re:Dreamer Public Alpha 0.5.3 release
Added 2020-12-06 03:53:32 +0000 UTC
Sorry for the delay everyone!
re:Dreamer (0.5.3) was a far more complicated update than I had planned:
- There have been heavy edits to the Ryouichi confrontation to show off Zach as more of a scared opportunist getting revenge than a master manipulator. Zach's a lot shrewder than one might expect an autist of his caliber to be, but he's not able to pull off a mind game on that level.
- Ryouichi's sprite has been removed to prevent a potential legal issue from arising because unbeknownst to me until 2 weeks ago, the visual novel source of Ryouichi's placeholder sprites received a commercial English release literally days after Ryouichi's sprites were ripped for use in this game.
- Added a segment to Keisuke Day 2's morning meeting between Zach, Keisuke, and Ai based on whether or not Zach had "therapy" with Ai on Day 1, and if so, what he answered. The scene now has lots of T.E.A.C.H. flow behind it, as well as other edits elsewhere.
- There's now a proper branch between Keisuke Day 3 Party and Keisuke Day 4 morning. The gap in story is still there, but at least you don't have to access the jump menu to get to Day 4, and there's a brief summary of the unwritten events that happened later that night.
- The content jump menu has been reworked for clarity and more options.
- Ai has been rebuilt from scratch with proper layered source files direct from her artist. The sprites had previously been delivered as .PNGs which required some rather imperfect Photoshop skills from myself to create the individual facial expression components, the flaws of which became overwhelmingly apparent after the game window size increase. These new parts are derived from the raw independent layers and look much cleaner.
- The Ai, Keisuke, shower sex HCG, and Zoey 'layeredimage' files have been rebuilt with downscaling via the waifu2x-ncnn-vulcan engine on the upconv_7 model. I had previously assumed that Lanzcos resampling algorithm would be sufficient for downscaling our very large source files to the size required by the game's 1920x1080 window, but applying that method to Ai's rebuilt 'layeredimage' files revealed noticeable anti-aliasing issues between her smaller facial components (such as her eyebrows) and the transparent pixels of the alpha channel that was not present with downscaled fully assembled sprites. Essentially, the pixels on these transparent edges were much sharper than they should have been when the image layers were assembled as a displayable within Ren'Py, waifu2x with a -1 denoise level produces more accurate scaling. But don't tell Ai that, or she'll try to take credit for an AI scaling engine producing better results.
- Zoey's placeholder sprites have been rescaled to the projected size of TiltSHIFT's Zoey sprites. Yes, she's really that short (160cm/5'3") compared to Keisuke (182cm/6'0"). But highlighting the height difference between her and Keisuke isn't the reason for this adjustment; no, she has been resized in order to pair better with the size of Myumi's Britney sprites. After some prodding, he has projected a date between December 4th and December 6th to complete the first pose of Britney's sprites to the point that they can be used in-game (that means giving her a full set of expressions, her facial emotes, the casual and nude outfits, both her hairstyles, and her glasses). I know all you yuri fans out there have been lamenting Britney's neglect for over 10 months, but she's finally going to get new story content next update!
