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Inner Circle Update for May 10 2017!
🕑 Added 2017-05-11 06:16:09 +0000 UTCHey everyone!
Apologies for being a bit late on the update! We did some testing today that I wanted to include the results from. Enough chatter though, I'm going to get right into it this week!
Story Progress
I’m beginning to feel relief here! I’m well into the second half of the story summary write-up and I’m pretty sure at this point that the pieces fit! The summary contains a huge mess of updates and edits that I simply didn’t have time to write into the more detailed story outline, so seeing it all work out is great. There are a couple of story arcs I haven’t fully explored that I’d like to as I write the last chapters of the summary, so hopefully those go well too. It’s also worth noting that the main story has (so far) grown from the 20 sub-chapters shown off previously to 25.
Something I’d like to share with you is the current idea for the introduction text when starting a new game, which you can find in the image above. It’s not really a spoiler since, well, you’re going to see it at the beginning of the final game.
Clearly, this is a whole lot of information that hasn’t made an appearance in the playable versions yet. Also relevant is that contrary to the plan awhile back, it’s likely that the Access Tunnels section won’t be the immediate start of the game.
Oh, and consider “First Contact” a placeholder name… I can see Star Trek execs at my door already.
On the Subject of Animations…
First off, nobody get too excited 😲! But, as part of the upcoming artwork overhaul, I’m really investigating the plausibility of adding character portrait and H animations to battle. There are a lot of things that need to work out in order for this to even be technically viable, so don’t get your hopes up yet! However, since this is by far the most requested feature for the game I think it should be fully explored. And, since I spent the last couple of days racking my brain over it, I figured I’d talk about it some here.
Basically, the following things need to happen before we can even consider character portrait animations in battle:
1. We need to guarantee that the game can load the animations without lag, without long loading times, and without a ridiculous overhead RAM expense.
This may sound like an easy thing, but when you look at how we have to do the animations it becomes a more challenging task. A lot of times 2D animations for large scale graphics in games are done using 2D armatures that rotate/scale. This would be an impractical process for us, and would be especially goofy since we’re using 3D to create our art. The benefit of it however is that it takes very few (if not one) images to make an animation. Since we use pre-rendered art, we would use spritesheets, and since we intend on upgrading to HD this means that these will be some big freakin’ graphics.
After a day of testing with APL I’m somewhat optimistic, however some compromises may be required. We’re pretty sure we’ve come up with a solid method for avoiding load times and lag through means of smart caching, however RAM usage may still be a problem. The biggest issue is that we need all the basic battle poses available on the fly, meaning the character’s full set of basic pose animations for their current outfit’s exposure/armor damage states must be cached (big RAM overhead). There’s a chance that this can be avoided if we get the load times low enough to where there will be no lag when dynamically loading a sheet. One way to accomplish this would be to make some compromises with regard to the number of frames for some or all of the basic battle pose animations. Ultimately however, it’s the H animations that are the most important, and I’m happy to say I think those should be technically viable using the aforementioned caching method.
2. All armor damage needs to be done in 3D as opposed to painted in post.
Quite simply, there’s no way I’m hand painting and manually animating armor damage for X frames for every piece of artwork 😲. It’s simply not viable. We’ve been experimenting with solutions for this for quite a while, and the only plausible ones we’ve found aren’t easy. While we’ve been able to accomplish this with Neon’s second outfit, the best example of our plight is Malise’s bodysuit. It will no doubt be an issue with other characters’ outfits down the road, so figuring out a solution for this one is an important first step.
After having TK run tests for about a week straight awhile back (I even mentioned this in a previous update), we’ve begun looking at changing Malise’s base body from Poser’s Victoria 4 (V4) to Daz’s much newer Genesis 3 (G3). When I started working on the game I chose V4 because it had by far the most licensable assets available for it. In this case however, the poor joint deformations really screw with what we are trying to do. We need our armor damage setups to look good in any pose, and so far that hasn’t been possible with V4. This is especially true when posing around the pelvis area. I made a bunch of comparison test videos yesterday and it’s pretty clear that Genesis 3’s superior geometry deforms much more naturally when bending (the fact that G3’s butt cheek isn’t halfway down her thigh after bending summarizes this pretty clearly).
I also did some tests with displacement maps in order to replicate the hentai-esque skin bulging effect that I hand paint . It worked well on Neon’s chest, but that was pretty easy since her boobs (thankfully) don’t have joints. Ultimately, TK’s solution would mean using displacement maps could be avoided for obtaining this effect, however the tests still show that getting this behavior right in all possible poses is especially tough. It’s likely that the armor damage will need to be more, uh, extensive so as to get possible creases away from joints (as shown in the test images).
A third issue is the geometry of the current bodysuit. Since it’s not proper for what we need to do, TK would create a new bodysuit asset from scratch for Genesis 3 with geometry tailored to our requirements. All in all, this would be a big task, but since this outfit occupies a whole lot of screen time it’s arguably worth it even without the concept of battle animations looming.
3. I need an efficient way to animate painted liquid effects for all the juicy goodness.
Last month I bought a Surface Book so that I can actually join digital artists in the 21st century. It’s pretty ridiculous that up until now I’ve used a mouse for all painting thus far, so this will no doubt improve the speed and quality of my painting. By far, the most time-consuming thing that I paint for this game’s artwork is the liquid effects. Unfortunately, these are something that will need to be animated in post no matter what. Since Photoshop doesn’t really have great tools for this I’m looking at learning After Effects. I’m pretty sure I’ll need to do this anyways in order to create battle FX animations for the new engine.
So, again I’ll mention all of the above is entirely to establish whether or not animations in battle are even technically viable. There’s still a lot of work to be done to answer that, but I can at least say “maybe” for now 😃, which is a whole lot better than I could have said before.
Comments
Kelplover197
With animations even if it's just a simple 1, 2 picture switch 1 being out and 2 being in that would be great. You would just have to decide on how many times it repeats until the climax.
PhatsM
Well shit, I'm all for this then. Giddyup.
Perhaps there's some misunderstanding about the idea for H animations in battle :D. The H chains would still be chains. Instead of a series of still images for a chain there'd be a series of animations.
PhatsM
Animations I could take or leave. Yes, I love to see them, but I'd have to agree with Kurtis above that a chain of 5 unique images that show distinct progression is also very positive. I would take enemy, pose, scene, music, and costume variety any day over animations. The possibility or use of them moreso in cutscenes would be very welcome, however. On the other hand, I am all in favor of conversions to the V4 modelling. It looks world's better than I expected when I already think the models look great. Seeing the two side by side makes me see the flaws as they are now. I feel as if showing me has spoiled me. The way clothing damage in V4 makes Malise's meat spill out through the rips is just too much NOT to ask for more.
I have the same opinion, we like games like final fantasy not because of the graphics or animations
CherryBlossomStorm
I agree with MB completely. Animations are obviously great but I don't know they're worth the cost. My humble opinion: More enemies, more zones, more stuff to explore - more content basically - should be the #1 priority right now. Hopefully things will pick up when this engine is done?
matt7h
Godspeed, Ero. Keep up the hard work!
MB
I'm with Kurtis on this one: I would rather a few different, shorter H-chains than one long one per enemy - regardless of being animated or not. Unless you can figure out a way to 'mass produce' these animations, so that you can pump out new ones like no one's business, then I would say go with the simpler paralax animation method and other more advanced 2D methods that lend themselves to a 3D feel. Along a parallel train of thought: I'm getting concerned with scope creep. It's been a while since the last version, and it feels like each time we take a step towards v0.06, it takes two steps further away from us. Getting the story, game back-end, and production workflow in order is good - helps speed up version releases in the future. But hearing about overhauling the animations and models from the ground up (or what sounds like it), and drastic expansion of chapters, I'm worried about MatM from a project management standpoint. I've never been more excited for an H-game, but I don't want to see you lose the forest for the trees either.
The current playable version takes place over 3 subchapters, but they will definitely get longer as the game goes on. There will definitely be shops and non hostile areas. Some parts of the game will be more nonlinear than others. Most places you should be able to go back to, but some you won't. I'm considering a New Game+ feature though.
QuestionablyInsane
Oh man what a dump of information! So yeah I was going to recommend doing sprite sheets but your way ahead of me on that one. :P One suggestion for loading from one state of armor damage to another is to have a still image of the destruction happening. You could have like a panning shot of a still image of the character having her top torn or whatnot… You could also add some spice to it by having a layer on top of the image with the torn bits flying away… Why I suggest this is that this could be used to hide the fact that you are loading the next armor state in the background… Second option you COULD do is play around with Camera/ parallax mapping. Do simple animations that is the combination of Images mapped to 3D meshes that are animated with bones… This is a bit different to Puppet animations… But not by much. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d9_S88yAwU" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d9_S88yAwU</a> Buuutttt…. Yeah the whole idea of taking a 3D model just to make a 2D image so you could use that image to project on a simple 3D model to animate…. Yeah that’s madness. But I was actually going to recommend maybe thinking about it for your world map… You can do some interesting things with simple camera mapping. This could definitely help if you want to do cool panning shots of scifi cities. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9r9tKX5olY" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9r9tKX5olY</a> Aside from that… Holy deformation Batman! Yeah there is no comparison. Go with Genesis. Sorry you will have less premade stuff available but dang man I had no idea V4 was so bad. If you need a new body suit it’s super easy to just duplicate the mesh and scale it up a bit and then start editing from there… You will also hopefully have very little rigging to do as the duplicated mesh with hold all the data. I also dig how you are doing deformation maps. Are you projecting those on or are you using the UV mapped texture and drawing on the deformation on that. In theory that should keep the deformation in the same place no matter the rigging. As for Sperm effects… Well I’ve been meaning to hit up a buddy on another game with this effect I’ve been playing around with… It’s not perfect but it’ll serve. I’ll send you a copy of the message I give him when I get it composed… I have to Photoshop up a few things and I need to have pictures demonstrating stuff. As for the ejaculation scene I was thinking if you do something like I said with the torn clothing that might be cool. Have like a single image like you have now of the eruption with maybe another layer with sperm particles moving away filling up the screen and having you character animated in the “after sex” oozing phase afterwards… Or you could do something just SLIGHTLY more ambitious of the character arching back at climax and having the sperm on another layer flying out. Anyways Good luck! So glad to hear you are considering animating your game! Fingers crossed!
Wuumaster
On one hand, animations would rock, especially if there are some variations to them to keep them from getting repetitive. On the other hand, if I had to choose between 1 H-attack chain with an animation, or 5 H-attack chains, I think I'd prefer the variety of the 5 over an animation. Just keep the opportunity costs in mind. =)
Tadd Morgan
Animations make such a huge difference, I am very excited to hear you are experimenting in that area!
How many chapters are there in the current version of the game? Will the chapters be same/similar in length or will their size vary? If I'm recalling correctly previously there were talks about stores. If the previous statement isn't based on some bs i dreamed up: will the stores be located in some sort of free-roam areas, without the threat of being raped or ded'd by enemies, in between chapters, or would those areas (if they exist) be part of a chapter? Can you go back and forth between chapter areas - to explore, level, pick up stuff you missed etc.? As for the animations: sounds amazing, even if its only a maybe at this stage.
