Ren'Py Abandoned Lab Rats 2 [v0.51.1] [Vren]

[boblicticious]

if you look at it closely, LR2 uses a kissakea style system of modular character building. i dont know about the animations, but theyre a memory hole anyway and people are advised to turn them off.
basicaly what it does is displaying everything like a lasagna, layer by layer on top of each other. at least thats what it is, else thats going to be a lot of different permutations that are in those folders. anyway, if im right it should be easy to replace the modules.

Right, but the tricky part is creating assets that grow/shrink with the characters themselves. Honey select has this built in. You change the character, it adjusts the clothing. But unless you are building this game as an extension off honey select (which honestly would be freaking awesome), the individual pieces would still need to be rendered individually.

I gather from posts on patreon that he uses a script to render out the assets when new physical attributes/clothing items/poses are created. I don't think such a script could very easily be set up to pull and render those pieces from honey select automatically for all your planned combinations. I don't know how many pieces the individual assets add up to, but there are 3 body sizes, 10 or more breast sizes, and at least 50 pieces of clothing. Even if you are grabbing everything individually and not rendering every combination you still need 30 versions of each piece of clothing for each pose... for just one pose that's manually rendering and grabbing 1750 images for the assets. Multiply that by say 7 poses (there may be more in the game), and you're over 10,000. That's just the clothes, not the bodies or their attributes like hair and eyes and such.

The layered approach is also why the models have their issues... clipping with clothing, seams on body parts, etc... That's part of why the honey select models look so good... they aren't built out of pieces but are rendered from a proprietary whole system which is pretty much 100% the focus of the software. Cause lets face it, honey select looks great, but you can tell that all the effort was put into the character creator and poser... the gameplay is nonexistent.

You can bet Vren knows that the models for this game don't look as nice as they did for LR1. He chose them for their flexibility and their applicability to his plan for this game. He wasn't trying to make a sexier game... he was just trying to make it more of a game than a VN.

 

[boblicticious]

Hmm, that's unfortunate. It would have been nice if we did not have to sacrifice aesthetics for function.
So this is the best we're going to get? Not even a little bit more variation in the randomly generated women? Or unique faces for the main girls?

Never say never I suppose. But I would personally be surprised if it changes.

A new software that lets you create characters with support for scripted rendering with clothing could change that though.

 

[PoyntFury]

Pregnancy has *ARRIVED*

 

[tyuiasdf]

I'm sure it allows for greater customization, but wow. The models are way uglier.

I would argue that it’s also because there isn’t quite enough variety in their appearance for each character to look like her own person. Rather

Hmm, that's unfortunate. It would have been nice if we did not have to sacrifice aesthetics for function.
So this is the best we're going to get? Not even a little bit more variation in the randomly generated women? Or unique faces for the main girls?

Ultimately, I think that this is the problem - despite what I’m sure was a ton of work, there just isn’t quite enough variety in the current designs to offset the reduction in aesthetic appeal.

Right now it doesn’t feel like infinite variety. It feels like the same few characters over and over again. And there are even duplicates of the unique characters in the crowd.

I feel like it’s the same thing with the dialogue. There are many different personalities, but they never quite feel different enough. And it seems like you hear the same dialogue over and over if you stick with the same girl.

I often wonder how much better it would be if 1 month was spent on a dedicated storyline rather than something like the taboo system which was a lot of work for only a handful of lines of dialogue because it has to be implemented systematically.

I’m hoping the next update focuses on more physical variety or actually implementing more story elements for special characters.

 

[RedPyrate]

This game was not good in the beginning, and you are still having all this dialogue about what is not right with it.
I'm amazed people still have any interest in this game, or that Vren is still trying to make it right . . .
RED

 

[boblicticious]

This game was not good in the beginning, and you are still having all this dialogue about what is not right with it.
I'm amazed people still have any interest in this game, or that Vren is still trying to make it right . . .
RED

He's not making it for the people who don't like the concept. Those of us who do like the concept are on board.

 

[Evil13]

Aren't we still in that week of playtesting that Vren always does before releasing the newest version properly?

 

[masterpyromancer]

Man its finally here. I've been waiting for this. I gotta say I like the direction lab rats 2 is going. It may not use honey select models, but his style has grown on me.

 

[karollol]

Aren't we still in that week of playtesting that Vren always does before releasing the newest version properly?

Yes, this is the playtest version.

 

[Heml0ck]

Does anyone know if the current female character models are just placeholders until Vren can finalize their designs? Or does Vren actually plan on keeping these hideous things?
I do hope someone makes a mod if this is what Vren intends to give us.

If you download and install the Mod in the OP it allows you to edit any character in the game, including face & hair, their names, stats and everything else. I'm surprised people miss this or don't give it a try.

I agree, there are faces and hair-styles that should simply be removed from the game (if you mod your own game files, this can happen today). I happen to know which assets are the ugliest and I comment them out of the main script.rpy file.

 

[Llamamann]

this question is for version 28.1:

i am on a mac, playing the pc version in renpy,
animations are disabled
blue boxes are around each character (threesome scenes are just two blue boxes smashin)

this was not an issue for me in version 27. does anyone have any insight for me? is this because the pc version played on a mac?

thanks!

 

[legendppk]

Hey guys have been lurking and following this game for like 4 years (didn't bother making an account here until recently, and didn't bother posting until like a week ago). I haven't downloaded this game for a long time. Are the ladies prettier now? Or are the same assets still being used? The front page still has the same screen shots as before.

 

[Chronos92]

you cant give sneak serums to randoms anymore?

 

[Carmen Sandiego]

Does anyone know if the current female character models are just placeholders until Vren can finalize their designs? Or does Vren actually plan on keeping these hideous things?
I do hope someone makes a mod if this is what Vren intends to give us. The new designs look nothing like the old ones and the original Honey Select designs were actually not bad at all. As Paranoiaaaaa put it, now all the women the like same man wearing different wigs.

I'm not the dev of this game so I can't say for sure but I'm pretty sure at some point in time Vren will update the characters with better looking Daz models. I mean the models are the easiest, or one of the easiest, thing/s in this game to change. I would also like Vren to focus on this a bit but he's clearly decided to flush out the mechanics before beautifying the game. I wouldn't expect an update in the models until the game is nearing completion, which in all honesty should be soon.

.29 added pregnancy, so how many more mechanics/concepts can their be? Maybe a few more aspects of the business to handle, maybe a few more for relationships; maybe. But I wouldn't be all that surprised if Vren didn't focus on optimization/adding content soon. At least, based on the last game, I can't imagine there being too many more mechanics that need to be added. *Shrugs* Time will tell.

 

[Zellio]

Mac update plz?

 

[Evangelion-01]

I'm not the dev of this game so I can't say for sure but I'm pretty sure at some point in time Vren will update the characters with better looking Daz models. I mean the models are the easiest, or one of the easiest, thing/s in this game to change. I would also like Vren to focus on this a bit but he's clearly decided to flush out the mechanics before beautifying the game. I wouldn't expect an update in the models until the game is nearing completion, which in all honesty should be soon.

.29 added pregnancy, so how many more mechanics/concepts can their be? Maybe a few more aspects of the business to handle, maybe a few more for relationships; maybe. But I wouldn't be all that surprised if Vren didn't focus on optimization/adding content soon. At least, based on the last game, I can't imagine there being too many more mechanics that need to be added. *Shrugs* Time will tell.

Well he could always add more Serums with altering effects in regards to a persons character or appearance for example.
I think there are plenty of option that could change the gameplay up a bit including certain Events for the company or simply walking the city... and considering the scope that the "world" of LR grew in Part 2 there is no telling if it wasn't groweing some more... maybe add ea travel option to get European, Asian, African, etc. employees for more variety aswell

 

[Heml0ck]

this question is for version 28.1:

i am on a mac, playing the pc version in renpy,
animations are disabled
blue boxes are around each character (threesome scenes are just two blue boxes smashin)

I'm not sure what causes that bug, but you could try text editing the script.rpy file and making sure:
default persistent.vren_animation = False

If that is false then when the code gets to this line:

if not persistent.vren_animation:
background_fill = None

There should be no background fill box...

 

[Llamamann]

I'm not sure what causes that bug, but you could try text editing the script.rpy file and making sure:
default persistent.vren_animation = False

If that is false then when the code gets to this line:

if not persistent.vren_animation:
background_fill = None

There should be no background fill box...

i will definitely try that, thank you!

 

[Inquisidor]

walkthrough?

 

[Rubix]

how to make the mother be your girlfriend?
when i do that, she says that she would like to, but its not possible, that also goes for lilly and the rest