- May 1, 2020
- 879
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I have two programming diplomas and I've taken the PMP course. I've also created a mod that makes changes to exactly 25% of script files, and I've read almost every line of code in the game. What D2K said was quite reasonable. I'll go point by point on why what you said isn't.
1 and 2. No, the code is not as bad as people seem to think. As I've said many times, there are two different sets of code in the game: "the old way" and "the new way". The prime example of this is that the game didn't originally use overlays, so there had to be an image for each combination of facial expression, arms, and clothing. These were numbered, rather than given descriptive names. It makes posing a pain in the ass. You have to look through the images and pick out the right image so that you can write something like:
show player 63
player_name "Hi there!"
show player 62
In this example, 63 is a talking image, and 62 is the equivalent when not talking. With the new overlay system, you write out what body, arms, face, dick, etc., overlays you want, and they remain in effect until you specify something else. The game automatically shows the "talk" version of the active face overlay when the character is talking, and reverts to the non-talk version when they aren't. The above becomes something like:
anon b_naked a_shrug f_sexy of_blush od_dick4 "Hi there!"
This approach massively speeds up posing and reduces code size. It also massively reduces the size of images. Instead of hundreds of ~100 KB images of the character with every possible combination of face, arms, clothes, etc., you have a small number of 100 KB body images, and then a few dozen ~10 KB face images, some ~20 KB arm images, etc. You end up with less files, all of which are smaller.
Many of the older characters now have a base image directory and a /layered_image directory. The layered images cover all of the arms, faces, etc., for the character. That is to say, most of the image work has already been done. To get rid of the old images, someone has to go through each code file that uses the old system and convert it to use the new system. I try not to do that in my mod, but when I add significant content, sometimes it's the right choice to speed up posing. If I was going to convert all of that code, I would create a chart that would indicate the overlay equivalent for each of the old-style images so that it would be a quick lookup to make each change. There are only a few hundred script files that need to be converted. It's boring work but, conservatively, it would only take about a man-hour per script. One person could do the work in a few months, or the work could be divided between multiple people.
3. No, absolutely not! Only the backgrounds need to be converted from 4:3 to 16:9. That's 1978 images. Most of those images are day, day_blur, night, and night_blur variants. So, something like 500 images need to be widened, and then you make a copy that applies the blur filter, one that reduces the brightness, and one that reduces the brightness and applies the blur filter. All characters and objects are high resolution images on DC's end that have been downscaled to 1024x768. They need to be re-downscaled to 1920x1080. That's roughly 17,000 images, and you could conservatively convert three or four per minute. A big, boring job, to be sure. Dozens of man hours, so a few months for one person, or divide the work between multiple people.
4. Full agreement.
The ~500 backgrounds that needed to redrawn must have been a big job. I think DC was also updating the look of the characters as well, so that's even more work. Redoing the art must have been a monumental task. From what I've gleaned from this thread, the art has been done for some time. That is to say, DC's part is done. The code work that needs to be done will take hundreds of man-hours, but most of it can be divided between many workers, assuming that a good project manager assigns and reviews the work efficiently. There's still Hofstadter's Law. Everything will take longer than it looks like it should take. You fall behind schedule. If you have a fixed budget, there may be nothing you can do about it. If you have enough revenue to hire more people, or convert your part-time workers to full-time, then you can get back on schedule that way. It certainly looks like there's enough Patreon income to do that.
I'm as tired as anyone of hearing people complain about how long the Tech Update is taking. I'm also tired of people misrepresenting how much work it is. You're both right! It is a massive job, and it shouldn't have taken more than a year.
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