- Oct 22, 2018
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You know, I'm impressed, you went full Twin Peaks on this one. Sadly, I can't find myself able to talk about the naga shit, it's so long ago and even then I didn't really pay attention.
Ren'Py Four Elements Trainer [v1.1.0d] [Mity]
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- Sep 19, 2018
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that doesn't fit here because while people are paying, they are all volunteers, not actually contracted.
meaning they can stop paying at any time they run out of patience or interest,
and the reason they pay at all, and if stopped may come back, is due to work quality.
meaning doing a quick but bad job would hurt them much more in the end than taking a long time but giving a good material.
meaning they can stop paying at any time they run out of patience or interest,
and the reason they pay at all, and if stopped may come back, is due to work quality.
meaning doing a quick but bad job would hurt them much more in the end than taking a long time but giving a good material.
as a side note to the discussion, if i were to point the failing of the B4SR, it would be, that it felt like they didnt care what happened. nor how they could make it better. i still think cbob got too pissed of at his massive minigame not being in the game. he was so focused on those minigames that he didnt even add the "lv2" interactions(you know, the new text when a character develops so to make it more interesting for us).
just look at the smoothie scene, all they needed to do was remove the barf and have her say something like "i know" while smiling, before drinking again. same for jinora, she could just show up and ask for one too, maybe even say "make mine extra strong" or something like that.
none of those would take that long. of course, doing that to every new scene would take some time, but, guess what, its an easy touch up that could be used as they think what the love route will be.
i still defend that, working on something lighter can help with writter's block. specially when its a nobrainer like those.
just look at the smoothie scene, all they needed to do was remove the barf and have her say something like "i know" while smiling, before drinking again. same for jinora, she could just show up and ask for one too, maybe even say "make mine extra strong" or something like that.
none of those would take that long. of course, doing that to every new scene would take some time, but, guess what, its an easy touch up that could be used as they think what the love route will be.
i still defend that, working on something lighter can help with writter's block. specially when its a nobrainer like those.
Those things would make an awesome feature, also seems somewhat simple to do.
- Oct 22, 2018
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And such features were present in previous books, as well as in most trainer games.
spoken like someone who has no idea how depression works!
...or writer's block, for that matter.
Seriously, for someone who had the later sometimes, and struggles with the first a lot of times, I can say that, as bad as writer's block is, depression can be worse and cause the block.
just cbob saying he started taking antidepressants is a big help.
they are not a magical cure, it takes some days to take full effect and even full effect may not always be 100%,
but unike what others who never dealt with it may think it is not something you can just power through with "a walk in the woods" or "enough motivation". the only reason it is "all in your head" is because that is the part of the body the affected organ, the brain, is. it would be just the same as saying you can heal asthma by going to a farm from time to time to clean the lungs or getting rid of a kidney stone by wanting the pain of it gone hard enough.
- Sep 19, 2018
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art update: show me that smile
Marty here! Have you already read Mr. Word's (cbob's) post? If not please do so first. I've been wanting to write an update myself earlier but was waiting on him to provide some more clarity on what was going on with him and give everyone a few days to read it.
First of all, I think most people who have been with us for a longer time, already had a sneaking suspicion about what was causing Mr words slow down. We actually received some pm's suggesting as much to me. Cbob hates showing any signs of "weakness" but I think it's good for everyone to have a better understanding of this so I'm happy he did include it in his update... even though it's more of a "blink and you've missed it" admission.
I've come to realize cbob has very little/weak self diagnosis skills. He just puts on a smile and keeps on going. I recently sent him the following pic to show him how convincing I thought that had become.
He also suggested "knocking the next build out in two weeks" in an email he sent to me because we have such great patrons and he felt bad for our tardiness ... I would've liked to see my own face when I read that." Call me crazy but looking at our recent track record that seems more like a fever dream than an actual possibility.
Despite all of the stuff I started doing besides drawing, officially/legally I'm just a hired hand/contractor responsible for the art. I used to always send all the art/scenes necessary for a new build to cbob at the start of a new month and for a long time that worked out fine.
I want to go full speed again more than anyone else out there, but I think an attempt at that now will only cause a repeat of these last couple of months (with horribly inaccurate estimations and postponements up the gazoo). That won't do anyone any good. Least of all Cbob.
I'd like a return to a dependable release schedule and that's not going to happen without cbob taking the time to take care of himself. For real. He has already started doing some smart things and we can return towards stability if he keeps at it.
He told me that working(despite his speed) on FET is very important to him so I don't want to cut him off entirely so I'm probably going to start dripfeeding him art at the start of the new cycle and see how that works out. Just please take whatever he says about time frames and estimations with a healthy helping of salt. It's what I do.
Anyway, he has started doing some smart things to get better and one of those things, exercising, is a good idea for anyone. I don't know about you guys, but I've been getting a covid belly. I hate it and I want it gone. My stomach is growling as I write this and I started running laps during the evening in an effort to smite it. But even without trying to getYou must be registered to see the linksof excess body fat, exercising is good to do.
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So what have and am I doing besides starting to exercise myself?
last time I held a poll about maybe adding high res pics to the game. I was hoping for an overwhelming yay or nay, but the biggest group is fine with whatever. So while I still wasn't entirely certain I just started converting all the existing book4 love route sprites into their higher res version.
"When in doubt just start doing something and hope for the best" is the mantra I went by. I pretty much finished all of it. Not the backgrounds, only the sprites for book 4's love route. The screen's aspect ratio of 4:3 would also still be the way it currently is. So it's more of a Frankenstein solution really.
The file-size gain isn't as big as I expected and if I'd turn the png's into webp files the difference would be virtually almost erased. that'd be good, but I think I'll hold off on doing that just yet.
I tested the scenes with higher res sprites on a 14 year old pc. It didn't have onboard graphics acceleration, but since I'm the final resting place for my family's old hardware I had a super old graphics card lying around. No surprises there! My ability to throw out things which still work is pretty much non existent. I'm not a hoarder, but could be considered the missing link between that and normal folks.
Anyway, the old pc had no problems pushing the larger amount of pixels across the screen and the scenes didn't show any sluggishness. Oddly enough it was only the menu's with a lot of menu entries when it did become sluggish.
So in theory I could change everything once cbob sends me the build for an internal test. Most of the scenes were surprisingly easy to update on my testbed so it shouldn't take me too long since most of the legwork has already been done. That doesn't mean I will.
I'm currently thinking of maybe just doing one scene and see how it works out in the real world. If it causes problems I can easily undo it and if the results are good I can change it all later for the entirety of book 4's love route.
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As it often does, one thing leads to another and while I was working on increasing the resolution of the sprites I started noticing our pretty "classic" aspect ratio of 4:3 more and more.
When we started working on FET I still had one of those older 4:3 screens so it felt like a completely natural and fine aspect ratio at the time. 4:3 was fine and still is. But... as you might remember I also started refactoring FET a while ago. Let's call it my pet project. It's something which I do on the side whenever I feel I have time.
Refactoring is a fancy name for me rewriting scripts in a better way. I'm making them smaller and also easier to read/understand. I started doing that because I wanted FET to load faster, but the rewriting is wreaking havoc among savegames so I don't want to add the changes to our actual releases. No yet anyway. It's more something for the far future... like the extended version of FET or something.
And since I'm already doing all of that... why not update the aspect ratio as well? The answer.. ...because it's a lot of extra work. We hard coded several aspects of FET to only work in the current ratio, but I'm stubborn if nothing else and now that I've managed to put all(or most) of the files we're using into proper folders(which wasn't as easy as it might sound) I've been rewriting book 1 and am trying to see if changing the aspect ratio can be part of that. Not the dialogue, (although I might add a tidbit here and there), just the script structure.
So far I've managed to bring down book 1's script size from about 4 Mb to 3 Mb. Book 1 is by far the smallest among the books so that's not nearly as impactful as it might seem. Still, it's progress.
It's going very slowly. At the start of creating FET, Mr. words brute forced his way through problems in a way which is almost beautiful in it's disregard for efficiency. I'm perfectly serious about that. Trying to figure out what his older scripts are doing can be difficult by itself, but he actually had to write them from scratch and keep older save games into account. I can just fuck around in the scripts with zero regard for any of that and at my own leisure since it's just something on the side for the far future.
It's also going very slowly because it's the kind of stuff I only do when work on in my spare time or when normal builds have slowed down for whatever reason. Despite this hopscotch way of working , I derive a weird sort of satisfaction out of it. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And FET has certainly become an elephant size-wise Ps. if I had suspected things would take this long with the normal build updates I would've chosen to spend my time differently.
Oh and finally because I am marty and not mr words (despite the deluge of words I just put you through...) here's a picture! A version with chibi Toph can be found in the attachments.
And that' s it. Just a bit of background information on what I've been doing and how I see the future. Once cbob sends me the new build I'll jump into action, testing and updating some of the images as quickly as I can, but just realize cbob's sense of time and what he can do within it is very skewed. I don't think we'll be needing our "hassle sticks" (see mr words earlier post) , but until I can get down and dirty with what he'll send me it's anyone's guess really.
- Oct 22, 2018
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oh my god someone really took their time writing this haha... I freaking love it... also if cbob was making the exact same EVERYTHING IS OK FACE the patreons might end dying from laughter , well atleast they're talking about the current status of the update.. also tnx for sharing this message here..
I wish he added more scenes to book 1 since Katara is the best girl .
- Oct 12, 2017
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oh, good! refactoring!
it may not sound hard, but... it really is.
if as marty said cbob had not much idea of what he was doing, chances are high that was a big bob of messed-up spaghetti in code form. that makes it work, but chances are it does much slower and heavier than it should, and much more prone to errors.
and if cbob didn't put many comments to figure out what he is doing later, or someone else... which he almost definitivelly did not, as most programmers rarely do either...
marty will have to find a starting point and go backwards and forwards to find out what it is supposed to do and where it is used, all to figure out what to cut anc change to make it better (with the chance of needing to cut a chunk out and writing a new, better version)
and that is not even taking in account personal coding. people code differently, and as you progress you code differently than what you used to code. and sometimes the change is enough to give you a headache while trying to see what the code does even when it is done well (something we already covered this one very likely was not)
as marty said, this will be a gigantic work. but it may also become a good foundation for the future, or at least give him good experience for later projects.
...
am I the only one that has to resist the urge to make back to the future references when talking about marty?
it may not sound hard, but... it really is.
if as marty said cbob had not much idea of what he was doing, chances are high that was a big bob of messed-up spaghetti in code form. that makes it work, but chances are it does much slower and heavier than it should, and much more prone to errors.
and if cbob didn't put many comments to figure out what he is doing later, or someone else... which he almost definitivelly did not, as most programmers rarely do either...
marty will have to find a starting point and go backwards and forwards to find out what it is supposed to do and where it is used, all to figure out what to cut anc change to make it better (with the chance of needing to cut a chunk out and writing a new, better version)
and that is not even taking in account personal coding. people code differently, and as you progress you code differently than what you used to code. and sometimes the change is enough to give you a headache while trying to see what the code does even when it is done well (something we already covered this one very likely was not)
as marty said, this will be a gigantic work. but it may also become a good foundation for the future, or at least give him good experience for later projects.
...
am I the only one that has to resist the urge to make back to the future references when talking about marty?
- May 30, 2020
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I remain a forever loyal simp to Mity. I will wait as long as I need to. How long will it be? I don't truly care. Perfection takes time, however much time is irrelevant, for everything presceeding this has been nothing short of a life changing experience for me.
- Apr 20, 2020
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I wouldnt mind if the story would continue with the artists writing and i would definetly PREFER if he was in charge of designing mini games and puzzles. Since i played the halloween sidestory (wich was made only by the artist) i lost all believe that theres anything about the current writer/coder that i would miss
I love this endeavor. I REALLY don't mind waiting for quality. If a writer has nonsense around them, then they need time to deal with it. Those who are upset by how much this is making are fools. Each person who pays for it can always opt out. Vote with your wallet and leave it be.
Wishing the team all the best. Looking forward to the full release (hopefully with some gallery-work included).
Wishing the team all the best. Looking forward to the full release (hopefully with some gallery-work included).
- Apr 20, 2020
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Some of the content in the latest books feels stretched and bloated with unnecessary grindy mini games that offer nothing else then wasting your time. And its only done to increase the time you need to play to reach scenes so the book isnt over in an hour .
The halloween sidestory was much better in those regards everything involved simple puzzles that encouraged exploring everything and it was overall enjoyable to find all the dialogue
The halloween sidestory was much better in those regards everything involved simple puzzles that encouraged exploring everything and it was overall enjoyable to find all the dialogue