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Armor Damage Concept! - Inner Circle Update for April 20 2018
🕑 Added 2018-04-21 01:44:21 +0000 UTC Hey guys!So, don’t get too startled by the mosaic pixilation :D. Some people asked if I could limit spoilers, which I know I also appreciate, so I’m going to test out doing this on nekkid artwork I put out in the open. You can see the uncensored version below if you so choose. We’ll see how this works out!
For some not-so-good news, our new sculptor has to go abroad for a few months on short notice, so I’m not quite sure what the situation is there. There’s also good news though, and that is that we’ll have another new artist starting part time Monday. Assuming things go smoothly, he’ll be joining us full time in June. There is, regrettably, more bad news, and that’s that Ubercharge will remain on limited availability for at least a few more weeks due to the pressure that’s on him to make progress on his master’s degree project. We’ll likely prioritize time he has to go toward helping with armor damage and training up the new artist, so that means maps won’t receive much love for a little while.
I’m pretty sure I was supposed to sandwich the bad news in between two pieces of good news instead of the other way around, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Malise Armor Damage Concept
Here are the full uncensored versions of our first Malise armor damage concept!
Malise Armor Damage Concept (Zipped)
Malise Armor Damage Concept (Open Suit)
Malise Armor damage Concept (Wide Open Suit)
It’s important to note the word ‘concept’! This is a hand-painted composite I made to test out the general look/positioning of the damage. I have a few alternate versions as well that I didn’t flesh out. We’ll need to do more testing before we get serious about the 3D version, as there are a lot of things that make this difficult. Not only do we need to need for the damage shape/lines to look good with the structure of the suit, we need for it to be positioned appropriately so it doesn’t look weird when joints bend so that we can minimize the number of joint correction models TK has to make. To top it off, we have to validate our solutions for overcoming the problems that originally kept us from doing armor damage in 3D. Point is, we may end up with a different design, and will almost certainly have to troubleshoot some issues. But yeah, TK will likely be starting on this soon-ish since he’s almost done with Ven’s armor :D.
One other thing I wanted to point out is that we are planning on making armor damage and lust sickness completely independent of one another, meaning you can end up with additional variations that weren’t possible in previous versions of the game (hence the three configurations above). I’m not certain if APL had implemented this yet in the code, so this may come a bit later.
Light Mixing / Render Optimization
I spent the majority of this week following through with most of the remaining necessary work on the light mixing system. I wired up the light mixer to all existing portraits and now have the ability to save light presets and apply them to any new render sets. I also have the ability to change the lighting on all game portraits simultaneously via master faders I created. There will be one of these for the left portrait, right portrait, and enemy group, meaning for any given environment there can be three variations of the preset. I also learned how to use logical expressions in the compositing program in order to code some extra control into the light mixer. This will allow for certain lights to remain on at a minimum level for specific poses that turn out too dark in a given preset. An example of this could be Malise’s attack pose, which is one where we’d always want at least some light on dat booty, even when the lighting preset doesn’t have a strong front light. I’ve re-lit and re-rendered most of Malise’s poses for compatibility with the light mixer, and am happy to say it works well; not only this but the poses look great in the (admittedly few) different lighting setups I’ve tried. I’ll need to adjust a couple and re-render for things I didn’t consider, like Malise’s left-hand gun making a shadow on her face when the right side light is on.
Another thing I spent some time on was experimentation with a program called Altus Denoiser. I mentioned last week that I was able to cut render-time needed to use the light mixer for portraits/enemies by 95%. While this is great, larger cutscene images (ones that will get close-ups in game for example) will still require an hour or more for a clean render. This is especially true for images with a lot of liquid since subsurface scattering is slow. This Altus program seems promising, as it’s able to take two low quality renders (with some extra passes for input) and create a high-quality, noise-free version. My best test showed I could take two 7 minute renders and get one of similar quality to a 38 minute render. I suspect that ratio will improve even more with more complex scenes. It’s not very compatible with the light mixer since I’d have to manually process all the various light group renders (unless I can figure out how to script it), but I never really intended to use the light mixer for cutscenes anyways.
AltairPL’s Coding Progress Report
As I've mentioned in last update, my priority for this week or so was to continue implementing logic for multi-teaming holds.
It started pretty good and I managed to implement pretty much everything needed for it, but my fears from the last update came through and something did blow up in my face. While recently testing the last batch of edits made to action conditioning, I stumbled upon an isolated issue with one of the skills. Said skill is not really needed and was added by me some time ago as a proof of concept, so I just swept the issue under the carpet thinking we won't have any similar troubles. I couldn't be more wrong. Multi-teaming handling for an already-holding enemy (waiting for another enemy to join the fun) is affected by the same exact issue, which threw a wrench into my gears and made me lose all my momentum. The problem is that the responsible code is part of something much bigger and complicated and every possible solution I could think of would require a lot of time and effort to implement and neither of them is perfect.
After trying to figure it out for a few days I got really tired of this particular problem and coding heavy stuff in general, so I've spend the rest of the week on pretty light stuff, like organizing my notes, cleaning the code in few places, adding some missing documentation to the code and other "mundane" stuff like that.
I'll probably keep slow pace for the weekend, gather my strength, and strike back at the action conditioning issue... maybe taking a break from it will allow me to find some better solution I haven't considered yet.
Ven and Splicer Asset Progress
Last but not least, we’ve got some more assets to show off! Here are the final assets for the first variation of the Splicer gang’s boots/pants:
Additionally, TK is nearly finished with Ven’s armor overhaul. Here are some images of her new arms, remodeled from scratch!
He’s made additional progress on improvements to the textures and materials for both the legs and arms, but I won’t have those until tomorrow at the soonest.
Comments
How about one of those red strands of the suit survive the armor rend and slightly tugging the labia open to that side?
MangoFishSocks
Oh sick. I hope any further news about the development team's situation won't be too harsh. I appreciate you taking the armor damage request into consideration. Feels down to earth.
We're pushing for an IC update tomorrow night :D. About the armor damage, possibly -- we have to use grafts for the armor damage b/c Daz refuses to allow high poly morphs for standard users for their Genesis figures (they only make the technology available to content creators in their store). This complicates things for us somewhat, so will have to see how it all works out.
MangoFishSocks
Hey Ero, I have 2 questions: 1) Will you mesh the next Inner Circle Update together with the monthly update? Less work and time required that way. 2) For Malise's nanosuit armor damage, could you leave a bit of fabric intact next to her genitals, creating a 'panties to the side' effect (NSFW <a href="https://i.imgur.com/184pjxZ.jpg)?" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://i.imgur.com/184pjxZ.jpg</a>)? Or perhaps right in the crevice between her thigh and taint (NSFW also <a href="https://i.imgur.com/TjAS0ce.jpg)?" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://i.imgur.com/TjAS0ce.jpg</a>)? It'd probably require some juggling with bones and keeping enough room for penetration but out of all the armors shown so far, her nanosuit seems like the best one to request this for especially if you break some fabric on her thigh too.
Ah, I don't remember correctly then.
What? The Sims? I don't know. I haven't played or bought any of the latest ones. I've only owned the very first version of The Sims. And I remember back then it was already pixelation blur.
I thought they used a fog blur. Or am I just that old that they've progressed to pixelation blur?
AltairPL
thanks, gonna try to remember in the future
Lol for a moment I thought I was looking at The Sims :P
Rubber Duck Debugging link don't work correctly with the parenthesis bracket and period at the end. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging</a>
yeah! The armor Damage look pretty good. i like the torn fabric at the shoulder, it look more realistic. Not like the old versions where only the intimate parts get torn.
Purple Witch
As always, I am in love with the work done, although I have a few thing to say: I hope all the personnal, professionnal, and code related gets sorted for everyone. I like the concept behind the armor damage and lust independence. I only have to say that as a rangers-wearer, I think the boots would gain from having the reinforcements, and sole modeled, rather than bump-mapped. It is very personal, and as I modeled a pair a few years ago, I understand it takes time and energy, while the quality is already good enough, and it might be a waste of time. Anyway, big love to you all, girls and boys, and see you around next update! <3
it looks so amazing , i cant believe how much you always improve! keep up the good work! sometimes i think you made a diamand out of nowhere and then you pull out sth even better! i'm still looking forward for the art and the gameplay of the game itself !
MangoFishSocks
Sadly, Jon, the only 'high' quality projects I've seen are either in a 2D anime style or that bog-standard 3D style. Mostly directly built on Ren'py or RPG Maker, respectively. While there's nothing wrong with those and there are some gems buried in there, they just don't stack up against the quality of custom work from Ero, TK, Altair, Uber and the sculpting girl. It's especially a shame how most of them completely separate their H artwork from the gameplay in a gameplay/reward or gameplay/risk setting.
Spencer
Really sucks to hear development might be slow for the next couple months. But you guys are making some high quality stuff here and I really want to see it finished. There’s nothing quite like this out there
AltairPL
Thanks for the kind words MangoFishSocks. I know the concept you described - it's called rubber duck debugging (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging</a>). I need to bother Ero for a special bonus for a rubber duck :D.
Jon P
Definitely among the top of adult games, if not THE top. All of Eromancer's current graphics work isn't even comparable anymore to anything else I've seen, western or eastern. It's been looking like AAA studio stuff for a while, especially now with custom clothing sculpting added in. (If you/anyone is aware of similar badass high quality stuff, hmu! No such thing as too many awesome adult games.)
MangoFishSocks
The armor damage looks excellent already. If you keep your targeting and interpretation of physics the same, it can't be anything but great in future concepts. Sorry to hear that, Altair. Code blindness can be a tough thing to overcome. Back when I did some programming at an internship, one really helpful tip I got was getting another teammember and explaining to him/her what the code does and in what order. Verbally explaining that to someone else is a good way to figure out where it breaks for yourself, too, and you might even get a helping hand. Best of luck. P.S. Sorry if I come across as pushy when asking for updates. I'm just excited for this game's quality and your work to come to fruition, as it already has in the parts you've showcased. I think this game is one of the leading projects in western adult gaming, both in terms of gameplay and graphics (especially after the overhaul), and particularly how those intertwined back in the demos.
