Development Update #13- Chapter 3

👋 New Sunday, new devlog.

This week was a good week of progress. I made it to a total of 1339 renders.

I couldn't work on the music once again because I was just too focused on the rendering side of development. That's not ideal since I'm a little behind schedule with it, but it's not something I'm too worried about right now.

On Friday, I tested the Horde add-on that I talked about last week. It works well, but I only tested it on a very simple scene just to play around with it a bit. I haven't tried it on an actual chapter scene yet.

Most of the scenes have a lot of vegetation and fog, so I'm not too confident it'll perform as well as it did in my test. I think I can probably make it work. Maybe by doing more distant shots and things like that 🧐

So far, the chapter is about 10 GB. Now, don't panic 😅 None of the renders have been optimized yet. They're all still in PNG format, which is why the size is so large.

Once all the renders are finished, I'll optimize everything as much as possible. Renders will be converted to WebP, music to OGG, and so on.

For this chapter, I want to keep as much image quality as possible. As most of you know, Chapter 1 was rendered in 1080p with a fairly high noise threshold. (technical rendering stuff, a higher noise threshold means faster renders, but less detail in the final image) Around 70% of Chapter 2 was also developed in 1080p, while the rest was rendered in 4K and then downscaled to 1080p, again with a relatively high noise threshold.

Chapter 3 is being rendered completely in 4K with a much lower noise threshold. I don't want to downscale the renders to 1080p this time. My current plan is to keep the 4K renders and rely on lossless WebP compression to reduce file size.

I think I've found a way to let Ren'Py handle the scaling automatically, which means players with smaller monitors won't have any issues, while players with larger monitors can still enjoy the full image quality.

This will increase the final size of the game compared to previous chapters, but I think it's worth it. I'm developing Chapter 3 on a 27-inch monitor, and one thing I've noticed is how much image quality can be lost when 1080p renders are stretched across a larger display. My goal with Chapter 3 is to avoid that as much as possible, so players with bigger monitors can enjoy the renders without that loss in quality.

That's pretty much it for this devlog.

(I've been slacking a bit with the 4K wallpapers these last two weeks, sorry 😶. Winter is just around the corner here and the colder weather hasn't exactly helped with staying up late making wallpapers. But they'll be back this week 😀)

Hope you all have a great week.

—pixelend 🧟