Friday Update #31: Counting Your Eggs Before They Hatch (Patreon)

Hey again, folks. CaptainCaption here in what I guess counts as a Friday Update. As this update will cover, sometimes my brain no worky with checking stuff, days of the week being one of them.

One week after testing positive for COVID-19, I am saying that I am over that speed bump in my life and am back to working on the game like usual. I say that, but honestly, except for Monday, June 27th, I ignored my own advice to take it easy and was kind of working on the game anyways.

I say "kind of" because my biggest effort related to re:Dreamer in this week since the late release on Sunday was the 8 hours I spent on Wednesday, June 29 honoring a promise I made to get the Zoey sprites compatible with Student Transfer scenarios.

Due to their complexity and modular nature, getting the Zoey sprites to work within the far more restricted sprite format of Student Transfer required flattening the body to a large degree, as you can see below.

I did this with 48 individual outfits for each of the 3 poses (down from the 150 I had wanted to do) and made 100 expressions (everything after 99 is the same expression, but with the reduced eye glow of the yandere eye effect).

Why, yes, this is very excessive! Thank you for pointing that out to me, but part of the reason I am even doing this (besides my general philosophy with gender bender content being that the more there is, the better, and Zoey's sprites and CGs being released for use is a part of that) is as advertisement for re:Dreamer and the flex of "wow, look at how complex these sprites are, and by the way, they're almost certainly going to be the only sprites that anyone using them will have the legal rights to use instead of being stolen from other visual novels!" to both the Student Transfer scenario developers who will (hopefully!) be using these sprites and the main game dev team, many of whom I had falling out with over a series of stupid dramas.

In my defense, I don't claim to not be petty.

Unfortunately, the scenario guide's documentation was incorrect, meaning that I can't complete the project despite all the images being made due to a feature I was counting on not being there.

The problem is Zoey's hair.

As you've probably noticed, 2 of her 3 hairstyles (the ponytail and the loose hair) have a significant portion behind Zoey's body and a portion in front of her body and expression; there's also some funkiness going on with the short hair in the C pose because of the raised hand and the hair being one layer instead of two that results in it being placed above the facial expression but under the outfit.

At least I'm not the only one who had issues with her hair recently!

The promised feature I was relying on to get around this was being able to declare if layers are above or behind the rest of the body, with up to 19 possible layers.

For comparison's sake, here's how Zoey's sprites are stacked in re:Dreamer:

• Back hair (ponytail or loose only)
• The left arm of Pose A outfits
• A tiny bit of the T-shirt back between thighs if that's being worn
• The base skin (blush layers, gloom layers, and the skin wetness are built into these beforehand, not stacked on top later)
• An extra shadow for Pose B for under the breasts and the hanging arms
• Core facial expression parts (stacked in the order of mouth, eyebrows, eyes to reduce compatibility issues)
• Facial emotes, such as the sweat drops and tears
• The lone short hair layer, if that's the current hairstyle
• Pants/Bottoms (some of these have shadows depending on the top article of clothing segregated to their pose's outfit folder for that, otherwise, they use a generic version without the shadow for topless outfits or general compatibility) (admittedly, I need to take another look at this as it has issues in some places)
• Shirt/Tops (due to their complexity, most outfit tops, particularly the male uniform ones, are pre-assembled and are not compatible with each other)
• Front hair (ponytail or loose only)
• Sunglasses accessory

I long since gave up on offering the full complexity of Zoey's sprites to any Student Transfer scenario developer as it'll be needlessly complicated and obtuse for them to use Zoey's separate outfit parts and facial expressions (i.e., re:Dreamer's show zoey xa eyes_11 eyebrows_11 mouth_11 ndrops is a lot more powerful and gives on-the-flay expressions but is also much more to type and harder to use than Student Transfer's show zoey a_11).

One thing I can't get around is the hair, as I'd have to triple the number of outfits and the file size unless those were on a separate layer.

The official Student Transfer scenario guide documentation has been changed since mentioning to the devs that it listed several features not present in the current release (many thing were coming features in Student Transfer V7, not current features in Student Transfer V6), but I have a snippet of the text I posted on Discord.

Yes I know this is getting long, but wait, there's more! Specifically, we have one more feature which could be useful for advanced users, which is setting the layer of the accessory.

Sometimes you have something like a different hairstyle that you want to use as an accessory. You could go ahead and painstakingly cut out all the parts where hair overlaps with the character etc, but that would make it very painful to reuse across various outfits which have slightly different outlines.

Instead, wouldn't it be nice if you could just layer the accessory behind the character instead of in front of it? That way, you could create a single hair accessory and just layer it behind the outfit and expressions, which would remove the need to mess around with cutting things out exactly.

Well, now you can! Any accessory -pose-level or outfit-level- can have a symbol and a number appended to it which will determine whether it shows up behind or in front of the outfit and expressions, and by how much. Incidentally, this also allows you to layer multiple accessories over each other, if you so desire.

By default, accessories are overlaid on top of everything else since that is the most common thing you may need to do when adding one. If you want to set the layer, you may add -<number> to set a layer behind the sprite (with bigger numbers being further back) or +<number> to set a layer in front of the sprite (with bigger numbers being further in front).

As an example, Sadie's hair is displayed behind her outfit and expressions by setting acc_hair-1.

You may select numbers between 0 and 9 (single-digit), so you can go up to 9 layers back and 9 layers in front, with 0 being the default layered right on top of the outfit and expression images.

There's also a related thing with pose-level accessories that I was planning on using so that Zoey's hair was only placed in one area, but that didn't exist:

For Sadie, as an example, you could override her pose-level hair accessory for the uniform outfit specifically like this: 

outfits/

└── acc_hair/

    └── on.png

    └── off.png

└── uniform/

    └── hair/

        └── on.png

        └── off.png

    └── uniform.png

Now admittedly, when I asked about these things in a very specific question back in May, I was told that these features weren't around yet by a lone person in the room who knew what they were talking about (so to speak), but I also had a number of people telling me these features were around because they were in the documentation, which could be trusted, but they had never used it themselves as they had no need for such a power user ability.

Honestly, everything in life is just the 5 Monkeys Experiment. How do I know? Because the experiment never happened and was made up for a business/self-help book, but everyone kept repeating it like the literal scientific experiment existed until it became such a truth that some of you reading this might be upset at me for challenging the established "fact."

So yeah, these scenario sprites are on the back-burner until Student Transfer V7 comes out... eventually? They've shifted it around from since when I was on the team, but I think it's generally 16 month between releases, and the last one was on July 4, 2021.

Before I go, I'll leave you with an update of Zoey's beach outfit by Izumi.

The previous sketches and flat colors were good, but these final versions and rearranging them in this order really sells the idea of the outfit to me, which is that as the day progresses, Zoey will ease up and stop being so reserved as she takes off more of her outfit and gets comfortable being looked at.

You can find further details on the post for it, as well as the full images to download.

Due to the week delay from COVID-19, re:Dreamer 0.10.8 drops on Friday, July 15. It'll feature more of Britney showing Zach around the theater, and if I get a chance to get to it, the Sunday of Zach being introduced to Britney's local campus pastor and having to restrain his intellectual atheist fedora. The focus of the  update after that will be decided via a poll again.