Art Progress and Release Progress

Greetings! Bad news first: the release isn't done. The good news is that I've gotten quite a bit done on it, and I've also made more progress in moving on from Daz and improving the game's art. The rest of this post discusses work on 10.4 - including some save changes to accommodate the Relationship Plugin - as well as the art stuff I got done! And don't worry - saves from every previous version of the game should still be compatible with 10.4. Let's get started!

The Relationship Plugin

I've discussed this a lot, so if you already know what the relationship plugin is, go ahead and skip to "What's New." If not, a quick recap: data about your relationships with other characters is currently spread out in all kinds of strange places. Whether you hugged Ana after rescuing her from Tal, whether you told Val you liked her when dancing with her, that sort of thing. This makes it difficult for me as the developer to easily query this information, and there's no real way to see what your overall relationship with a character should be. In real life, your relationship with someone is some cumulative function of all the little choices you've made when dealing with them. It'd be nice to have it work that way in the game, too - so I wrote a plugin to do that.

The plugin tracks everything I've identified as "relationship-affecting events," makes it easy to query what happened there, and uses these events to calculate relationship scores along different axes - friendship, attraction, and romance. I can then use these scores and/or the outcomes of certain events to change how a character interacts with you, gate certain things, and so on.

Relationship Plugin - What's New

The plugin itself has been written for a while, but the big tasks that hadn't been done is seeing how all these events are currently recorded, fixing any problems with that, inputting all these events into the plugin (including how they affect the scores,) making sure it all works like it's supposed to, and fixing old saves to work with the new system. All that is now complete. I also added a dom/sub axis to relationships, since it seemed like a big missing piece.

There were a lot of events - 80 of them at present - but they're now all inputted, along with their contributions to relationship scores, and everything is documented for easy future reference. A big problem I had to deal with was the fact that some things weren't recorded properly, or weren't recorded at all. In some cases I could deduce what happened based on other variables, but in others the information was just lost.

Not breaking old saves is a promise I've managed to keep since the beginning - and there's a plate full of spaghetti code in the game to prove it! I didn't want to give that up now, so what to do? There were only 5 events where information was totally gone - 2 involving Ana, and the rest involving others. So for those I decided to have the game assume what the outcomes were and fix your save accordingly. If you don't like those choices, though, there's a sheep in the Recollection Room purporting to be from the Temporal Stability Directorate's Continuity Office who'd be happy to assist you with changing them. You only get to change them once, though, so be careful!

The "lost" events are:

• Whether you hugged Ana after she rescues you from the orc-thing at the beginning of the game (it assumes you did.)

• Whether you hugged Ana warmly after rescuing her from Tal (it assumes you did.)

• Whether you told Val you liked her when dancing with her at the club (it assumes you did if you had the opportunity to do so.)

• Whether you let Emily bully you at the beginning of the game (it assumes you did not.)

• Whether you got drunk and flirted with Sami at the pre-Dark Pits party (it assumes you did if you got the Talent Show scene, otherwise it assumes no.)

• Whether you played with Chichi at the pre-Dark Pits party. The sheep doesn't ask you about this, because why wouldn't you play with Chichi?

These choices will only be "fixed" if required. Thus, if you start a new game nothing will be "fixed" because nothing will be broken - and you'll never see the sheep. If you haven't gotten to the pre-Dark Pits party in a particular save, neither that save nor any subsequent ones arising from it will assume anything about what happened there (since all these choices are properly recorded now.)

I was kinda surprised I managed to lose information on the Ana and Val stuff - there's actually a mildly sweet/amusing conversation snippet with Ana at the pre-Dark Pits party that's been impossible to trigger this whole time. But that's all fixed now!

The goal of this system isn't to make a cool feature just for the sake of making one, it's to have more immersive and hopefully more meaningful relationships with characters. You spend a lot of time around them, and this will make it easier for them to act like it!

Art

Moving from Daz to a more robust and powerful 3d suite is something I've been tinkering with for a while. I'd messed around with Blender some time ago, and explored using Maya more recently. I decided not to go with Maya for some reasons I'll get into, but it still proved to be an educational experience. Since my last post I decided to give Blender another try, and I've been pretty pleased with the results! The image at the top of this post was made with Blender, and I am now pretty confident it can do what I need it to do. So no promises, but you'll probably be seeing more Blender WIP posts in the future.

Hair is a pretty important part of a character's look. In Daz, there's a lot of options to customize a character's body and face, but with hair you're sorta stuck with completely premade assets. You can make hairstyles for Daz yourself in other programs if you have sufficient knowledge - and at this point I probably do - but I consider it kind of a waste since Daz hair doesn't look like... hair. There's a few ways to tell if an image was made in Daz, but hair is undoubtedly the biggest tell. (Awkward poses are another, but that's a limitation of the person using it, not the software itself.) I love Alex and Ana's hair, and Shiri's is acceptable, but there aren't many good stylized hair assets out there. And so I have a lot of characters that look like ass because their hair is bad.

Exhibit A is Emily. I've sorta wanted to include her in some H-scenes, but I couldn't because her hair was so bad. I tried to make it look more stylized by messing around with the shader, but... it looks even worse than normal Daz hair, to be honest. Hair was really the thing that got me to start looking at other programs. Which brought me to Blender.

And I learned something about Blender hair - that it was difficult to deal with. I want to say it sucked, but some people had made some really amazing stuff with it. But I can almost guarantee you they spent ages doing so. I made some hair for Emily in Blender, and I thought it looked okay at the time, but not good enough to adopt a whole new workflow, so I abandoned it.

More recently I experimented with Maya, the long-time standard of commercial 3d software. Maya has a tool called Xgen that was developed for Disney's Tangled (Rapunzel) movie, and it was supposedly really powerful and (relatively) easy to work with. And I did find this to be the case - it was definitely a breath of fresh air compared to Blender's old hair system.

Maya isn't that expensive if you're a small-timer, but I've never liked the idea of having to pay a company to maintain access to my creative work. It's sorta like someone holding your kids hostage, you know? I've been moving away from Adobe for that reason, so it seemed kinda stupid to hop in bed with Autodesk. Maya's renderer, Arnold, also has a few quirks - it's really great, but to use it to its full potential you need to render with your CPU rather than your graphics card - which is incredibly slow even with powerful consumer-level hardware. I also moved to a Mac (again) and Arnold's GPU renderer - not good for final renders, but fine for lookdev - doesn't work on Macs at all.

So I took another look at Blender. They implemented a new hair system since my last experiment, and it looked interesting. They've made a lot more improvements recently (especially to their renderer) which also piqued my interest. And it runs great on Macs, since Apple has assigned a few engineers to work on it.

Blender's new hair system seemed kinda difficult to use (well) initially, but I found a plugin that gives it a very Xgen-like interface (Medusa Nodes, if you're curious) and I've been very impressed. Emily's new hair was made using it, and for the most part I really like it. I'm interested in getting some feedback, though - do you like it? Not like it? Does it seem true to the character? Are there things you'd like to see changed about it?

Below are some images comparing the new style (and new shaders) with the old Blender experiment, and her old Daz model. New is on the left, and Daz is on the right. Please let me know what you think!

For my last Blender experiment, I basically used Emily's Daz hair as the reference. As a result, I kinda... forgot? that hairlines go forward at the temples, and most people don't have parts in the middle of their head. But this time I used lots of reference images of real undercuts, so in addition to the new hair system allowing for more realism, the styling itself looks more real. I still think it looks sorta stylized, though, which is definitely what I was going for. But I'm not in love with it or anything, and if you have suggestions for improvement I'd love to hear them. Unlike with the old system, this one would be fairly easy to tweak and change.

There's still a lot of work to do on Emily. I want to improve her skin shaders more, but that can wait. I'm trying to decide if I should work on making her a good control rig first, or work on making her some clothes. My Maya learning involved building an IK control rig for a character, and man, was that a revelation. "IK" stands for inverse kinematics, which means you can grab a character's hand or whatever, put it where you want it, and the rest of their arm will move pretty much like how it's supposed to automatically. The alternative to this is forward kinematics (FK) which means you have to go in and manually move every single joint involved in getting a body part where you want it. It's exclusively what I've done up to this point, and it's just as tedious as it sounds. You still have to do a bit of this sort of tweaking with IK, but in general it's much faster to get something natural-looking than with FK. (And much more amenable to animation. Hmm...) The caveat is that you need to spend some time setting up a rig that does all this neat stuff automatically.

Other 10.4 Stuff

I finished the release promo image for 10.4 already, but I'll have to wait for the release to show it to you. I actually did the release promo image for 10.5, too - both of them are done with Daz, but hopefully those will be the last Daz images I'll use for the game. Once I get clothing down, I think I'll be in a position to start doing some pretty cool stuff with Blender.

I've also been writing skits and random conversations for the various shops you'll have the opportunity to explore. I usually try to have something interesting going on in each of them. There's still 7 shops left to do, and I still need to edit the date quest, do eventing (movement) for it, add shop items, a few specific conversations, and final edits/tweaks, but we're now much closer to a release.

Conclusion

The Blender stuff may seem kind of random, but after focusing on writing for so long, I was in the mood to work on art. Working with Daz for the release promos reminded me how much I want to finally move on from that software, so I decided to give Emily's hair another shot - and I'm encouraged by the results!

I was also sort of dreading getting into the relationship plugin stuff - I knew tracking down how all that stuff was tracked would be really tedious, and that I'd probably uncover a ton of problems. Both of these were true, but I feel much better now that it's out of the way. While a pain to set up, the system should be pretty easy to maintain from now on, and it'll provide a lot more options to make relationships feel more meaningful.

Anyway, that's all for this time. 10.4's to-do list is getting a lot thinner, and hopefully the next time you hear from me will be for the release. I'll try to avoid starting any big art projects until then. Thank you for your support!