and I like sport bikes and it's pretty soooo...

Anyways, so yeah, 6 years and 2 days ago I registered on F95Zone, so I guess it's appropriate that my 5000th's post falls around my 6th F95Zone anniversary. Sure, other people post a lot more than I do, so 5000 isn't any big thing, but I like to mark such milestones nonetheless.

I guess it's appropriate that I ordered a new graphics card for my eGPU enclosure today, a RTX 3090 (finally). It's still a pretty expensive card - the price wasn't insane though for a now older card -and it'll be a bit before it gets here, assuming no shipping problems.

The main reason for this is the 24GB of VRAM, which will hopefully help with larger scenes like the one above. The RTX 3060 has been doing well, and I'll still use it in my HTPC build going forward, but I've hit the 12GB VRAM wall a few too many times.

The final scenes in Enthralled are pretty involved, so the 24GB of VRAM should be very helpful.

As for why a 3090 and not a newer card, well I'm using older Nvidia drivers on Uber Laptop here, as the newer Nvidia drivers weren't playing nice with my system (screen goes black/can't use the laptop) and MSI has no interest in updating drivers for a laptop they first released over 6 years ago/early 2017...

SU ReImagined has kept me very distracted in the meantime, and I haven't been in the mood to render stuff lately. My muse is more interested in ReImagined atm. Here's my take on Indigo/Brainiac8 that I threw together with a bit of help from Jimwalrus, who ran a Daz render of mine through Stable Diffusion to emulate the SR7 style...

Drawing and painting this from scratch would have taken me days, and I don't have the patience for that much work for just a single pic.

I haven't been in the mood to mess with FmF stuff lately. I feel bad about that, but to be honest SU ReImagined is the thing I'm more interested in atm.

Anyways, so yeah 6 years 5000 posts blah blah! Hopefully my silly artwork and other efforts are still keeping a few people entertained!

 

[OhWee]

It's heeeeere...
a

PNY RTX 3090 24GB!!!

I just dropped it into my eGPU enclosure. Note that this 3090 only has 2 8 pin connectors, which is all my Razer eGPU enclosure has, so no need for splitter cables or anything. This will also probably mean that it'll run a bit cooler maybe, we'll see.

I of course immediately fired up Daz Studio, and loaded a quick scene and did this render...



Nothing fancy, I just wanted to make sure that Daz wasn't going to crash...

It was pretty much plug and play. I have to use an older set of Nvidia drivers 'cuz you know MSI doesn't update their laptop drivers and the newer Nvidia drivers result in a black laptop screen/no display, which is why I went with a 3090. The 3060 has been working pretty well already so I figured that the 3090 should 'plug and play' and it essentially did!

Not sure how fast the above render was, I hit 'render' and went to grab something out of the microwave real quick, so maybe a minute or two at most, and the render was already done. It's a simple render, but still, it DOES seem to be significantly faster than the 3060...

BTW, Uber Laptop here has 64 GB of ram installed, and a bit of spare SSD storage space, so I'm good to go with such things for now! Still only a 4 core/8 Thread ancient Intel CPU (i7 6820HK at 2.7 GHz max) but it's plenty fine for now, until I eventually build a dedicated rendering rig. That'll be a bit down the road though...

I also relaxed my texture compression on the above render from 512/1024 to 1024/2048, and rendered it at 4K as I always do. I shrink stuff down to 1080 height 'cuz forum posts and 4K renders are a bit rude IMHO... I should use thumbnails but I'm stubborn that way... my thread my rules!


Anyways, assuming that this card 'just works', I am now officially out of excuses r.e. those final chapter Enthralled renders that I've been putting off as the scenes I had in mind wouldn't fit within 12GB of VRAM without doing multiple passes or other shennanigans. I'm sure I'll find a way to fill 24GB of VRAM, but life should be much happier in the meantime!

I'm still focused on SU ReImagined ATM though, so it'll be a bit. I need to ease back into the Daz rendering groove...


YAY TEAM or something like that...

 

[Jimwalrus]

Can I borrow it?

 

[OhWee]

Random shout out...

You must be registered to see the links

She's rather pretty for a forest spirit!

 

[OhWee]

Just a tribute of sorts to the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in US history, 160 years ago this month (July 1-3).



Remembering those that paid the ultimate price fighting for their ideals.


Edit: Archiving more pics...

 

[OhWee]

Just playing around in Daz Studio again...



A nod to Fire & Ice, and also Frank Frazetta. Renders are a poor substitute for Frazetta's style, but Frazetta's art has inspired millions, including me.

In any case, so I needed to shift gears for a few days after Photoshop crashed on a rework that I was working on. I should have saved more often, and I didn't lose that much work, but it still pisses me off when crashes happen. Photoshop crashes for me are rare, but still happen every now and then.

Anyways, Daz Studio is also prone to crashing, which brings up an interesting issue that I'm dealing with which has lessened my desire to work in Daz Studio regularly...

The short form, Uber Laptop here has dual GTX 1080s, and I now have an RTX 3090 attached via a Thunderbolt 3 port. From my research, it seems that my crashes are partially tied to not having enough system ram to fully take advantage of the 3090s VRAM (I do have 64GB of laptop DDR4 installed, which would normally be a lot), but more prominently, the GTX vs RTX thing is causing issues, even though I am not using the GTXs for rendering usually. They still drive my monitors though, which may cause a few conflicts. I've read about a few others having GTX vs. RTX issues and it's just a guess, but yeah...

I tried to render a couple of fairly complex scenes, and it seems that around 15-16GB of VRAM usage, that's where crashes become fairly regular. So disappointing, but otherwise the RTX 3090 is much faster than the RTX 3060 it replaced, so there's that, and being able to push past 12GB of VRAM is helpful too.

I can't update my drivers due to laptop issues, the Nvidia driver set I'm using is the last set of drivers that will interact properly with my laptop monitor. This laptop dates back to 2016-2017, so I'm not surprised that MSI has essentially abandoned updating the drivers to work with this particular laptop (GT83VR). My drivers are 'updated enough' to support RTX cards,and are essentially the most recent driver set that are confirmed to still work with this particular laptop without losing the laptop screen. Using newer drivers essentially just gives me a black laptop screen, which I need to be able to boot into windows, and also use inside of windows. So yeah...

So my potential solution to this will be to finally build my dedicated rendering system, but I'm not in a money spending mood atm, having shelled out around $1K for the 3090 recently. I don't regret that purchase at all, I just need to work within my budget.

Daz3D.com's new sales strategies have essentially turned me off, and I have a lot of assets for Daz Studio already, so I can easily make do with what I have atm. So not spending a lot of money on Daz sales helps my budget situation, but there's other 'real life' stuff that I need to take care of too.

Anyways, I just wanted to note that I won't be finishing Enthralled until I build said dedicated rendering rig, as the last batch of renders will require a good chunk of VRAM, so I need the 3090 working at it's peak for those...

I'm mostly just rambling here, just wanted to note that I still like to play around in Daz Studio, and chasing my muse is still a thing I enjoy. Following my muse and shifting gears as needed helps me avoid complete burnout in my artistic endeavors. I'll get back to working on SU ReImagined in a few days, but I'm going to see if I can finally wrap up an FmF related project first, as I'm in the mood to work on that atm.

BTW, the above render is for an intro sequence, vaguely related to the actual story. It'll make more sense when it's all done.


On a somewhat related note, for those that like fun deep dives into films by someone passionate about older and some newer sci fi and fantasy films and such, you might enjoy Retro Nerd Girl's reviews...


Enjoy!


Archiving more pics:

 

[OhWee]

Quick update on my various projects and system upgrades...

So, I've been running out of storage space on Uber Laptop here. It's to the point that I have close to a year's worth of Daz asset purchases that I simply haven't downloaded due to lack of drive space.

I've been hoping that 8 TB NVME's would drop in price significantly. Note that while I can find 4 TB NVMEs all day long in the $150-200 range, 8 TB NVME's are still over $750. And I'm pinching pennies atm...

Note that Samsung has an 8 TB SATA III drive (actually 7.3 TB, I still say false advertising but whatever) is only around $370, or less than half the price of the NVME version, despite having that 2.5" shell. I just don't understand...

Uber Laptop here only has room for 1 2.5" SATA drive, EXCEPT that I removed the DVD/Blu Ray slim player years ago, which I put into my HTPC build. I have an external USB Blu Ray Player that I can use if I need to watch a Blu Ray movie or something, so the 'missing' drive hasn't been an issue.

APPARENTLY, they make a SATA drive adaptor for slim bays. I found one for less than $10, so I have a second Samsung 2.5" 7.3 TB SSD on the way along with the adaptor. Both should be here in about 5 days, at which point I guess we'll see if this will work. Worst case, I order an external 2.5" usb to SATA drive case and attach via a USB port, and I'm out a few bucks on the adaptor...

It'll be slower than NVME, but much faster than hard drives at least!

THEN the other 'fun' begins, that is downloading all of the Daz assets that I've purchased/acquired recently from Daz3D.com. There's a few fun things in there that I want to put to use sooner rather than later. The Daz3D.com September PA sale has actually been rather good (for older assets anyways, note that I still prefer Genesis 3 characters, and a lot of that stuff has been over 80% off before token madness). I've probably spent more this month on Daz Assets than I have in the last couple of years, so yeah I have a LOT of stuff to download/install...

So yeah, ugh stuff to install!


Hopefully it'll all go well. In the meantime, I need to do a few more renders for the FmF short story that I've been trying to get across the finish line, then there's SU Re-Imagined that I want to get back to.

Back to it!


Archiving more pics:

 

[OhWee]

The big guy is 69, so I figured he could use some 69 action...



The 1954 movie was first shown in Nagoya, Japan on October 27th, 1954!

Archiving more pics:

 

[OhWee]

Just a quick nod to one of my new favorite shows!



Just because!

I'm in the middle of cobbling together a dedicated rendering rig atm. I still need to order a few more parts, but I'm off to a good start!

Carry on!


Archiving more pics:

 

[OhWee]

OK, folks, I'm in disaster mode right now.

Short form, tried to clone my OS drive on Uber laptop, errors, then the boot drive failed completely.

Tried cloning the OS from Interim/HTPC Rig, errors, not risking any further attempts with interim rig. Interim rig has no internet connection, as I keep it isolated from the interweb thingie.

Dedicated rendering rig is up and running, bu without an OS drive to boot it with, yeah it's just a pretty paperweight until I get an OS installed.

I am typing this on baby laptop, the one I bought about a decade ago. It's on it's last legs, battery is dead/won't charge and it has issues booting on AC power without a functional battery. Working ATM, but it's not ideal, also Windows 8 which I miss but won't work well with my new systems and GPUs that don't support Windows 8 afaik...

I'm probably going to snag a cheap laptop from Walmart this morning to maintain reliable internet connectivity (baby laptop's chiclet keyboard has intermittent keys so I have to keep retyping until the keystrokes register). UGH

Fuck Fuck Fuck!


In any case, all of my projects are on hold until I get a working desktop system, or manage to get Uber Laptop working again. Getting Daz Studio to work willl again will be a bit of a bear as well, but on thing at a time.

Most/almost all of my project stuff is saved onto different drives (I tend to instal most of my programs onto drives other than my 'C' drive, in case something like his happens so yay I guess), so I'm good there for now.

Still, Fuck Fuck Fuck!

 

[OhWee]

Still in computer hell...

So I bought a new HP laptop (on sale) with Windows 11. HP in their infinite wisdom have removed BypassNRO, so I can't bypass the 'you must have an internet connection to finish setting up this laptop'. BypassNRO allows you to set the laptop up offline, but not an option for me. I use a 4G USB modem to connect to the interweb thingie, and of course Microsoft didn't anticipate that so I can't connect in any case. I COULD maybe buy a USB to ethernet adaptor and try that (to connect to the internet through baby laptop here), but I don't want to spend any more money than I absolutely have to.

Yes, I have a "Rufus" USB OS install drive set up, and tried installing a 'default' version of Windows 11 on the new laptop with it, no joy (missing something HP requires).

Baby laptop here (that I'm typing on) is over 10 years old, has a dead battery, a tiny 13.3" screen, an almost full drive and an intermittent chiclet keyboard, so not ideal but better than nothing. Yay?

I had planned to clone my OS drive (Windows 10) to get my dedicated rendering rig up and running (it boots fine, just needs an OS) but any attempts to clone my OS drives have failed so far.

Years ago I moved my Daz stuff onto a separate drive, but of course you need an OS drive with the Daz software keys in the OS registry, so while my Daz stuff should be intact, it's unusable atm. Same for my other mods. On physically separate drives on the failed OS drive so should still be intact, but no way to know until I resolve the dead OS drive issue.

The file structure seems to be mostly intact on my failed OS drive, but until I successfully recover the files off of said drive (boot partition is not recoverable, I tried, so drive is not 'bootable') I won't know what still works and what doesn't.

I do have backups on a large HDD, but it's mosly full so I haven't backed up in a few months. There was a nice deal on an 18TB external drive during the black friday deals, but those sold out online before I had a chance to grab it. So still looking for a good deal on a dependable backup drive. And then I'll need to scrape up cash to buy it of course (not that big of an issue, but one thing at a time). I've spent a LOT of money on computer hardware in the last month (new laptop that is currently useless, dedicated rendering rig with no OS, external drive enclosures...). My upgrade budget is waaaay over budget atm...

I did try to clone the OS off of my interim rendering/future HTPC rig, but that failed (drive errors) and I don't want to risk killing that drive too trying other cloning methods, so that OS drive is kind of off limits atm...

Seriously considering Linux right now for the new laptop. I bought it to be my new internet browsing machine only, my dedicated rendering rig is to be my 'work' machine for Daz Studio and other stuff, but I need to get a functioning OS on it first...

Baby laptop here is my 'emergency backup' machine for disaster situations such as this one. I haven't used it in a couple of years, and am lucky that it still works.

BTW, I do still have the original OS drives for Uber Laptop. They didn't have enough space so I replaced them fairly quickly with a single, much larger OS drive. It's tricky, though, as it's two drives in a 'RAID' configuration so I have to set everything up to put them to use again, and of course the registry information for my other programs that I installed after removing them simply doesn't exist on those drives. So that's a 'when out of other options' option.

So still Fuck Fuck Fuck and Ugh, but whatever...

 

[OhWee]

BTW, in case anyone was wondering about my dedicated rendering rig specs:

Asrock X570 Creator (went AM4 for reasons, also, TBolt 3 native support with this board).
Ryzen 5700G (wanted integrated graphics for my desktop, to keep my GPU 100% dedicated for rendering only).
128 GB DDR4 system ram (lots of system ram helps when compiling scenes for GPUs with lots of VRAM).
1000 W power supply (for multiple GPUs when I get that far).
2 TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD for OS (currently being used to save backups since the OS drive clone failed).
8 TB Samsung 870 EVO 2.5" SATA for my Daz install. (8 TB M2 NVME is still expensive, @2x the cost)...
Room for more drives, second GPU.

Ryzen 5800 X3D could be an option if the 5700G isn't enough, but the 5700G has 8 cores and Daz Studio doesn't really push CPU cores that hard so X3D would be overkill probably. Unless we are talking CPU only renders but I have a beefy RTX 3090 with 24GB of VRAM so shouldn't be an issue...

It has successfully booted (the I/O backplate wasn't included, so I had to wait a couple of weeks for Asrock to send me one, should have been included but stuff happens). Without an OS though I haven't been able to put it through the paces yet...

I have an RTX 3090 24 GB that I plan to drop into this system. I also still have an RTX 3060, but the plan was to 'retire' that card to HTPC duties. I MIGHT put it alongside the 3090 though...

So, short form, the future is bright, once I get past the current hardware/software disaster...


Off to look for a cheap NVME...