Harmony Girls v0.4.5 Development Update #2

It's been a long week for development and I've got a lot to talk about today. I was able to finish 4 animations last week, but I needed to spend a lot of time on another endeavor. I've been hard at work building support for a new animation format that will dramatically reduce the amount of memory required to run Harmony Girls and will have the added benefit of reducing overall disk space by a substantial amount as well. It was experimental at first, but I've since converted every Lily solo video making scene to this new format, have the minigame running on it, and am proud to announce it was a major success. So let's talk about what to expect.

The previous way I displayed animations was by using still images and a pause between each one. The issue with that system is Ren'Py requires 4 bytes per pixel to cache, causing each full size animation to eat up around 3-400 MB of memory. That caused a fully loaded minigame to consume around 6GB or VRAM. In the new system, I've converted the images to movies in the webm format which has reduced that VRAM consumption to next to nothing. While it has a number of limitations, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. So, aside from the hardware limitation changes, what will change in the game itself?

First, there will be a slight delay before animations begin playing. This delay lasts about 1/20th of a second, something I notice but Nakith does not. It's possible many of you won't notice as well. The other major change will be with the additional scene camera angles. Without the memory constraints, I can blow up the small cameras to full sized shots with tons more detail. I've included Lily's Fingering and Squirting in the preview images so you can see what that looks like. Now, it is possible for me to leave the small cameras as they are, but it would no longer be a seamless transition as the whole animation would restart. It may also be a lot of work for me, but I'll need to test that. After testing, I may put up a poll to see which system you all prefer.

Which leads me to my next point. I'll be releasing another version of 0.4.2 in the near future which will include Lily's solo video rework for you all to test. It will most likely also include some changes to character development of stats and perks to reduce the overall grind. It would help very much to have your feedback on this new system. My computer's hardware is powerful, as needed for rendering, so I need to know how it works on other systems before I fully commit to it. I can work to iron out any issues you may find before including the system in a full update. If I find the small camera angle to not be too much work, I'll include that in the test so you all have a practical experience with it before voting in a poll.

This new system is a massive core change for the game, but I want it to have very little impact on the gameplay itself. It's necessary to reduce hardware requirements so I can increase the availability and reach of the game. It's also a good thing to have for potentially creating a web based build of the game. I hope you all understand why I'll be putting a good amount of development time into this. The more people that can play the game, and play it with full quality animations, the better.

I apologize for the long read but this has been a very important development update for the game. I'll have more information as I've spent more time on the new system and I'll hopefully have the test build out once I've finished rendering the new, larger camera angles. Until then, enjoy the teaser images and feel free to join the discord if you want to talk more about these recent developments.