Exploring new territories

Hello everyone.

Just a heads-up, this very long post is just my thoughts on the game and not some sort of announcement. This is just me rambling and accompanying it with a render. Feel free to skip the long read 😂

One of the main concerns I have with CoMS is time. It has been more than 5 years since I started learning and working on the game. So many things have changed.

If we observe the release cadence of updates over the years and should the end of Chapter 4 be the middle of the story, we're looking at a decade-long journey to completion, if we're generous.

I can understand there are those who have come and gone. Those that have played the game back in 2021 that never could have imagined after 5 years we are only just about to reach halfway and recognizing that likely have turn them away. It is hard to imagine following something for 10 years, knowing it very well could take that long and still be interested.

As for me, while I wish I could be faster, there is something that is a bigger concern to me than speed. I completely understand those that have lost interest due to how long the story have taken to develop and how much longer it could take, I think it is a completely valid reason, quality simply matters more.

One of the challenges of continue development on a project that is ongoing and regularly updated is keeping up with time. Every month there are new games released with better and better technology, ideas and talent behind them. They have fresh new assets, new animations, new UI, new mechanics. And every year goes by the old games get more and more dated, especially in the visual department.

I remember games from 2018, games that inspired me to go on this journey. I remember how old they look by the time 2021 came by. This is not an insult or critique to old games, just stating the fact that newer assets are of higher quality, they are more detailed. Lighting techniques that used to be relatively unknown and limited to very few developers are now almost standard knowledge. The floor have never been higher.

This puts me and CoMS in an interesting position. Full disclosure, I personally believe my game looked great for 2021, dare I say one of the best visually. And every update since I've tried to keep up with time. I want to keep up with the latest and greatest if not staying ahead of the curve. This mean continue development of my own knowledge and skills. I'm very proud to say every year I've found new things that I could learn and implement into the game, visually-speaking. I think this is what helps CoMS looking as good as it is despite its age.

But there is a limit to how far you can take something. There are things just simply out of your control. One of the biggest reasons older games can't escape looking dated after a few years is just because you can't keep remaking character assets over and over again. The characters look a certain way that people are familiar and even attached to. Not to mention the time it takes to remake anything. If you were to ask players what they would prefer the developer spend time on, remaking or new content, I firmly believe new content wins out every time. It is very hard to justify constantly upgrading the characters with new tech.

In the case of CoMS, I do very gradual updates to my characters, many times they are not even noticed by players. I use every new update as an opportunity to reevaluate the current status of my characters. Not every character receive updates every year, but they do receive small tweaks and fixes at some point in the past 5 years. Lana, for example, received the most updates, she gets changes almost every update. This isn't because of some bias, but just because she is the most customized of my characters but also my first. She had a lot of foundational technical issues because I didn't know what I was doing. And instead of completely remaking her from scratch, I've just been updating her once or twice a year.

What does this have to do with the render you might be wondering? Well, to quickly explain some concepts for those who might not be aware, vast majority of AVN devs use DAZ Studio to make our renders. The reason we use DAZ is because it is the most accessible 3D software at rendering characters you can customize. You can dress them up, tweak their looks, hit render and you got a render. It is very easy to get into and do all of that, relatively speaking.

One of the things DAZ do is generations, their character models are separated by generations they called Genesis. Currently, the latest is Genesis 9 or G9. CoMS was developed when G8.1 just came out. For that reason, only Lana, Mireille, Blanche and Safiya were G8.1. The others were G8. I eventually updated all of them to G8.1 two years ago.

G8.1 was not a full generational upgrade, but it did made a huge leap from G8 in terms of fidelity and control over facial movements. For those who have been following AVN since before 2021, most games were made with G8, sometimes even older models if you got further back than even 2018.

One of the problems with a new generation is that assets are typically not compatible between generations. Stuff like clothing, plugins, animations, hair, etc. For that reason, it is often not practical to just upgrade characters to the next generation, not to mention the potential visual discrepancy the upgrade progress could bring.

And so I have no intentions of upgrading to G9. Not even new characters will be G9 in order to keep everything looking like they belong together. However, and some time I should at least try it and educate myself, update my knowledge and skills. So, this render is my first attempt at creating a character using G9.

But that's not all. Because while upgrading to G9 is impractical, something else isn't that I haven't talked about yet, is Blender. Blender is a very powerful 3D software that offers loads of features DAZ do not have. Blender is a far more reliable software as it is widely used outside of AVN industry. It has more support, more updates. If I want to consider the future of a 10-years game, I have to consider tools that have a more certain future.

And so, this is not only my first G9 character, it is also my first character that I did the sculpting in Blender.

The character was still based on a G9 asset, I did not sculpt this from scratch, I merely tweaked it, using it as a base to create a character I have in mind. But this opens up a lot of potential uses, some I have already implemented into the game in the last update. The most common usage is fixing clothing.

In this case, the collar of the jacket would have been upright like it is on the left collar and clipping into her long hair. I could try and fix it in DAZ, but with all due respect to the creator of the plugin that enables said feature in DAZ, doing this in Blender is much easier. Barely took a minute to fix this in Blender. I also did a lot of other fixes but I won't get into every little bit of it.

What this mean is that going forward, I am very excited by the potential of Blender. I could do my usual upgrades and tweaks there instead of DAZ, it's just a new avenue where new things can be incorporated.

There is also a potential future where i just move platform and render in Blender as well. Doing this will be a huge undertaking and not likely to happen. Despite everything, DAZ still offers a lot of convenience that Blender do not. If there is a window of opportunity do it, it would be after the next update. Staring down another 5 years of development, I have to think about the future, and I don't know what the future of DAZ will hold, but Blender is likely the more stable and reliable platform.

I'm going to cut it "short" here. This is a way longer post than I intended and I could go on and on and on and on...

Thank you for reading, if you've gotten this far. Have a good day!