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x
May 27, 2017
711
3,034
"An artist is their own worst critic", this idiom couldn't ring more true for this VN. This was already one of the best looking VNs; lighting, posing, backgrounds, models, they were all great. I'm not sure a remake or engine change was ever needed in the first place. But, ultimately this is the dev's work and passion, so if they find it lacking or needing changes, we can only choose to continue being on the ride, or disembark and find a new project to be invested in.
 

Maviarab

Dark Lord of the Coffee
Donor
Jul 12, 2020
10,622
24,918
I still enjoy this...but godamn is the MC one pushy bastard that has zero respects for a woman's boundaries (when you choose to push, I mean there's pushing and coercing lol). Still a fun VN with an interesting story though, model changes don't actually bother me that much. Play it or don't, Reddit threads discussing it...jfc...give me a break, get over yourselves.
 
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Reactions: holaje12

cxx

Message Maestro
Nov 14, 2017
66,793
33,654
Hey, am I remembering wrong? Didn't the developer say that the new episode would be released at the end of the summer? It's snowing here bro... Where is the new episode?...
it's still summer somewhere. :p every1 should know that reference.

anyways not much news about progress.
 

De_pone

Newbie
Oct 11, 2020
82
120
If the Models still look wonky for the final update it's gonna suck. I hope he plans to go back over them after settling in with the new Engine.
 

K18

Well-Known Member
Apr 19, 2018
1,035
7,307
SeptDevUpdate1.jpg

Ugh, lighting. The bane of my development existence. That and environments got a lot of attention over the last few weeks. It's been a wild ride, and, at times, I was questioning why I decided to take the plunge into UE.

Lighting
This is always a struggle. Daz Studio, my old rendering software, has its own limitations with a lot of noise at low lighting conditions. For Unreal Engine, you've got multiple options for lighting your scene, apart from the "physical" lights themselves. Lumen, ray tracing, etc. are all options. I've gone the Lumen route, but it was this past month where I decided that I needed to get my lighting fixed up. Early previews were alright, but not looking as nice as things did before. These are the times I really love how quickly Unreal Engine can spit out renders, and this was never more needed then since I had to do a lot of testing to get the right balance.

I've now got different lighting sets that I just need to align and position with my character(s) that I want to light. There are dark and dramatic Rembrandt, high key, low key, loop, and many more options. This allows me to quickly setup the lighting I need for a scene and just make small adjustments to get it correct. I also corrected some render settings in UE that were causing abnormally dark shadows.

And this is another area where UE shines. Not only do I have these presets, but I've set it up with blueprints so that I can control most of the light settings from a single list of options. I can even key these settings in my animation timeline to change them. Cannot get better than that for easy setup and adjustments.

Is my lighting perfect? Nope, but it meets my personal tastes and consistently makes the characters look good. That's all I need. Oh, and being able to correct it easily when it gets wonky.


Environments
Taking my old environments into Unreal Engine proved to be very problematic, especially since I'm using Lumen lighting. Lumen hates flat planes, which is how most walls, floors, and ceilings are done in Daz Studio (and in a lot of other software too). If you use flat planes, Lumen exhibits color bleed. Let's say you have a red wall. Light in 3D and the natural world bounces around. So it will pick up some of that red and project it into your scene. That isn't a problem. But with color bleed, that effect is exaggerated significantly. You'll get characters glowing red in that scenario. Not good.

What I ended up doing for Chapter 11, since I don't need all the environments I've used so far, is use native Unreal Engine environments for nearly everything. A lot of these look a lot closer to how I wanted the game to look anyway (but lacked the assets and, at the time, a lot of the knowledge to customize). The few that are not UE native, got a nice little trip over to Blender to extrude these flat planes and create depth. That fixed those color bleed issues, and didn't affect performance at all.

More environment work is ahead after Chapter 11, but I've got a good system, and I'm very pleased with the new results.



Other than that, it has been character fixes, creating a few new characters I need for Chapter 11, and getting comfortable with the animation system in Unreal Engine. There are a number of things that are now complete (or close enough that only minor adjustments will be needed). Renders and animation work for Chapter 11 are ongoing now, and the final big hurdle is one that is only going to be solved with experience: high quality, fluid animations.

We've got an estimated release date of this fall for Chapter 11. Sorry I cannot get more specific than that, but I'm working in new territory every day, and I've already had more than enough challenges to solve. The upshot of all this is that individual renders, instead of taking around 10-20 minutes each to render out like they did before (that does not include setup time), now take around a second. Animations, which could easily take a day in Daz for something around 10 seconds, are just a few minutes now. This production improvement is one of the big reasons I've invested in this months long process to make this change. Future things like variation in clothing, hairstyle, etc. for characters, pregnancy options, as well as just additional scenes, will now be relatively easy to implement.

We are just getting started on this, and I'm excited to continue to improve things for all of you as I get more comfortable in Unreal Engine. A final reminder that the game engine itself is not switching to Unreal Engine. If your PC (or Mac) could run To Be A King before, it can run it after. All of the rendering is still taking place on my machine, and packaged as still images or video sequences (for the animations). Your saves will work just fine too. Now, if you'll excuse me, I better get back to work.
 

Emma98

Newbie
May 22, 2020
41
94
View attachment 2932622

Ugh, lighting. The bane of my development existence. That and environments got a lot of attention over the last few weeks. It's been a wild ride, and, at times, I was questioning why I decided to take the plunge into UE.

Lighting
This is always a struggle. Daz Studio, my old rendering software, has its own limitations with a lot of noise at low lighting conditions. For Unreal Engine, you've got multiple options for lighting your scene, apart from the "physical" lights themselves. Lumen, ray tracing, etc. are all options. I've gone the Lumen route, but it was this past month where I decided that I needed to get my lighting fixed up. Early previews were alright, but not looking as nice as things did before. These are the times I really love how quickly Unreal Engine can spit out renders, and this was never more needed then since I had to do a lot of testing to get the right balance.

I've now got different lighting sets that I just need to align and position with my character(s) that I want to light. There are dark and dramatic Rembrandt, high key, low key, loop, and many more options. This allows me to quickly setup the lighting I need for a scene and just make small adjustments to get it correct. I also corrected some render settings in UE that were causing abnormally dark shadows.

And this is another area where UE shines. Not only do I have these presets, but I've set it up with blueprints so that I can control most of the light settings from a single list of options. I can even key these settings in my animation timeline to change them. Cannot get better than that for easy setup and adjustments.

Is my lighting perfect? Nope, but it meets my personal tastes and consistently makes the characters look good. That's all I need. Oh, and being able to correct it easily when it gets wonky.


Environments
Taking my old environments into Unreal Engine proved to be very problematic, especially since I'm using Lumen lighting. Lumen hates flat planes, which is how most walls, floors, and ceilings are done in Daz Studio (and in a lot of other software too). If you use flat planes, Lumen exhibits color bleed. Let's say you have a red wall. Light in 3D and the natural world bounces around. So it will pick up some of that red and project it into your scene. That isn't a problem. But with color bleed, that effect is exaggerated significantly. You'll get characters glowing red in that scenario. Not good.

What I ended up doing for Chapter 11, since I don't need all the environments I've used so far, is use native Unreal Engine environments for nearly everything. A lot of these look a lot closer to how I wanted the game to look anyway (but lacked the assets and, at the time, a lot of the knowledge to customize). The few that are not UE native, got a nice little trip over to Blender to extrude these flat planes and create depth. That fixed those color bleed issues, and didn't affect performance at all.

More environment work is ahead after Chapter 11, but I've got a good system, and I'm very pleased with the new results.



Other than that, it has been character fixes, creating a few new characters I need for Chapter 11, and getting comfortable with the animation system in Unreal Engine. There are a number of things that are now complete (or close enough that only minor adjustments will be needed). Renders and animation work for Chapter 11 are ongoing now, and the final big hurdle is one that is only going to be solved with experience: high quality, fluid animations.

We've got an estimated release date of this fall for Chapter 11. Sorry I cannot get more specific than that, but I'm working in new territory every day, and I've already had more than enough challenges to solve. The upshot of all this is that individual renders, instead of taking around 10-20 minutes each to render out like they did before (that does not include setup time), now take around a second. Animations, which could easily take a day in Daz for something around 10 seconds, are just a few minutes now. This production improvement is one of the big reasons I've invested in this months long process to make this change. Future things like variation in clothing, hairstyle, etc. for characters, pregnancy options, as well as just additional scenes, will now be relatively easy to implement.

We are just getting started on this, and I'm excited to continue to improve things for all of you as I get more comfortable in Unreal Engine. A final reminder that the game engine itself is not switching to Unreal Engine. If your PC (or Mac) could run To Be A King before, it can run it after. All of the rendering is still taking place on my machine, and packaged as still images or video sequences (for the animations). Your saves will work just fine too. Now, if you'll excuse me, I better get back to work.
Thanks for the update.. waiting tooooo long for it.. :rolleyes::rolleyes::confused:
 

Majindevil

Member
Nov 20, 2018
498
1,237
View attachment 2932622

Ugh, lighting. The bane of my development existence. That and environments got a lot of attention over the last few weeks. It's been a wild ride, and, at times, I was questioning why I decided to take the plunge into UE.

Lighting
This is always a struggle. Daz Studio, my old rendering software, has its own limitations with a lot of noise at low lighting conditions. For Unreal Engine, you've got multiple options for lighting your scene, apart from the "physical" lights themselves. Lumen, ray tracing, etc. are all options. I've gone the Lumen route, but it was this past month where I decided that I needed to get my lighting fixed up. Early previews were alright, but not looking as nice as things did before. These are the times I really love how quickly Unreal Engine can spit out renders, and this was never more needed then since I had to do a lot of testing to get the right balance.

I've now got different lighting sets that I just need to align and position with my character(s) that I want to light. There are dark and dramatic Rembrandt, high key, low key, loop, and many more options. This allows me to quickly setup the lighting I need for a scene and just make small adjustments to get it correct. I also corrected some render settings in UE that were causing abnormally dark shadows.

And this is another area where UE shines. Not only do I have these presets, but I've set it up with blueprints so that I can control most of the light settings from a single list of options. I can even key these settings in my animation timeline to change them. Cannot get better than that for easy setup and adjustments.

Is my lighting perfect? Nope, but it meets my personal tastes and consistently makes the characters look good. That's all I need. Oh, and being able to correct it easily when it gets wonky.


Environments
Taking my old environments into Unreal Engine proved to be very problematic, especially since I'm using Lumen lighting. Lumen hates flat planes, which is how most walls, floors, and ceilings are done in Daz Studio (and in a lot of other software too). If you use flat planes, Lumen exhibits color bleed. Let's say you have a red wall. Light in 3D and the natural world bounces around. So it will pick up some of that red and project it into your scene. That isn't a problem. But with color bleed, that effect is exaggerated significantly. You'll get characters glowing red in that scenario. Not good.

What I ended up doing for Chapter 11, since I don't need all the environments I've used so far, is use native Unreal Engine environments for nearly everything. A lot of these look a lot closer to how I wanted the game to look anyway (but lacked the assets and, at the time, a lot of the knowledge to customize). The few that are not UE native, got a nice little trip over to Blender to extrude these flat planes and create depth. That fixed those color bleed issues, and didn't affect performance at all.

More environment work is ahead after Chapter 11, but I've got a good system, and I'm very pleased with the new results.



Other than that, it has been character fixes, creating a few new characters I need for Chapter 11, and getting comfortable with the animation system in Unreal Engine. There are a number of things that are now complete (or close enough that only minor adjustments will be needed). Renders and animation work for Chapter 11 are ongoing now, and the final big hurdle is one that is only going to be solved with experience: high quality, fluid animations.

We've got an estimated release date of this fall for Chapter 11. Sorry I cannot get more specific than that, but I'm working in new territory every day, and I've already had more than enough challenges to solve. The upshot of all this is that individual renders, instead of taking around 10-20 minutes each to render out like they did before (that does not include setup time), now take around a second. Animations, which could easily take a day in Daz for something around 10 seconds, are just a few minutes now. This production improvement is one of the big reasons I've invested in this months long process to make this change. Future things like variation in clothing, hairstyle, etc. for characters, pregnancy options, as well as just additional scenes, will now be relatively easy to implement.

We are just getting started on this, and I'm excited to continue to improve things for all of you as I get more comfortable in Unreal Engine. A final reminder that the game engine itself is not switching to Unreal Engine. If your PC (or Mac) could run To Be A King before, it can run it after. All of the rendering is still taking place on my machine, and packaged as still images or video sequences (for the animations). Your saves will work just fine too. Now, if you'll excuse me, I better get back to work.
hmm the rigging of the chars seems to need some fixing the elbows look just wrong and broken
 

cxx

Message Maestro
Nov 14, 2017
66,793
33,654
hmm the rigging of the chars seems to need some fixing the elbows look just wrong and broken
yea but same thing with daz but at least faces were fixed from previous pics (still looks same as daz made).
 

Deleted member 2744443

Well-Known Member
Aug 18, 2020
1,164
463
Good to know ahead of time about this one. My current project is about two women on their honeymoon, and I'm going to have plenty of g/g interactions in the future.

EDIT: While I'm waiting for my new computer to get fixed, I'm collecting ignores to make my life easier in the future.
What happened to the can do attitude, just a gigolo, or the excitement of thinking one can at least ride the lez girl, or the bi girl that the dominant thinks is full on? Giving up too soon?
 
3.90 star(s) 82 Votes