Working on v0.55
Hi folks
Almost a week has passed since release of v0.54 and public release of v0.52a.
Since then as mentioned in v0.54 release post, I'm occupied with creating the gallery feature.
So how's the progress on v0.55 ?
TLDR:
- Gallery feature will be in v0.55 on 28th of May
- It will feature mostly erotic scenes
- It will show you locked scenes you missed.
- It will have a dialogue % indicator to show you missed text.
I tried to implement it earlier but i had some issues that would risk a bi-weekly release. As mentioned i decided to use v0.55 as the gallery feature release and i would focus only on that.
The RenPy engine in which i make my game comes with the gallery feature. "Yaaay !!". At least that's what i thought at the time... How hard it could be ?
Turns out that its gallery implementation is super cumbersome and very manual which is something i discovered over first 3 days since v0.54 release. I learned and played with it but it quickly became annoying to work with. Basically you have to manually add images to gallery string by string in the code, do miniatures yourself etc. 0 automation.
I did some napkin math and i had nearly 1000 images already. Even doing copy paste would take looong hours to get it. Moreover due to how i use images in order to create gallery with proper scenes i would have to watch out what i am doing as sometimes i would repeat images in the script.
Doing miniatures for 1000 images ? Yeah... not something that can be done fast. Sure i can come up with a batch Adobe Photoshop script but those miniatures can't be random either, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them correctly. You have to first pick miniature good enough for representation of what scene shows and then zoom in a bit in correct place framing it well.
Oh and don't forget about movies. Because they are not supported well in the gallery and you have to use hacks to get it working correctly...
As you can see this is time consuming and frankly mega boring.
Since i have Python programing skills i decided to do what a reasonable code monkey would do.
"Write your own damn gallery and have 100% control over it." - Adolf Einstain circa 1422
So i did. in 3 more days i had my own gallery. The gallery worked and it automatically divided the events, unlocked images etc. all without me sitting for hours copy pasting strings of text per an image. "Only few micro issues left". It didn't support movie files and had some issues here and there but those problems can be solved no ?
Well yeah. I could, by directly changing RenPy internal code. That naturally was a red flag already but i wasn't one of those who auto-update whatever software they work on to be met with the pain later on. But then when i was in middle of it, happily banging away RenPy internals i realized the one crucial thing.
I'm not releasing only on Windows. I have to think about Mac and Android users. And from stats i have, Android users are actually more common than Windows or Mac users. My code relied on using Windows os functions to scour folders so on and so forth.
Great. Now i have to learn about android programing, its os etc. And the more i started to learn about it, the more i realized that producing my own gallery without putting R&D during my off hours, deciding on tech solution and testing it before going into production this update was a mistake that could cost me weeks of development, what's worse i'm a week into schedule and with no gallery to show.
So what i did ?
I went back to coal mining and putting those damn strings into gallery manually via the default RenPy gallery. The initial idea for gallery was to encompass all images and i have to curtail that to select scenes mostly focusing on erotic content. Good news is that i solved issue with displaying movies in gallery so it CAN be completed. Now i need some manual work for 2-3 days, gui, Q&A and release it. The benefit of my own gallery is that it will be 100% automated which means no wasted time that i can use for other stuff like event creation. So when that version will be ready i won't need to do manual stuff anymore.
Good news is that gallery will be working, bad news it will leave me almost no time for any new event as i have to work my way through all events, do miniatures, check stuff etc etc etc
The next update post v0.55, naturally will be all about events.
Either way folks, thanks for tuning in for this long progress update :)
Perkel