art update: show me that smile (Patreon)

Marty here! Have you already read Mr. Word's (cbob's) post?  If not please do so first. I've been wanting to write an update myself earlier but was waiting on him to provide some more clarity on what was going on with him and give everyone a few days to read it.

First of all, I think most people who have been with us for a longer time, already had a sneaking suspicion about what was causing Mr words slow down. We actually received some pm's suggesting as much to me. Cbob hates showing any signs of "weakness" but I think it's good for everyone to have a better understanding of this so I'm happy he did include it in his update... even though it's more of a "blink and you've missed it" admission.

I've come to realize cbob has very little/weak self diagnosis skills. He just puts on a smile and keeps on going. I recently sent him the following pic to show him how convincing I thought that had become.

He also suggested "knocking the next build out in two weeks"  in an email he sent to me because we have such great patrons and he felt bad for our tardiness ... I would've liked to see my own face when I read that." Call me crazy but looking at our recent track record that seems more like a fever dream than an actual possibility. 

Despite all of the stuff I started doing besides drawing, officially/legally  I'm just a hired hand/contractor responsible for the art. I used to always send all the art/scenes necessary for a new build to cbob at the start of a new month and for a long time that worked out fine.

I want to go full speed again more than anyone else out there, but I think an attempt at that now will only cause a repeat of these last couple of months (with horribly  inaccurate estimations and postponements up the gazoo). That won't do anyone any good. Least of all Cbob. 

I'd like a return to a dependable release schedule and that's not going to happen without cbob taking the time to take care of himself. For real. He has already started doing some smart things and we can  return towards stability if he keeps at it. 

He told me that working(despite his speed) on FET is very important to him so I don't want to cut him off entirely so I'm probably going to start  dripfeeding him art at the start of the new cycle and see how that works out.  Just please take whatever he says about time frames and estimations  with a healthy helping of salt. It's what I do.

Anyway, he has started doing some smart things to get better and one of those things, exercising,  is a good idea for anyone. I don't know about you guys, but I've been getting a covid belly. I hate it and I want it gone. My stomach is growling as I write this and I started running laps during the evening in an effort to smite it. But even without trying to get rid of excess body fat, exercising is good to do.

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So what have and am I doing besides starting to exercise myself? 

last time I held a poll about maybe adding high res pics to the game. I was hoping for an overwhelming yay or nay, but the biggest group is fine with whatever. So while I still wasn't entirely certain I just started converting all the existing book4 love route sprites into their higher res version. 

"When in doubt just start doing something and hope for the best" is the mantra I went by. I pretty much finished all of it.  Not the backgrounds, only the sprites for book 4's love route. The screen's aspect ratio of 4:3  would also still be the way it currently is. So it's more of a Frankenstein solution really. 

The file-size gain isn't as big as I expected and if I'd turn the png's into webp files the difference would be virtually almost erased. that'd be good, but I think I'll hold off on doing that just yet.

I tested the scenes with higher res sprites on a 14 year old pc. It didn't have onboard graphics acceleration, but since I'm the final resting place for my family's old hardware I had a super old graphics card lying around. No surprises there! My ability to throw out things which still work is pretty much non existent. I'm not a hoarder, but could be considered the missing link between  that and normal folks.

Anyway, the old pc had no problems pushing the larger amount of pixels across the screen and the scenes didn't show any sluggishness. Oddly enough it was only the menu's with a lot of menu entries when it did become sluggish. 

So in theory I could change everything once cbob sends me the build for an internal test. Most of the scenes were surprisingly easy to update on my testbed so it shouldn't take me too long since most of the legwork has already been done. That doesn't mean I will. 

I'm currently thinking of maybe just doing one scene and see how it works out in the real world. If it causes problems I can easily undo it and if the results are good I can change it all later for the entirety of book 4's love route.

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As it often does, one thing leads to another and while I was working on increasing the resolution of the sprites I started noticing our pretty "classic" aspect ratio of 4:3 more and more.   

When we started working on FET I still had one of those older 4:3 screens so it felt like a completely natural and fine aspect ratio at the time. 4:3 was fine and still is.  But...  as you might remember I also started refactoring FET a while ago. Let's call it my pet project. It's something which I do on the side whenever I feel I have time.

Refactoring is a fancy name for me rewriting scripts in a better way. I'm making them smaller and also easier to read/understand.  I started doing that because I wanted FET to load faster, but the rewriting is wreaking havoc among savegames so I don't want to add the changes to our actual releases. No yet anyway. It's more something for the far future... like the extended version of FET or something. 

And since I'm already doing all of that... why not update the aspect ratio as well? The answer.. ...because it's a lot of extra work. We hard coded several aspects of FET to only work in the current ratio, but I'm stubborn if nothing else and now that I've managed to put all(or most) of the files we're using into proper folders(which wasn't as easy as it might sound) I've been rewriting book 1 and am trying to see if changing the aspect ratio can be part of that. Not the dialogue, (although I might add a tidbit here and there),  just the script structure.  

So far I've managed to bring down book 1's script size from about 4 Mb to 3 Mb.  Book 1 is by far the smallest among the books so that's not nearly as impactful as it might seem. Still, it's progress.

It's going very slowly.  At the start of creating FET,  Mr. words brute forced his way through problems in a way which is almost beautiful in it's disregard for efficiency.  I'm perfectly serious about that. Trying to figure out what his older scripts are doing can be difficult by itself, but he actually had to write them from scratch and keep older save games into account. I can just fuck around in the scripts with zero regard for any of that and at my own leisure since it's just something on the side for the far future.

It's also going very slowly because it's the kind of stuff I only do when work on in my spare time or when normal builds have slowed down for whatever reason. Despite this hopscotch way of working , I derive a weird sort of satisfaction out of it. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And FET has certainly become an elephant size-wise   Ps. if I had suspected things would take this long with the normal build updates I would've chosen to spend my time differently.

Oh and finally because I am marty and not mr words (despite the deluge of words I just put you through...) here's a picture! A version with chibi Toph can be found in the attachments.

And that' s it. Just a bit of background information on what I've been doing and how I see the future. Once cbob sends me the new build I'll jump into action, testing and updating some of the images as quickly as I can, but just realize cbob's sense of time and what he can do within it is very skewed. I don't think we'll be needing our "hassle sticks" (see mr words earlier post) , but until I can get down and dirty with what he'll send me it's anyone's guess really.