Status Update #15
Apr 1 at 2:34am
Hey guys! So this will be the last status update before version 0.4 is released.
I've been working my butt off trying to get this thing finished. You probably are thinking:
Gosh, DynamiteRed! You are slower than death! Why is this update taking so long? Do you just suck at making games?
I don't know, maybe. Game development is like, hard, man! But seriously, the reason is that from a technical standpoint, this update is just really complicated. In addition, the renders are taking longer than previous updates because as time goes by, I keep getting more experienced with Daz Studio. This means that as I figure out how to make things scenes look better, they take longer to bake. I'm still working out the ratio of quantity vs quality, and so far I've been trying to lean more towards quality. As a side note, I wonder if certain other devs realize that there are sliders to change the render quality? I see some of these other games with super grainy renders. That is the result of bad Iray settings. The default Iray render settings in Daz are super low ...
Anyway. The update is more or less feature complete, but I still have these things to do:
- Populate the new part of the city more (This takes so much time!)
- More NPC reactions to clothing changes (Also takes a long time!)
- Finish a repeatable scene at the church.
- Finish Jareth's other route scene (About time!).
- Polish the new barmaid job.
- Finish the next story beat.
There's a lot of new, cool stuff in this update as far as the game systems go. I've already told you about the new outfit and shame system, but I've spent the last week coding a new main menu as well. In total, on the programming side of things there's a few thousand new/changed lines of code. The end result is that the game feels quite a bit different (for the better).
My goal is to get the beta out by the end of next week. Older saves will be broken. I'm sorry, but due to a total re-write of the outfit system there isn't much I can do. I've changed some core things, such as the number of equip slots Astrid has. I will be providing a couple save files with the release to ease the transition.
Now that the important stuff is out of the way ...
Some random development chat if you are interested:
If you have ever used Daz Studio, you know that it is a complex piece of software. I keep discovering new things, and recently, an embarrassing mistake that I had made.
I wanted Astrid to be somewhat unique, so rather than just buying a stock character from Daz's marketplace, I spent many, many hours tinkering with the thousands of different body shape sliders to get something hopefully unique to this game.
What I didn't realize however, is that the combination of body morphs I used caused her rigging to be slightly fucked up (The layout of her "bones", which control how her different body parts bend and pose).
Since I've started this project, I have wondered why certain poses created some distortion on her ass cheeks. With extreme poses, body distortion is almost unavoidable with any character in Daz. This is a problem that I am constantly fighting with, and continually try to fix, while some other devs don't seem to care very much. Anyway, Astrid's body seemed to have more distortion problems than the base Daz model, but I've been putting up with it until now. Two weeks ago I finally got fed up, and spent a few hours on google trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.
Eureka! I just need to fix her bones! And Daz Studio has a tool that will automatically do it, called "Adjust rigging to shape"! All of a sudden her ass distortion is gone! Thank god! I feel kind of retarded, but I'm glad I finally got that sorted out. There are a ton of small details like that in Daz Studio that I keep finding out which are not obvious at all. Here is a comparison of Astrid's ass:
Okay, so that was a bad example, but I haven't re-rendered some of the more noticeable cases yet. If you look closely on the old ass, you can see almost like a vertical line on the left ass cheek. While on the new ass, that shit is completely smooth, baby! You can also see how her ass "moves up" due to the different bone placement when you tab back in forth between them.
Anyway, I wrote way more about that than I needed to, but it was something that was really bothering me because I knew it was fixable. Another cool thing I have discovered is the amazing world of custom clothing morphs! Want an NPC to lift up her skirt, but the clothing doesn't include that morph from the creator? Just pop that shit in Blender and and pull the skirt geometry up! Very handy stuff! You'll get to see my custom morph attempts with the Barmaid job.
That's it for now guys, as always, thank you so much for your support.