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Here is where we are with Chapter 11's development. Even more progress has been made in correcting issues and improving the look of the final renders and animations. In addition, there are a few story changes that I'm making to the script. This has been a slog to get everything into Unreal Engine, and every day I feel like a dummy as I learn something I didn't know before. Let's focus on the bright side of things. Renders are easier to churn out in Unreal Engine now than they were in Daz. That is just on the setup side. As I've mentioned before, render speed cannot even compare as Unreal Engine is so much faster (it being a real time render engine and all).
Chapter 11 static render work is ongoing, and the final big challenge is getting animations to a quality level I feel comfortable releasing. It is going to take months of practice for me to get to where I ultimately want them, but I am not going to wait for that moment to get Chapter 11 out to you all. I only need a bit more time to get them to a level where they don't suck. My thanks to the developers helping me train my eye and reviewing my animation work, as rough as it is right now. Every day I find new things in the animation toolset that helps me shorten my time to produce these.
I wish I had an ETA to give for Chapter 11's release, but sadly, having missed two rough estimates already, I'm not ready to give one until I am a bit further along with a few of these fixes and animation work. I will be sure to shout it from the rooftops once I have one.
So here is the shortlist of what remains before I have a beta of Chapter 11:
- Final script rewriting (probably 8-10 scenes left here)
- Animations to an acceptable quality
- Static renders produced for all scenes with fixes implemented
- Fixes for about half a dozen known outstanding issues
- Liquid simulation and shader work for a certain bodily liquid
- Final assembly of code, renders, and animations into the Ren'py game engine
Now, if you aren't interested in why I've spent months making this switch, you can go ahead and move on to something else you want to do. Otherwise, read on to learn about the key things I hoped would happen when I made this massive change in my development process. Mercifully, they have all born out, even if they took longer than I hoped. This could be its own lengthy article, but I am going to summarize as best as I can.
Efficient Animation Pipeline
This is my #1 reason for making this transition. Animation work in Daz Studio is laborious, painful, and limited. Not only is the process of creating the animation rough, but converting other animations to work in Daz and rendering out the final animation is equally time-consuming.
There are those who say I've gone this long without animations, so why add them? However, I know many of you want them, there are a significant chunk of players who won't even look at a game that doesn't have them, and animations do, when done well, add value to the gameplay. I'm excited to be able to deliver a few with Chapter 11, and then increase that quantity as my skill in these develops.
Large Scene Support
Coming in Volume 3, I plan for some new and diverse locales, including some nice outdoor scenes. Having attempted to do a city in Daz Studio, I knew that those would not be possible in Daz Studio. I could fake it with certain tricks, but even those were laborious and limited my creative vision. No such issues exist with Unreal Engine, which seems obvious given how many AAA open-world games are made with it.
Real Time Physics Support
This right here was another feather in Unreal Engine's cap. I wanted jiggle physics, both for some added "realism" and to save me from having to try and hand animate it. I also wanted the hair to move more naturally during animations and in static renders. It has been very freeing, even though I'm still fine-tuning this area, to not need to stress about hair clipping or weird distortions when I try to fake physics. The engine handles that for my renders and animations, even if it needs me to spend a bit of time setting it up for each character. It is even better that any changes I make to these physics settings apply to all characters or at least only need to be updated once per character. Then I can re-render anything I've setup before, and those changes will be automatically added.
Improved Render Speed & Variation
In order to output the volume of renders I do each release in a timely manner, I had half a dozen computers in my house to get these rendered from Daz. Not only was that a pain for updates & hardware costs, but it also meant my air conditioning usage was very high, as well as my electric bill (at least until I switched to solar). Unreal Engine provides near instant render output. This makes corrections and iterative testing extremely efficient. I'm down to just two systems (one to work on and one to output on). Unreal Engine also allows me to add variations easily and without any significant extra development cost. There are paths I wanted to open up in To Be A King, but it was too costly in terms of development time. I could write and code the script variations quickly, but then I would add days or weeks to development of the renders in Daz Studio.
Better Method For Fixes
One frustration of my old software was that every render was stored in its own individual scene file that had its own settings. This meant that, if I found an issue with a series of renders, I'd have to load up each file, implement the fix, and save it back out. That process alone would be 5-10 minutes per file. Multiply that by 80 files or so per release, and I'd have a couple of days in just fixing issues. That does not count the time to then re-render them.
Unreal Engine works a lot better in this area. I still have individual files for each render or animation sequence, but things like characters, lighting, etc. are linked into that sequence. If I make a change with say a character's hair. That update applies immediately. All I have to do is set the sequence for the render or animation to re-render and it grabs those changes automatically. Couple that with the increased render time and improvements and fixes are easier than ever to get done.
Final Thoughts
I love this work, and I love the daily challenges it presents (usually). Strange as it sounds, game development is like its own game. Only in game development, you are constantly solving the puzzle of how to bring what's in your head to a project that others can experience on their computers. If I put off making this change until after I finished To Be A King in a few years, I'd be even further behind (not to mention frustrated).
Now let me get back to getting Chapter 11 out the door to all you eager people, and then turning my attention to completing the final chapter in Volume 2. I'm in my own personal crunch mode to get this done, and I look forward to sharing a release date as soon as possible. Thanks for reading, and thank you for your interest in what I do.
