Character View Test Build (Patreon)

Greetings!

I'm finally done with the Character View feature, and it's now ready for you to test out!

Well, there are a few issues with the 'Game View' portion which I'll discuss later in the post, but if you want to give it a spin, here's the links!

The Test Build

The Proteus Effect charViewTest1:

Windows 

Mac 

Linux 

New Features

Unless I screwed up with Git somewhere along the way, there should be no new story content in this test build; it's just 0.8 plus the new features I've been working on. Specifically, it includes:

• The transmogrification (xmog) feature, which lets you make one outfit look like another. There's no game benefit per se, it's just a feature that lets you customize your appearance. If you want to test it out, talk to the transmogrifier on the second floor of the Sorcerer's Society! (Note that you'll need to have started/completed Shiri's quest from 0.8 to access this area.)
• Improved lighting: a few areas of the game will have interesting lighting effects. As of right now it's only parts of the Oracle's temple and the wolf area from Jovi's quest, but you'll start seeing more of this sort of thing in the future. Oh, and the overworld map now has a slight fog effect.
• Character View feature: This is really two different features. First, I reworked the 'Status' menu so that it now shows you renders of party members - and these change based on what they're wearing. (Protip: pressing 'page up' and 'page down' while in the Status menu will cycle between party members.) I refer to this as 'menu view'. I also added a feature that will let you toggle on/off a render of the player character on the main screen as you're walking around. (I refer to this as 'game view'.) You can toggle this on and off by pressing 'i' on the keyboard. Both parts of the Character View feature should properly respect any transmogrifications you make of the PC's outfit.

I shouldn't have included any new story content in this build and I didn't include stuff from the new H-scene, but if you go poking around in the image files you might find a few interesting tidbits! :D

Please let me know if you find any bugs! If I issue any new test builds to address them, I'll update this post with the new links and a changelog describing what I did (it will also be updated in Discord's test builds area.)

Known Issues:

• The 'Game View' image does not automatically change when the PC changes outfits or transmogrifies their current outfit. As a workaround, just toggle the 'game view' image off and then back on after doing one of the aforementioned things.

Character View Discussion

Most of my time lately has been spent making renders and doing postwork; I added 27 new images as part of the new feature, and I ended up redoing them (and the postwork for them) several times. I'm still not really happy with some of them, but I figured I should go ahead and share what I have anyway. The rest of my time was spent polishing up the 'Menu View' feature. Finishing it proved a bit harder than I thought, but barring any bugs it should now be in its final state, and I'm fairly happy with it. 

I ended up having to change some things with equipment slots for most of the NPCs, and this led to an issue that could cause unexpected problems with old saves. Fortunately, I was able to write a function that fixes old saves as you load them, so you shouldn't see any problems from that. As an added bonus, the girls with 'panty' slots should now be wearing them. I can't believe I made poor Shiri walk around without panties for so long!

By the way, I haven't really addressed it before now, but it's currently possible for characters to walk around naked. It probably shouldn't be most of the time - and most H-games have this covered right off the bat! I don't want the player to trip over H-scenes as they're going around doing normal stuff (it would sorta ruin the game's vibe), but I may add a few places/situations where you can get a special H-scene by wearing your birthday suit. That's for the future, but 0.9 may include something that restricts your ability to be naked to certain places/times.

'Game View' Issues

The 'Game View' feature is pretty far from where I'd want it to be, but I decided to go ahead and release it in the test build mostly to see what you guys think about it. I've touched on this in previous posts, but I have two basic problems with the 'game view' feature. First, I don't really like the way it looks, and second it would be really time-consuming and error-prone to implement the feature in a way I'd be quasi-comfortable with. 

I covered the first point in detail in a previous post, but just to recap: I think the renders clash with the visual style of the game world. I think it's jarring to see them both together with no sort of visual boundary between them. Some folks seemed to like it, though, and if enough of you do I might leave it in despite my reservations about it.

The second point has to do with how hard it would be to implement it the 'right' way. The main problem is that once you toggle the image on it stays on until you toggle it off. This may sound okay, but there are parts of the game where I really don't want it up. Take cutscenes. I think it would look weird to have the image up while they're going on, and it could very well block stuff you're supposed to be seeing. I don't want it up during minigames. And I haven't checked to see what it does during H-scenes, but obviously I don't want it up during those either! So, to implement it the way I'd want, I'd need to create some mechanism that tells it to go away during certain events and makes it come back when they're done.

This isn't a hard problem, and I'm sure I could figure something out in a day or two. The real problem is that I'd have to go back through everything I've ever created and put these flags in that say "starting here, make the image go away" and "okay, you can bring it back now." This would be a huge effort, and would be very error-prone to boot. What if I forgot to add a "bring it back" flag somewhere? The feature would then appear to stop working, and it would be very easy to make this mistake with branching events.

I don't see a way to automate this, since it takes me to make a decision about what's a cutscene/minigame/H-scene and what isn't, and where they begin and end. This would be a big commitment of development time, and I'm not sure it's worth it for something I don't like that much anyway.

So, there's a possibility that 'Game View' won't actually make it into 0.9, but I wanted to see what you guys think about it anyway. If enough people really like it, I may leave it in without the whole 'make it go away at certain times' mechanism. If I do, I'll probably make the player go through a few hoops to activate it, just to make sure the average player doesn't turn it on by accident.

So, please let me know what you think about the new features, and please let me know if you find any bugs! I hope you enjoy the test build, and thank you for your support!