Things Are Getting…Unreal (Patreon)

My patrons know this, but I am at the point where I can make it public. I am moving future releases of To Be A King over to Unreal Engine instead of Daz Studio. There are many reasons for the change, with the main one being that animations in Daz are not workable for the vision I have. For your easy perusal, I've included some frequently asked questions below.

Does this mean I need a powerful PC with a nice graphics card to play future releases?

Nope. I'm sparing you from that purchase. I use a game engine called Renpy, and that engine is used by nearly every visual novel out there. What Project Lambda is doing is changing how I create the art for the game. Unreal Engine will produce the art on my computer systems, but I'll still package everything into Renpy. You won't have to worry about framerates, graphics quality, or anything else. If you can run the game now on Windows, Linux, or Mac without issue, you will be able to in the future. The only big change I'd expect is that releases will be larger in file size with all the videos.

Why make the switch during development? Couldn't you wait until your next project?

I could do that, but To Be A King has at least another 18 months of development ahead. That is a long time to put off a change that has many benefits. I already know that this switch will reduce development times, increase quality and immersion significantly, and make things like character swaps for scenes an absolute breeze. I am gaining a much easier development process, and you, the player, are gaining full animation and more choices for how the story plays out. It's a win-win, once we complete the transition.

How is this decreasing development times?

As the learning curve of UE5 evens out, I will have a lot more things at my disposable to make releases larger, more realistic, and come out more quickly. We won't be at that stage for a bit, as there is a lot to learn and get done, but we aren't talking years for this either. Not only are the features of UE5 designed for quick production, but producing dozens of animations in Unreal Engine is a lot quicker than doing 1200+ static renders each release in Daz. Even things like animation assets can be shared across characters, and small changes are just a few clicks away. The one thing I am most excited about is that, because of the structure of Unreal Engine for characters, I can make improvements globally for things like a character's skin or eyes, and ALL my characters get those improvements without editing individual character models.

Won't it be weird that the game suddenly changes like this?

You're not wrong. Volume 2, before its final & complete release, will get a full overhaul with everything being done in Unreal Engine to make that transition a bit easier. I'd like to redo Volume 1 as well, but I will need to have a better idea of how long that would take before I commit to a timeframe for it.

Is the game going to be "free roam" now?

No, though I will present more choices for you to choose what to do next. But there won't be any map selection, time of day BS ("The tavern is currently closed."), or confusing game mechanics. To Be A King is staying a pure visual novel, though now it will have better quality, full animations, and more choices available to you.

When will you have a demo or something to show us?

Within the next few weeks. My goal is by the end of March for a public reveal (patrons will get a look earlier than that).

When is Chapter 11 coming out?

No release date to announce yet. I already planned to have a longer development cycle for this chapter since I was including animations. We may be stretching that out a bit more than my original plan, but this transition is going to make many things easier for development going forward. With improved music & sound effects, full animations, and perhaps a few other small improvements before everything is done, Chapter 11 is going to be a release you won't want to miss.

The Long List of Reasons I Am Switching:

If you really want the details, here's why I decided it was worth it to invest the time to switch from Daz to UE5. Animations were the big one. There are a lot great animations that come out of Daz. However, the animation tools in Daz are still far behind. They are better than they were a few years ago, but nowhere near something like Blender, Maya, or UE5. Basic things are hard, and since there is no real time physics engine (sorry, Dforce…), a lot has to be done manually. I hoped I had found a way to take a lot of the drudgery out of this, but nope. 3 hours in UE5, and I had a better animation than I had after 7 days in Daz. I've held off on animations a bit longer than I should havein To Be A King, and I could not neglect to include these any longer.

Lighting is another big improvement. Even with every tweak in the book, lighting in Daz, especially in dim scenes, is very difficult. A lot of noise and long render times. Thanks to Lumen in Unreal, lighting is not only better, but much easier to setup and then render.

Render engine speed is not my biggest issue, thanks to a lot of money I've spent on computer hardware. But waiting over a day for a Daz animation to render out? Nah, bro. Unreal is head and shoulders above Daz here, which, to be fair, so is most other 3D software. It also renders out in a format that makes postwork much easier and streamlined, so that is a nice bonus. 4K renders in a minute for the win!

An actual real time physics engine that can calculate things like clothing, hair, and even the leaves on trees and plants without bogging down is amazing. Dforce cannot compare, nor would I expect it to. There is a bit more time involved to get everything setup in Unreal, but hair bouncing naturally, breasts and butts jiggling a bit, and clothing draping over the body is a nice improvement over my past few years of Daz hassles.

Large open worlds are possible now in UE. Anyone who has tried more than a backyard scene in Daz knows the joys of trying to render out a decent landscape, not to mention trying to get a full city in. There are workarounds, but they are cumbersome and still make the scene slow to load and work in. For obvious reasons, UE5 has none of these issues. I will finally be able to do some outdoor scenes where folks walk along a path.

To Be A King will leave Caudium within a few releases, and the assets available for where I'm taking the gang were extremely limited. There was going to be a lot of trying to convert things to Daz that were not at all designed for Daz. Thanks to Unreal's large developer base, I've got a plethora of assets to pull in, and they will work out of the box too. This opens up a lot more story possibilities and immersion.

My final reason is perhaps the saddest. The folks behind Daz are not innovating at all, and they have never provided much in the way of documentation or tutorials. My friend, Jay Versluis (WPGuru), is trying his best, and I'm pleased that Daz got him to provide a lot of needed content. But the Daz ecosystem seems far behind what is already available in other software. It helps that Epic Games is many times the size of the folks over at Daz, but I cannot tell you how wonderful it has been to have a huge library of written and video resources on virtually anything I want to know.

I'll always appreciate how easy Daz made it to get into this work for someone who was a total novice. But sometimes your tools need to change to fit your needs, and now is that time. Months of encountering significant limitations or very cumbersome workarounds are at an end. The road to moving isn't a smooth one, and everything isn't sunshine and rainbows in UE5. However, it is already opening up a lot more improvements, and it gets easier each day as I learn more.