It's the "Another update already?" update...

Hello!

Just a quick post* to get back on track with some goods after last weeks slightly "meh" news update.

Technical news

Now this relates to one of those technical issues that are really important to get right , but you won't notice it if I do. You'll only notice if I get it wrong.

Not to knock Renpy, as it is pretty flexible after all, but it was designed first and foremost for games that would tend to have a static background with character images sliding in and out from the left and right as they spoke. Although it has video handling, the base movie code was designed so that the static background would be there, the movie would play on top of it, and then you'd return to the static background. 

Heavy Five, on the other hand, has images which transitions into a movie and then back to a different image. And that's when I'm being basic. I also have screens running on top of movies, image transition to screens and -then- to movies, movies going back and forth between a whole series of images - and- screens, and then yet more movies. And this is before we even get to having things like the new PDA GUI on top of all that.

In short, I'm pushing the engine very, very hard.

And since all of the recent re-wiring has been done to make the game much more immersive, I absolutely couldn't have stutter, or flickering or Renpy handling things so slowly that, for example, you'd get image A, the movie, then image A again before it realising it should be showing image B.**

Achieving this has been a genuine technical challenge and not only because some of the video files are pretty extensive. The main issue has been getting Heavy Five to be seamless display wise on as wide a variety of PC performance as possible (and Mac ofc! ) 

One of the downsides of having high performance PCs to work with (and it is the only downside to be honest) is that a combination of the graphics card and the CPU having a lot of oomph means that it can process the information so quickly that it can forgive a lot of displayable coding. By that I mean, I can have code that runs the game perfectly display wise for me but on machine without the same level of power it could display poorly, slowly or with jitter. And when we get down to it, it's absolutely no good me looking at what I've done and going "Looks great!" and calling it job done if, when it's on your machine, it doesn't look great at all. After all this game is for you, no?

So, the backend of last week was taken up with kicking out extracts of the game that had the most complex handling combinations possible to a fairly broad selection of testers and players. As I expected, some issues did crop up that weren't visible to me and, although solving them was an interesting experience (I couldn't see or tell whether the corrections would actually work until the poor bugger who reported the issue downloaded it once more and ran it again), I'm pleased to say the coding and displays have been optimised to the point where you should have no problems at all.

Can I guarantee it? No. No, of course not, I've idea what PC you have. But I can assure you I've given it a bloody good go - all the way down to a PC running Windows 7.

Other stuff

Otherwise things seem to be running smoothly.

I've got to stop going back and faffing with that naughty animation in Two though. It seems every few days I try to tweak it a bit more. To be honest at this point I suspect I've lost a bit of perspective on how good it is. It could be fantastic for all I know and yet still I'd be worrying away at it. So, I'm going to leave it alone and see what the testers make of it.

And that's it for now

Stay, or be, lucky.

Notty

* Well that's the intent at the start. Let's see how I get on....***

** Incidentally the quick fix for this was always to show a blank screen just before you played the movie. A brute force approach but one that did prevent that scenario - although at the cost of a black screen flicker each time a movie played. So if you ever play a game that has a slight black flicker before a movie plays you now know why.

*** Damn it. I tried!