Friday Update #26: In The Clear (Patreon)

As a note, the filename of this image is CaptainCaption is Trans LOL.png. I'm attaching it to this post so you can see how much of a wizard I am with the lasso tool in Photoshop.

What's good, folks? Today's Friday Update covers literal and figurative meanings of the phrase "in the clear."

So with the timely 0.10.1 release, I think it's safe to say that re:Dreamer's update schedule is back on track. Again, while the arcade date in 0.10.0 having playable minigames was certainly neat, it was way too much work for the relatively small payoff, and I once again apologize for losing sight of the bigger picture and stubbornly refusing to release anything "until it was done." It was clearly a mistake, but my vision was too clouded to see that.

In order to rebuild trust, I'm going to make an effort to be much more transparent about what's happening with development for each release so that I can be held accountable for biting off more than I could chew. There is an existing #github-updates channel in the re:Dreamer Discord server, but it is largely unhelpful as the game is on a private repository and the viewable git commit messages from the discord bot are cut off after 160 characters or so. From now on, it'll be bolstered by a new #update-roadmap channel (invite link here) that gives a clear checklist of things that are being done for each release, as well as their progress. If something doesn't seem realistic to finish in two weeks, or if you have some other concerns with the projected content, call me out on it.

Now that I've dropped a bunch of unsubtle references to the concept of transparency, let's get to the meat of this update: the sprite viewer.

So back in the 0.10.1 release, the changelog mentioned:

The sprite viewer now takes cropped screenshots of our favorite Picrew character. I tried really hard to get the exported images transparent, but Ren'Py does not support pygame anymore (https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?p=550422#p550422), meaning that it can't use pygame.image (https://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/image.html)  in any meaningful way to save a PNG32 file (i.e., by converting it to a  string buffer and then into a Surface that I can export with pygame.image.save(); making a bytes screenshot with renpy.screenshot_to_bytes() (https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/other.html#renpy.screenshot_to_bytes), applying im.AlphaMask() (https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/im.html#im.AlphaMask)  made from the currently showing sprite with a red overlay color, and  using pygame.image.frombuffer() to get a Surface that I can export with pygame.image.save()).  If you were wondering, attempting to import pygame 2 breaks Ren'Py  completely, even when importing 'as' something else, and I have better  things to work on with this game than banging my head on a wall to  perfect a feature that likely won't be used very much.

While all of that programmer jargon is true, I failed to account for the fact that I could just make the perquisite images for the mask and screenshot as .PNG files instead of storing things into a buffer or some other method that wouldn't save any file except the cropped sprite output.

Thanks to ethylene in the re:Dreamer server, I found a solution that works based on saving a few raw screenshots with Ren'Py image manipulators (https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/im.html) applied to them, before ultimately outputting a transparent .PNG file.

To demo it, here are 4 tests with the new Zoey sprite outfit using the feature:

Patreon likely messed up the transparency on these images, so they're going to be uploaded as attachments to this post.

These are meant to be a companion outfit to the currently existing Day 2 Keisuke mall outfit and the placeholder CGs with a very, very similar outfit that were borrowed from an existing visual novel (there are HCGs in this set, but Patreon ToS being what it is, I'll leave it to you to surf the e-hentai fjords to find them, or you know, just playing the scene in re:Dreamer):

If you haven't seen, there is a patron-exclusive poll going on right now for the priority in replacing the placeholder CGs/HCGs with properly commissioned art and this set is one of those on the chopping block; the results to the poll will be the subject of the next Friday Update.

After Keisuke tears Zoey's pantyhose during their sex, every time she wears this outfit or its companion outfit without the coat, it'll be without the leggings.

So you may have noticed that "I" don't have the red eyes in these images today, and that's because I am poking fun at someone (a redhead) who said she had a similar outfit:

So congrats on being Picrew'd, girl! I hope you don't mind the cup size bump!

Before I go, I'll should explain what Picrew is.

Picrew is a Japanese character template maker (think what those lazy-as-hell NFTs look like, but not hideous). You can select from a lot of templates and make a character with a lot of options, and it's apparently somewhat popular in weeby trans girl communities.

The other day, a bunch of the girls in the server where making their own from this character template, and while on a boring car ride to the airport (my parents insisted on driving there while I would haul their van back, and traffic in the area is awful), I made one myself:

I didn't realize until after I made it that I chose the trans flag colors... is my subconscious trying to tell me something, or...?

I-I mean, I was just doing research for what the character creator screen within the re:Dreamer game should look like!

Until next time, everyone!