Pics 110: Daz Studio Gen 8 Ariane

Kind of ran out of "game" art, and I've been really busy on several fronts.  I got a new "steam deck" and I am working on trying to get Date Ariane Remastered to work properly on it.  More on that later.

This weeks pictures are experimental.  As I come to finishing up remastering all my current games, I need to start thinking what is next, and the way tech is going right now there are dozens of ways to go artistically. AI? Metahumans? Real Illusions?

One way is to move to Daz Studio which is the industry standard of 3D visual novelists (in fact I might be the only one still using Poser), but if I do it would be to take advantage of their high resolution models Victoria 8, the most popular ever, and 9, the newest.  That means redesigning my characters on new models which historically hasn't gone well.  Luckily some fans have been playing with the idea already over at f95 have come very close. (link is NSFW)

They suggested a popular prebuilt model named Aurore by Kayleyss as a good starting point for a Genesis 8 Ariane, and I agree.  Athletic body that looks like a real woman. I could almost use her in games and call her Ariane, except Being a DIK beat me to it.

Not wanting to use the same model as that game, I decided to use a trick I used when I first made the current Victoria 4 Ariane: I used a different skin texture.  The texture for MRL Ariana doesn't work on Victoria 8, but Mihrelle who made the skin makes several skins for Victoria 8 models, and MRL Gem is nearly spot on to what I was looking for.  Add on the Euridice Hair I've been using which works fine with the Aurore shape, and I have a Victoria 8 Ariane model I can use.

Is it a huge enough improvement that I now need to redo all the games with this model? Hell no. It is barely a slight improvement. Mostly it is an attempt to future proof new projects I want to make.  Speaking of future proofing my games...

Date Ariane Remasted on Steam Deck

Didiko posted this image on discord.  Date Ariane Remastered on Steam Deck?  While Steam Deck is no where near as popular as android, iOS, and other consoles, making steam games compatible with it increases steam sales, because most legacy games don't work on it. I decided I needed to get my own!  It arrived yesterday.

If you have steam deck and the steam version of Date Ariane Remastered in your library, it won't load. There is a "hack" of sorts. 1. Load it on to the steam deck, go to the games Properties.  There is a blank space for "Launch Options" Type the following exactly (CASE MATTERS): PROTON_LOG=1 %command%

When I tried it it worked, but the keyboard and mouse profile was not ideal.  I have since enabled a second profile for controllers which is built in to the Renpy version 8, so if you update the game, you can use the left thumb control to highlight choices and the "A" key to select.

Two things I need to fix before the game can be certified as "steamdeck compliant", 1.) On the character screen when it asks you to type in a name it needs to automatically pop up the steam deck on screen keyboard.  It doesn't.  You can press "Steam + X" to enable it yourself, but that is not good enough for compliance. 2.) when using the highlighted help paths, there is no indication that you are on the right choice except to make sure that nothing else is highlighted. This is completely broken when there are multiple highlights like at dinner.  I'm sure there is a way to add an extra outline or background highlight to whatever you are pointing at with the left thumb, but haven't worked it out yet.

Meanwhile I used a dev tool (because I'm a dev) to load a Linux build of Date Ariane Remastered on to the steam deck to test it properly.  I could easily do the same for the rest of my games, which means once I get these issues figured out I could start working on releasing all my games on steam and steam deck!