Figured I’d post some info for you peeps as questions have been coming up of late, especially over the holiday period what with my inability to post builds to Patreon directly.
Firstly, only Fenoxo can actually post TiTS builds to Patreon, and it’s kind of a laborious process that we can’t easily automate or anything. That said, we also wanna start pumping out builds on a more regular basis- the last few weeks should be a good indicator of what we can do when all the annoying busy work of preparing builds is all handled automatically. (By hand, it is no-shit about 40-50 minutes of tapping fingers whilst waiting on compilers and file uploads).
I also wanna really put some time down on figuring out the nitty-gritty about the imagepak enabled build too. We kinda have the system working (and have for a long time), but not really having enough art to kick it off combined with questions about how we should distribute it have kinda held us back on it a little bit; one of the test versions I kicked together was over 100mb, and all that really had in it was high-res versions of all the busts, so we ideally need to find a way to bring that down somehow, especially between build updates! It’s pretty clear that it would be a nightmare to distribute purely through Patreon at that size period, so it’s likely that it would only ever be regularly kept up-to-date through the blog.
To get around all of that, the user accounts here on the blog can be tied to your Patreon info. If you make an account here and go look at the Profile page that’ll show up in the menu whilst you’re logged in, down the bottom there’ll be some options for linking to either old Offbeatr or current Patreon pledges. Smash-click that big old orange button and you’ll be taken to the Patreon site to confirm you wanna let the blog access your TiTS pledge info. Then you’re done! The blog will know you’ve pledged (and for how much), and let you access a bunch of stuff through a new menu specially for backer builds.
As a side note, the system had a few issues during the server migration. The keys we use to keep everything tied together only have a short duration before they expire, and unfortunately it took me longer than the expiry time for some of the keys to get everything moved over. If you’ve got any issues, try resetting the Patreon connection – look in the same place you first clicked that big orange button and there should be an option to remove the binding. Once you’ve removed it you can try adding it again, which will generate a new set of keys, but it also requires granting access to the blog again which is why I can’t do much about it for you! If you still have issues after that, send us an email so we can look into things.
As a note though, I’m going to manually clear out all of the keys and remove all of the bindings when we do the next public build, probably some time in the next couple of days, so we can get a clean start (and my logs aren’t full of key access errors). The public build will also arrive with a new solution for public source code access too, for all of you that were waiting for that.
Now, to break up this wall of text, have some work in progress science porn courtesy of echo3Dx and the combined science of a 3D artist and Ged-“I know lots of long words about Unreal Engine”-an.
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I’ve been wondering what the deal with that image-pack was. Back when the source was still available freely I actually compiled that version and it was the result was just a bit under 180MB in size. Compared to the usual <30MB that is quite a bit.
Speaking of source access, how is that dual-repo thing you mentioned on the forums a while back coming along?(Being a programmer myself, I kind of miss nosing arround in the code…)
Anyway, thanks for info. Maybe you could give us a sample of all the words you know about that Unreal Engine sometime?(I haven't really had any experience with it myself so far).
Just smashing all the images in would dump out something over 200mb now, yeah. I found some tool that could recompress the images after the fact though, once they’re already embedded into the SWF that I used to get it to around about 100Mb; any lower than that and the image artifacts start to become noticable.
As for the dual repo thing, it’s technically working right now. I think what I’m going to do is smash up a new repo on Github to serve as the public outlet for the code, and let you all fork it there; we’re all setup on a private Gitea instance now, but if I open it up to the public and we end up with a couple hundred forks like we did on Github, the server disk space is rapidly going to vanish itself. Doing things that way would leave our actual working repo safe from potential Github-banishment, and we can just find another solution if the public repo gets banhammered.
As for UE words, maybe. Gotta figure out how things are actually gonna go down, but echo and I have been talking about making a 3D smut game for years (see: Cathouse Tale and Rak2 but with much more emphasis on the quality of the character models and animations); he’s slowly chipped at basic assets for it and I’ve been noodling over how to solve a bunch of problems or add much needed detail. I feel like we’re on the path to being able to cobble together a runnable thing to demonstrate the idea, so as part of that I’d probably be posting about it here on the blog with some ~technical words~ about what is going on. I kinda like doing that in general for UE, because I’ve stumbled over solutions to a lot of common problems but not found anybody talking about them on the interbutts, so I’d kinda like to put words-to-paper as it were about them.
Some cool and neat shit we have angles on:
Actual fur rendering with physics interaction, wind velocity, momentum etc.
Per-poly IK driven collisions with morph target tweaks. Think: having the fingers of a hand properly grasping and following the contour of, say, a donger whilst giving a handjob, whilst simultaneously not crushing all the finger joints into an abstract mess of polygon soup.
Combining the two; one character grabbing anothers furred hips or whatever, and having the fur kinda puff out above their fingers, following the flow direction of the fur. Having said fur slowly ruffle itself back to default once the grab ends or shifts.
>Actual fur rendering with physics interaction, wind velocity, momentum etc.
>Per-poly IK driven collisions with morph target tweaks. Think: having the fingers of a hand properly grasping and following the contour of, say, a donger whilst giving a handjob, whilst simultaneously not crushing all the finger joints into an abstract mess of polygon soup.
Isn’t this like, Pixar/SIGGRAPH level stuff?
Creative combinations of already existing technology. The fur things based around a p dece implementation called Neofur. Digging into how it actually works and functions, I’m figuring out ways to control it dynamically in other ways; for instance, you can use a growth map to determine fur length. Make the growth map a dynamically painted texture and paint into it wherever collisions happen, extend with some control over shell vertex displacement, blam you now have interactive directional fur*.
*After many hours of trial and error and tweaking and refining.
A tool that can compress images in an SWF after it’s compiled? That sounds quite interresting, care to share the name?
So if you do smash up a new repo on Github, will it still be possible to merge-back the good changes to the private Gitea instance? Or is it more like a gift to codegeeks like me, but not of actual use to you?
About UE: I think I’m gonna look forward to thoose ~technical words~. I normally stick to the logical(as opposed to graphical I guess) side of programming, but this does sound quite interresting.
Thanks for taking the time to write up such a detailed reply Gegan!
Part of this https://github.com/joa/apparat — reducer. Let me try a bunch of different compression settings quickly by dumping out a dozen versions at different quality settings and doing side-by-side comparisons.
As long as git repos have shared history, then commits can transition between them easily (every commit has a parent hash of another commit, so as long as the parent hash exists in both versions of a repo everything will work). The way git works is every clone _is_ a repo; your ability to push changes from your computer up to github works in the same way as I can shift a change from github to gitea or bitbucket or gits or gitlab or anything else.
Huh, that tool has an ‘Izma’ en/de-coder. Reminds me of a certain shark…
Thanks, if I get more serious about compiling(as in optimizing), this will be very usefull.
So merging the code from public to private and vice-versa won’t be a problem then (Still at least a bit more workload than with just the private version. So again, thanks).
I didn’t know I needed this in my life until you brought up 3D smut game and physics rendering that acts like actual interaction mixed with something resembling the above pictures, needless to say im stoked already, even tho its still just a idea.
Thanks for the public source code thing!
Also,
> (By hand, it is no-shit about 40-50 minutes of tapping fingers whilst waiting on compilers and file uploads).
I’m surprised Fenoxo doesn’t have a relatively good PC and internet set up. Since, you know, he needs them to earn income…
The IOS builds take for fucking ever, because they’ve gotta go through a swf-to-native-code transpilation process that is slow as fuck. That’s like 25+ minutes on its own right there.
Then just pull out a handheld game and kill zombies or something while you wait, lol.
So you want me to spend a tenth of my workday fucking with that stuff rather than just pressing a button and having it all work?
I mean in 30 minutes I could theoretically code one of Savin’s less varied scenes pretty easily, assuming everything is lined up right.
Considering you get nearly $25k a month it isn’t much of a stretch to ask.
That’s missing the point. Those thirty minutes could be putting more cool stuff in the game instead of spinning on my thumb.
Either way, I’m doing work. Just shoveling around builds by hand is stupidly inefficient and a waste of time.
Yeah, I really need public source code access. I promised someone that I would code their item, which I did, but can’t properly compile it because the version I have for some reason compiles only a blank screen.
When you say remove the keys for a clean start do you mean we’ll have to link our Patreons again?
Ye. It’ll just be like you never did the linking in the first place.
Fair enough
Will that do anything to our forum accounts? I’m pretty sure they’re separate accounts but I just want to make sure
Different accounts.
Will it break access for those who are not patreons?
As long as I still get grandfathered for my Offbeater contribution I am happy.
A 3d game? Sounds awesome. It seems like you know your stuff so I’ll be looking forward to the day where we can see the results of this idea of yours 😀
The pics are great btw. The full dragon bust is lovely.
Echo is a great artist 🙂
/so like is the hardlight stuff actually used for anything?
Now imagine working everything into something like Vive and the Perception Neuron suit.
hi hello i own a vive dev kit and am eyeballing mocap systems what seems to be the problem :^)
I… wow, just wow. GODSPEED COMRADE!
Well I fully anticipated everyone to slow down production and releases once the holidays come around the corner. So the lack of constant releases is both a good thing and expected; this only means you have the time to go back and double-check before posting.
Have a Happy New Year and I’ll probably start seeing posts after this weekend XD
So does this mean there will be more pub builds per month or it will always be once a month?