Development Update #78 - Big News (Patreon)

Are you sitting down? Good. This is one of the most difficult dev updates I've ever written. It is time to say goodbye…

…to Daz Studio. It's been an adventure for the past 4 years with it, but it no longer fits my needs. The animation setups were the final straw. No need to go into all the reasons for Daz transitioning from my main software to a very small piece of it, but this brings me to an announcement I've teased a bit on Discord.

In case you haven't checked out the development tracker, you have missed two mysterious items there. Projects Gamma and Lambda. Let's talk about Lambda.

Project Lambda

Three weeks ago, with my frustration with Daz at its height, I set aside a weekend to have fun with a purpose. I opened up YouTube on a Saturday morning with a list of things I wanted to investigate. I had an idea of what I wanted to move to, if I ever left Daz. But was it really possible, especially since I would need to keep models, hair, and clothing the same? Turns out it is very possible. Project Lambda is a port of To Be A King over to Unreal Engine 5.1. I think it is going to be incredible.

Many of the ladies are already in an Unreal project in HD glory. The environments, at least those I want to keep, will get converted also, though these will get some nice Unreal touches added. The plan is for a fully animated visual novel that remains in Renpy for its game engine, but uses videos (cinematics) rendered out from Unreal Engine for all the scenes. Why not go full real-time Unreal Engine for it entirely? The quality I want even taxes my own system, at times. Requiring a 3090 or greater is way too high a barrier to entry. Plus this preserves saves and all that too.

Animations are SO much easier now (as one would expect since, uh, you know, this is used by major studios). Hair moves with the character, there is an actual physics engine that is easily adapted, and more. Every character is coming into Unreal looking nearly identical to how they do in Daz. No model, skin, or even hair changes. The custom skin shader for the characters is remarkable, and there are still a few more improvements I hope to roll out before all this is done.

By the end of the year, I anticipate that this change will lower development times. In Daz Studio, I am setting up individual renders anywhere from 1200 to 1500 times per release. Not to mention dealing with all sorts of quirks in Daz. Soon I will be able to set up lengthier animated cinematics, and I can reuse base animation sets easily. It has been refreshing to have things function with minimal issues. The first time I got *name redacted* to walk down the hall, stop, and start talking and gesturing like a normal human being was incredible. Even better was when that rendered out in under 30 minutes (shorter if I just need to render out a test).

In three weeks of working in Unreal Engine, I can already setup new environments in Unreal faster than I ever could in Daz (and they look better also). I cannot emphasize enough that, while Unreal is not perfect, it is going to provide a much more optimized workflow for me. Less frustration, many more options, and much better quality out-of-the-box.

Besides that, here is what I can finally do:

• Full video in the game, thanks to Unreal's very fast render engine. No more days rendering out a short animation.
• Large outdoor environments with realistic weather effects.
• Expansive battle scenes.
• Realistic combat animations.
• Fully walkable cities as we travel throughout Europe and Asia for future chapters.
• Easy animation corrections and blending.
• Convenient character swapping, thanks to the way Unreal handles characters.
• Fully animated Cronut.

So, your inevitable question: what does this mean for Chapter 11?

The transition to Unreal Engine will be a big one, as you can imagine. It is often said that the first 80% of a project takes 20% of your time and the last 20% takes 80% of your time. This is almost certainly going to prove true here. I am fully aware that no one here wants to wait another 11 months or so for me to get out the next release, no matter how much more awesome it will be. I feel surprisingly comfortable in Unreal Engine already, and that is a testament to excellent software design, but there is still a ton I do not know. Tutorials, Googling, etc. are very much a regular part of my day at the moment, though my master Unreal Engine operations document grows daily. I need something for easy reference in the future.

I'll be doing a split schedule for awhile with work in Unreal and work in Daz both getting time during my six day work weeks. Animations will now be coming once the move to Unreal is made. When does that happen? I am not even going to attempt to predict it. It might, through some miracle, be Chapter 11. It might be Chapter 12. Or it might come in unlucky Chapter 13. It will certainly happen before the end of this year, but I am not going to shortcut something to get us there. As eager as I am to never see Daz, except for exporting models, I also want the first release with the new software to be looking as good as I can pull off.

Please do not worry here about my health or anything. I am not going to crunch to get this done for Chapter 11. There is no burning the midnight oil with this transition. The benefit of going into this full time means that I can pull this transition off without killing myself.

I will say that, looking back at my plans for To Be A King, this switch was inevitable. So many ideas for scenes that I've had to kill because there was no way to do them in Daz Studio. It is now only a matter of biting the bullet and making this transition. With the improved music and sound effects (definitely happening in Chapter 11), this next change is going to provide a better game for everyone. This is not the end of improvement plans for To Be A King though. Once I'm comfortable in Unreal, there are going to be some truly incredible options that you will have during a playthrough.

I am very excited for new possibilities as I continue to get more comfortable in Unreal. Right now my focus is on getting things in there as good as they were in Daz (at a minimum), and getting comfortable with the basic workflow. From there, I have some very ambitious plans for the future. More on those as they develop.

That's all for me. I'm very excited about this change, in case you couldn't tell. The possibilities it opens up for future improvements are enormous. My future ideas list grows by the day, as I need to keep focused on just the essentials right now. We might have some very simple previews out of Unreal before the end of February. Have a great week!