botc76

The Crawling Chaos, Bringer of Strange Joy
Donor
Oct 23, 2016
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What's this new engine gonna be?
Hoping for Renpy is probably too much, right?
 

Viatovic

Active Member
Sep 3, 2017
715
1,494
Ok, enough is enough.
I quit.

This has to be one of the most annoying games I've ever played.
Let's see... this game has been in development five months.
Just now we are ending with the introduction...
And, although the game has a cool premise and great renders... that's it.

This game is broken beyond repair.
It always opens to fullscreen, even when that's annoying as hell... and it never remembers it once you want to play again.
The engine is a nightmare.
Yeah, I have a potato pc from 2012 with a shitty graphic card, but I can run Dreams of Desire without a damn problem.
And this game, as cool as it is, doesn't measure to it.
So why? Why I should have to face this same problems month after month?
What offers this engine that Ren'Py doesn't?
Right now I was playing, well... suffering changing from render to render... and I had to save, just to relaunch the game and keep playing.
But I load and... surprise, surprise, the annoying bug of a random image frozen in place.
I'm searching Mom's room, but let's keep seeing Veronica's pussy because why the hell not.

So, this game has become a hassle.
I still gonna download the CG, because the game is beautiful... but that's it.
Shame.
My good wishes to the dev and his team.
 

El bacca Del Chew

Well-Known Member
Apr 3, 2017
1,813
4,604
What's this new engine gonna be?
Hoping for Renpy is probably too much, right?
It gonna be a full customize VNGINE, the coder is present here and will respond to it.

Ok, enough is enough.
I quit.
Come back around the 25th april

The engine is a nightmare.
A new one is coming, he had to deliver an update so..I can understand your frustation, i would have the same. Evzn if i don't have any probs from my side, i fully got you !!
 
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El bacca Del Chew

Well-Known Member
Apr 3, 2017
1,813
4,604
So why? Why I should have to face this same problems month after month?
What offers this engine that Ren'Py doesn't?
Check earlier in the thread, we're moving over timestamps to a new engine that I've been working on from scratch in Unity, the release date is set on the ~25th right now. There's a lot more info my other posts.
We have no idea as it will look likes, just the promises of the new coder/engine dev but till proofs of otherwise, let's give him the benefice of the doubt and hope for the best, shall we. :)
 

rave

Member
May 29, 2017
123
88
so... played the new update.

other than bj from gaz and repeating the 3rd day over and over i cant seem to find something new...
also the mom's pictures keep on appearing in trasitions
am i missing something here?
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
Modder
Game Developer
Sep 16, 2017
1,893
5,403
Ok, enough is enough.
I quit.

This has to be one of the most annoying games I've ever played.
Let's see... this game has been in development five months.
Just now we are ending with the introduction...
And, although the game has a cool premise and great renders... that's it.

This game is broken beyond repair.
It always opens to fullscreen, even when that's annoying as hell... and it never remembers it once you want to play again.
The engine is a nightmare.
Yeah, I have a potato pc from 2012 with a shitty graphic card, but I can run Dreams of Desire without a damn problem.
And this game, as cool as it is, doesn't measure to it.
So why? Why I should have to face this same problems month after month?
What offers this engine that Ren'Py doesn't?
Right now I was playing, well... suffering changing from render to render... and I had to save, just to relaunch the game and keep playing.
But I load and... surprise, surprise, the annoying bug of a random image frozen in place.
I'm searching Mom's room, but let's keep seeing Veronica's pussy because why the hell not.

So, this game has become a hassle.
I still gonna download the CG, because the game is beautiful... but that's it.
Shame.
My good wishes to the dev and his team.
While I share your frustration with the games stability on the previous platforms, as I am a fan and a player of the game myself before I was involved with the project, that's also why I decided to work with Motkeyz. You seem so frustrated like Motkeyz is not is not doing the best he can to realize the games full potential. You say that the game has been in development for 5 months, but this is not that simple. Maybe the project has been active for 5 months but it has suffered massive setbacks. While they have been working for MONTHS on the renders and the story which passes on through the engines, an immense amount of work is put in switching platforms to accommodate all the feedback from the players. Many games hit the grave around this time, just look at all the abandoned stuff out there. The fans around the world that stay engaged with this project has been the driving force to continue.

What was Motkeyz supposed to do? The reality is that most artists do not have a development background but wanted to make a game, this is what it's about. They are getting great feedback and support from the community as well.

Motkeyz reached the point of frustration to almost give up, because all the hard work put into each platform change, has caused new other problems. The renders are absolutely amazing, but the engines have been crap, and not only that, but every engine out there today requires tons of time to set up to get it the way you want, and if you tweak anything and don't have an extensive development background you end up with tons of new bugs and instability.

I can tell you this, the project is going stronger than it ever has. It is harsh to put this negativity on the project after everything that has been going on especially in the last month. Motkeyz has also communicated extensively that he is doing everything to ensure quality, it's not like he continued with the first platform and ignored everyone comments.

I was approached by Motkeyz a little bit over a month ago, maybe a week before the announcement on our collaboration, to join on this project and to make sure that the game will reach its full potential, and that's what I'm doing. I set a realistic deadline for getting the entire game re-done from scratch within 2 months, and already now halfway through the time, the development is 95% done and stable. Content Migration and the CG album are the only two major tasks right now, out of more than 40. I'm not simply going to say that I will release this earlier at this point even if we already know that this update today/yesterday is going to be sub-par platform wise.

This is not any of ours full-time jobs, but we're spending more than full-time of time to deliver all of this, because we love the project.

I have been working my ass of for a month so far, using all my spare time when not sleeping or working my dayjob, and I can't show any of it now because we are doing polishing work as we go.

I have my name on this, and my own product VNGINE, if this is bad it's not just sad for this project, but it's my own reputation on the line which I do care a lot about.

ON VNGINE Day 1:
1. The engine will be optimized as far as possible for the first launch, and will continuously be improved as we go.
2. There will be no random freezes, if there are any they are not random, but related to computer performance.
3. We are aiming at making Timestamps more sandboxy, which means we allow more free navigation and doing things in your order. But we can't do much with that yet today, as it requires more content that we have planned in the future and a lot of time we will invest after we've launched on the new engine. Right now you will see significant improvements in room navigation for example.
4. We're not putting any DRM on the game, like some others, because of greed.
5. I've done extensive research on other games when it comes to features, things that need improvement, stability, and I am doing everything possible to avoid anything out there.
6. We will not have random "script errors" like in renpy, where your shit just crashes.
7. We will not trigger "blue screen" like doing in Unity, which means that you are pointing to something that doesnt exist.
8. I will do extensive quality control on the game, before releases and has set at least 1 week of time for this in every release cycle.
9. The Engine is faster.
10. The engine has a much more comprehensive save and load mechanic under the hood.
11. You will be able to reverse through all your choices in the game, even if you forgot to save before it.
12. All the saves are sorted by latest save date, all saves have screenshots as well, like seen in other engines.
13. Save files are easy to export and import.
14. Save files persist through game versions, so you will not lose your progress just because we updated the game.
15. The game will run on any resolution right now but capped at 1080p for best results, since the renders are 1080p. This means if you go lower resolution, it will scale down the game and you won't get a squashed or misaligned game.
16. The platform is completely flexible in development, as I know it inside and out, and do not rely on any third party support. Noone will break the platform except for me, I don't depend on any other library, asset or person.
17. Game will be uploaded more stable and swiftly using a 100up fiber connection.
18. The only limit in game functionality comes from my own creativity, if I cannot solve something I find out, and we haven't seen anything we couldn't do that made sense.

To point at many things done from my trello list:
Engine Core:
* New character naming system
* Inventory System, with beautiful UI and on-hover tooltips.
* Advanced save and load functionality (Not game version dependent)
* Reversing through all your choices.
* Advanced Dialogue Parser
* Money system
* Own asset container file for all our assets, to prevent Unity compiled game size to be too big.
* Very gorgeous and user friendly Save & Load interface.
* Advanced game options such as dialogue text scaling, typewriter effect, typewriter speed.
* Unity remembers your last game settings such as resolution / windowed mode
* More sound channels, that will be correctly used. SFX, Ambience, Music
Timestamps core
* Scripted intro support
* Room navigation
* Special item triggers in rooms.
* UI Special effects, screen shakes, zoom effects, slide effects.
* New cursors, also chaging cursors depending on interraction type, for example when navigating.

Anyways, It's alright if you don't feel like playing this current game version, I totally understand that. This is for the fans that we didn't want to miss out on a release-cycle of renders. We already know the engine sucks, and most people do.

Stick around, or don't, but In one month from now the game will be something that you never thought was possible in this short time of development. Look at a game like glamour, how long did he work on that, and he can't even get the basics over from his previous game, now that's what I consider unacceptable, with an insane amount of funds for what he is doing, he rather work on DRM than to deliver something actually nice for the fans.

Glad you enjoy the renders, and I hope you will love the new Timestamps 0.0.1 on VNGINE in one month from now. See you then!

End Update
/A
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
Modder
Game Developer
Sep 16, 2017
1,893
5,403
Also in Two weeks we're planning on starting to release screenshots and teasers for the new release, and at that point we should be working mainly just on quality assurance.
 

NatSlayer

Active Member
Jan 9, 2018
525
153
Nobody else happens to be bugeado in the images of the 2 doors
it does not matter the scene put is stuck scene 2 doors of the house
 

gue5t

Active Member
Sep 11, 2016
594
1,029
...
4. We're not putting any DRM on the game, like some others, because of greed.
6. We will not have random "script errors" like in renpy, where your shit just crashes.
7. We will not trigger "blue screen" like doing in Unity, which means that you are pointing to something that doesnt exist.
14. Save files persist through game versions, so you will not lose your progress just because we updated the game.
...
* Own asset container file for all our assets, to prevent Unity compiled game size to be too big.
* Unity remembers your last game settings such as resolution / windowed mode
...
No offenc but form what I've read here there are obvious contradictions in you're statements ...
Plus the problems with saves are not in the engine but from the lazy developers not wiling to implement save updating of variables when loading a save from previous version of the game.

P.S. While we are on the subject of saves can you share you're plans on saves location and user choice on the matter? For example keeping them in the user profile vs in the game directory vs letting the user chose?

[EDIT]
While we are on the subject could you make clear you're engine stance on the telemetry and data collection subject and compliance with GDPR?
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
Modder
Game Developer
Sep 16, 2017
1,893
5,403
No offenc but form what I've read here there are obvious contradictions in you're statements ...
Plus the problems with saves are not in the engine but from the lazy developers not wiling to implement save updating of variables when loading a save from previous version of the game.

P.S. While we are on the subject of saves can you share you're plans on saves location and user choice on the matter? For example keeping them in the user profile vs in the game directory vs letting the user chose?
Right now I have kept the save files in the game directory under /saves/ however, I could of course have them stored in the document folder or in application data, so that you don't have to copy/paste it every time you download a new version. People seem to have different preferences on this. I could potentially have both implemented, so its a choice of the player, or, simply just have save files in two directories at the same time, why not. Thanks for that suggestion.

The unity remembers your last game settings, is not a matter of implementation really, things as resolution and windowed mode is stored somewhere in the registry i believe, as it's related to the core features of unity. Even if you don't have anything in the unity game, just a window, and close it, it will remember the size for next time, unless a developer forcefully changes the resolution when you start the game.

For example, in glamour a lot of people got a "blue screen bug" , which basically means that the developer didn't check his code, and sent the player somewhere he didn't develop, the blue screen just means there's nothing there, if there's nothing there default color is blue in unity.

The asset container doesn't qualify as DRM is not the same thing as open source or open assets. Since the game is dependent on the integrity of this file structure, modding it or taking it apart will break the game in some way. You can see the same thing in some DRM free games that have *.pak files or similar, they are just custom container. DRM would impose writing protection or protection from playing the game without a licence. You could still dump all the artwork from the memory, so it's not like we're trying to stop that.
 
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oopsdrop

Member
Jun 30, 2017
103
739
Added to OP, @Benjy mind sharing how you did it?
Basically, I made a small nodeJS script that does a XOR on every file in the resources dir.

The code:
JavaScript:
const fs = require('fs')
const path = require('path')

const listSync = (dir) =>
  fs.readdirSync(dir)
    .reduce((files, file) =>
      fs.statSync(path.join(dir, file)).isDirectory() ?
        files.concat(listSync(path.join(dir, file))) :
        files.concat(path.join(dir, file)),
      [])

const files = listSync(path.join(__dirname, 'resources', 'Graphics'))

// there is a DataPreparer.generateKey() in ENGINE.js
// but I couldn't figure the key from there,
// nor enable Chrome's debugger so...
// thx https://wiremask.eu/tools/xor-cracker/
const key = Buffer.from([10, 43, 54, 111, 11])
const keyB = new Uint8Array(key)

files.forEach(file => {
  const newFileName = file.replace(path.join(__dirname, 'resources', 'Graphics', '/'), '').replace(/\\/g, '_')

  fs.readFile(file, function(err, data) {
    if (err) throw err

    let dataB = new Uint8Array(data.buffer)
  
    // from DataPreparer.prepare (ENGINE.js)
    for (let i = j = 0, ref = dataB.length; 0 <= ref ? j < ref : j > ref; i = 0 <= ref ? ++j : --j) {
      dataB[i] = dataB[i] ^ keyB[i % keyB.length]
    }

    fs.writeFileSync(path.join(__dirname, 'cg', newFileName), data)
  })
})
 

Aesouh

Master Chief VNGineer
Modder
Game Developer
Sep 16, 2017
1,893
5,403
While we are on the subject could you make clear you're engine stance on the telemetry and data collection subject and compliance with GDPR?
It's funny you should ask because I'm a privacy specialist as a part of one of my roles, so I'm very faimilar with GDPR.

To simply put, we have no personal data whatsoever so we're not affected. The client doesn't collect any statistics either. For patreon its their problem ,for this forum, thats also the admins problems, since IP adresses also count as personal identifiable data.
 
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gue5t

Active Member
Sep 11, 2016
594
1,029
And what about the data collected by Unity? Also if you are working in this field you should be aware that you must acquire explicit user permission before collecting any data that might be used later on to identify the user and give him/her the option to see the collected data and request it's deletion ...
 
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