xavster_gaming

Callisto 0.40 - Week 8 Update

Added 2020-04-24 04:10:17 +0000 UTC

Been a good week completing all of the animation posing for v0.40. Whilst I finished the posing yesterday, there are still 7 animations requiring their image series rendered. Hopefully I can process all of these next week. Thankfully, due to simpler scene complexity (no water), the render time per frame is down to 5 to 10 minutes rather than the 20 to 30 minutes for the ones involving water. Put a lot of effort into the posing, taking it to the next level by animating things like hair / hands and also animating certain morphs. These extra little tweaks are all minor, however they add up to make the final result far more believable. Next week I am on to the final still frames and minor coding to for the first beta release.

I have been doing a little forward thinking towards how to populate the strip club in version 0.50. My goal is to have the club customisable, however at the same time not cause myself nightmares in rendering / coding. Initially I will have the club populated by the Jool character on center stage and a couple of place holder performers on the side stages. These side stage performers will not have any animations and will not be one of the models from the poll. What I intend to do, is allow the player to purchase additional performers (winners in the poll) and allow them to be placed on any stage they wish. All of these performers will have animated dance scenes. I should be able to implement Jool and 4 others in the v0.50 release. Jill will be back in v0.50 as the club manager, located at the bar and the interface for controlling club customisation / management.

I also want to change the customers in the club dependent upon the day of the week and the relative success of the club. All of this sounds overwhelming, however using some of the tricks I have already implemented in the game, I don't believe it should be too bad. To create the crowds, I will have to render them for several different camera angles and also do a variety of poses. I will move them around in the room and also hide some of them at times to give a sense of the club being more or less busy. This will likely be about 20 different scenes from 7 camera angles. Sounds like a lot, however at 140 frames it is no more than one of my average animations.

To allow the performers to be customisable, I will have them rendered separately on each of the dance platforms with transparent backgrounds. Then in-game I just have to compile the final image using a background with images in front. This is how I compose every kitchen image in the current game. For example, if you are looking at Tiffany / Lia chatting at the table, the background changes based upon sector and the Tiffany and Lia images are overlayed separately on the background.

The animated strip performances will utilise side by side transparent animations on a static background. This is what I have already done for the hologram animations and the salvage animations where Kara / Rachel jet away from the hold. For these animations I intend to have roughly 4 separate animations that return to the same start pose. Each will be around 15 seconds long and hopefully feature 2 or 3 dance moves. The reason I return to the same start pose, is that I am hoping I can randomly sequence these animations within the game. If this doesn't work as I hope, I'll just stitch them together into a single animation. There will not however be totally unique dance moves for each performer, as the time to do all of the animation poses would be too time consuming. Render time should be fine, as the animations will be only 1 character on a transparent background lit by a HDRI. Should be roughly 2 minutes per frame. Thus for a minute of animation at 30fps, it will take about 2.5 days to render.

I will continue to include new performers with each update after v0.50, however if things go to plan, it really is just a matter of creating a couple of performers (poll each version) and then running them through the already established scenes. Hence likely 2 days of work and about 1 week of GPU processing time. This allows me to add content with relatively effort, allowing me to focus on more interesting things.

As a couple of quick notes, the Patreon billing is disabled at the start of May and the strip club performers poll will remain open until v0.40 is released. The same plan remaining content for v0.40 as below: