Machete

Engaged Member
Apr 7, 2020
3,106
5,750
657
I don’t like to talk about other games on this thread but if you like this one you will really enjoy shadow of ambition
I started to play it in its early releases, and indeed it was good, but i find kinetic novels a bit pointless. No idea if in the meantime they introduced choices.
 

MrPiturd

Newbie
Jun 25, 2017
47
85
28
The 1080p efforts are currently on pausebecause I nuked the whole game repo last time I tried downscaling the images with a script (because fuck no I'm not doing a percentage-based image resize for 2000+ images by hand), but thank god I backed it up.
So yeah the downscale effort will continue when I have this episode wrapped up.
Is it his sense of humour? I mean - my hamster could do it without nuking any repository.

SecureDesktop_AvUJyQ0ljp.jpg
 

AbyssGames

Developer of "Shadows Of Ambition"
Game Developer
Jan 1, 2018
558
3,864
403
Is it his sense of humour? I mean - my hamster could do it without nuking any repository.

View attachment 5296408
Resizing the images isn't the issue, it's redoing the whole transformation code in RenPy that he uses to make images appear on the screen in certain ways. He made it for his current resolution, with 1080p, all that code is wrong and the images would appear off-screen or not where they're meant to.
 

BananaCreamGames

Moonripple Lake dev
Game Developer
Apr 27, 2024
235
2,429
329
Resizing the images isn't the issue, it's redoing the whole transformation code in RenPy that he uses to make images appear on the screen in certain ways. He made it for his current resolution, with 1080p, all that code is wrong and the images would appear off-screen or not where they're meant to.
I'm glad someone understands.
I've been fixing the margins for the past week and I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Is it his sense of humour? I mean - my hamster could do it without nuking any repository.
View attachment 5296408
I don't know that program, but it looks like it scales everything to a hard-coded resolution (1920x1080). My images arent all of the same ratio or scale so making them all the same resolution would make things even worse.
Anyway after my own script failing to convert the images as needed, someone recommended imagemagick. That did it in a minute or so, using one command, so downscaling the images was trivial.

I also had to re-do all the portals that you click when you move around, all the discoverable polariod positions in freeroam, phone pop-ups, all the movement transforms, main menu positioning, image defines...

With how ren'py functions and how I set up free roam, changes to portal positions aren't immediately reflected when I reload new code, I have to load before free-roam, then click through to the place that I'm working on... which takes even more time to do everything.
I think it's not hard to imagine how excrutiatingly repetitive it is fine-tuning a portal to sit just right.
And then you have to deal with your own old spaghetti code on top of that.
It's an absolute pain in the ass.

224 offsets to fix in just one file from ep5
1759209141408.png
1759209048683.png
There are thousands of x and y offsets that I had to manually fix throughout the game.

Needless to say I would have never taken this on if there weren't dozens of people complaining about performance :)
 

Digitool

Newbie
May 1, 2021
34
58
87
I'm glad someone understands.
I've been fixing the margins for the past week and I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
...

There are thousands of x and y offsets that I had to manually fix throughout the game.

Needless to say I would have never taken this on if there weren't dozens of people complaining about performance :)
That is a crap load of extra work BCG and has clearly hit the development time.
But, it is appreciated!
 

DressedToThrill

Active Member
Jun 30, 2024
677
1,398
229
Needless to say I would have never taken this on if there weren't dozens of people complaining about performance :)
The poors are standing in the way of me receiving my goon content more quickly! I will remember this! :mad:

To them I say: Go to work, no time for jerk! :ROFLMAO:

I'm just kidding, of course! I would never discourage a developer from optimizing their software. That's just good practise. (But I do really look forward to the next release (and mine). I kind of play it for the story! And the perverted stuff...)
 

BananaCreamGames

Moonripple Lake dev
Game Developer
Apr 27, 2024
235
2,429
329
The poors are standing in the way of me receiving my goon content more quickly! I will remember this! :mad:

To them I say: Go to work, no time for jerk! :ROFLMAO:

I'm just kidding, of course! I would never discourage a developer from optimizing their software. That's just good practise. (But I do really look forward to the next release (and mine). I kind of play it for the story! And the perverted stuff...)
1759379836648.png
This is why optimizing for low-spec devices is key :D Most of today's 'gamers' are on phones.
Us PC people are dying out.
 

idkmanerally

Member
May 2, 2023
343
1,425
276
View attachment 5303139
This is why optimizing for low-spec devices is key :D Most of today's 'gamers' are on phones.
Us PC people are dying out.
um... no. phones have gotten better at running games, and everyone has phones, so the percentages have shifted toward phones. but PC gaming is also exploding - in 2015 the average number of players playing on steam was around 8 million concurrent, these days its over 35 million.
 

BananaCreamGames

Moonripple Lake dev
Game Developer
Apr 27, 2024
235
2,429
329
um... no. phones have gotten better at running games, and everyone has phones, so the percentages have shifted toward phones. but PC gaming is also exploding - in 2015 the average number of players playing on steam was around 8 million concurrent, these days its over 35 million.
Yeah you're quoting steam numbers. Steam might have grown 4x in the last decade, not PC gaming.
And who's buying physical copies these days? It was a very different story in 2010-2015.
It's only natural that a digital game distribution platform like Steam's user base grew (of course Steam's quality also helped).

Talking numbers...
2015 -> 1.9bil mobile vs 1.1bil pc gamers.
2025 -> 3.2 bil mobile vs 1.8 bil pc gamers.
For every 1 new pc gamer in the past decade, there were 2 new mobile gamers.

Also, most mobile gamers don't play on PC, while a lot of PC gamers do.
That tells you all you need know to realize that mobile will stay ahead, despite being more saturated.

Pc gamers are perhaps not dying out as I joked, but my main point stands, phones dominate :)
 
4.80 star(s) 98 Votes