Carry On Christie

As the title implies I've been working on Christie today, specifically on conversations over the phone. I've added some 300 lines of dialogue which will build up towards a new hidden event. There's a lot of work still to do before all of that is done but when it is I don't have any more content planned for Christie outside of accusing her of something at the end but that is a long way off yet and won't be very in depth. In other words Christie will soon be basically complete and will be the first character to be in that position. After her I want to get Mark done so that covers most of the bases, and then Jenny, because... Jenny. Yeah.
Halo has undoubtedly slowed my progress this week but I get two weeks off at Christmas and since it's been 7 years since I got a present that wasn't clothes or edible I'm sure I will plenty of free time then. Assuming I don't buy myself GTA V.
TTFN!

Sunday, Ruddy Sunday

Got a decent amount done today, more than I had expected. First off I added additional conditions to ensure that you can't get to the strip club or meet the fisherman before your transformation, as well as saving me from having to work on reactions for several characters it also avoids a few story conflicts. I meant to do this earlier but it slipped through the cracks.
Next I added reactions for Billy the Barman and Bob the Dock manager so that they acknowledge the fact you no longer look like the same person. I also fixed Langstrom's reaction where he was checking if you look female rather than if you have changed. This won't affect most players but did cause potential conflict, particularly in the future.
Finally I wrote 200 + lines of new dialogue with Christie which will lead up to taking your relationship further with her. I fully intend on having that complete in this version. I have two sex scenes planned for her but I haven't decided if I'm going to have both in the next update or to focus on someone else. I have two more planned for Jenny, one for Sonia and a few bonus scenes but obviously as each has lots of potential variations they take a while to write and ensure they are working correctly without being too generic.
Anyway, that's how I spent my Sunday. With Halo coming out in two days I doubt I will be spending much time on Redus over the next couple of weeks but who knows, I didn't expect to get much done this week either.

DFTD - now with post!

Tweaked a few of the images which had developed jagged outlines, I doubt I found them all but it is usually an easy fix.
I've also cleared up a few more bugs, added a few entries to the library books and added room image display commands onto every piece of furniture in the game. It annoyed me how after you have examined something in your inventory or spoken to a character the image would usually stay there until you left or replaced the image with another. I didn't want to make the image disappear after examining an item as that would require an extra Click to Continue press on every object with an image and those things annoy me enough already, this way you can still examine everything as normal with no extra input but the pictures won't stay there blocking the room image forever either. Of course it did take a while to add the command (even with copy paste) onto every examine, inspect, use, open, close etc. trigger for every furniture object (well over 100, I'm not even going to bother counting). As a result I'm done for the day.

It's not going to be like this everyday you know!

Normally I wouldn't have time to do all of this during the week but I've been ill the last few days. With that tidbit I've done some more today. First of all I deleted every image from the game and added all of the updated versions (in case you wanted to know, the game is 29MB without images, I just thought that was pretty cool). After some initial problems with RAGS thinking that many of the pics were videos I believe I have them all working again along with a small number of new ones. When playing through to look for missing images as usual I noticed a long list of bugs, mistakes and a few lines of dialogue that I couldn't stand to see exist any longer. They have been sorted out and I have implemented the urinal in the mens room at the strip club, I honestly thought I had already written it but there is no evidence to suggest that is the case.
I may or may not be back at work tomorrow but I know that I will be busy this weekend so I don't know when I will get another chance to get some more done. I have a small number of major bugs to grapple with before I start adding more content and there is an awful lot to add.

Happy Shopper

And with that, every single image in the game (and a few not in yet), has been converted to the new format, I was surprised by how many artifacts were left on several of the partially transparent images, that should be mostly cleared up now as I trimmed each image before hand to ensure accurate boundaries. Inventory items are scaled to roughly 400x400 with a max height of 500 and a max width of 600, this should provide a decent sized boundary around each of them to ensure that no item takes up the whole window. Characters will use up more screen space than that as you would expect and some use more than I would like as better scaled source images were not always available (for example, if the original image cut off the top of the head and both shoulders, rather than try to recreate parts of their bodies, I had to stick with the aspect as given. There were a small number of images where I did end up adding artificial shoulders to alleviate this problem, especially when the source images are square).
I haven't put the pics into the game yet, that is my next task. I just hope I don't miss any, there are far too many images to replace one-by-one (128 pics at last count), so this will be a bulk task.

I'm a regular shutterbug! Well, not really.

That's the location pics done and I managed to get all of the character pictures done as well. All there is left is a handful of furniture images and the 30+ inventory images. Once they are done every image in the game should be 800x600, an improvement over my original stance which was to try to get one of the axis as close to 500 as I could get (hey, that was big on my old monitor). Of course the actual image quality won't be much better and in cases where the original was blown up anway, they will look a little worse, but the consistent dimensions certainly improve the interactions. (If you are wondering, I am not simply blowing up the images used previously, I am using the originals which are a detailed as I could find and scaling down). Some pics, especially the locations, will look a bit better but I don't want to try for any larger sizes as the sheer number of images already slow down the game considerably and compounding that problem too much would likely result in more crashes as RAGS seems to give up easily if there is something it doesn't like.

Not even worth a post really, more like a stump

I took a break from gaming today to get some more of those image adjustments done, I managed to do some 70 images. There are roughly 30 left to do before I can move onto objects and then I still have to do people so there are hundreds yet to do but the improvement is worth it. Mostly it is just a case of standardising the resolution (I'm trying for 800x600 where possible), for the characters and items I will also need to resize them with transparent space. I'm also re-visiting several of my edits that I did in GIMP to improve them. This is an example of how much better they look:

The main advantage to this will be that moving between rooms should look cleaner as the image box won't keep resizing, and the items won't be switching between small in the center and filling up the whole box.
I'm sure you would rather I was finishing up the plot or something instead, but every time I have played through the game the images have been my number one gripe and I want to fix that. I'm not sure what difference there will be to the file size in the end, I am also trying to standardise the file sizes, but as I am doing all optimisation outside of the built-in image tool this time it could go either way. The pics should look better though and that's the main thing.

And now a word from our sponsors

So, news.
Not much progress on Redus, between Borderlands, Civ BE, Sunset Overdrive, Star Citizen and soon Halo taking up my free time, not to mention Arrow, SHIELD, Korra, Castle and so on sapping those few leftover minutes each night, I am fully booked. So what's the news? Well, I got a raise, a new boss so I can now change my hours and I moved out recently. All of this means that when the gaming season dies down I will have more free time than I have had in months and the freedom and flexibility to work openly and even during the week if I want.
I know this hiatus has been annoying for those of you still interested in this project and I know it has been selfish of me, but it has been nice having a normal few months. My isolation after everything that happened damaged a lot of my relationships and I have had to work at making things right, but I think I'm finally getting there. I'm happy in my new place and based on how much effort I put into Redus the last time I felt like this, I predict a brighter future for the game. With any luck, this time next year it should be mostly finished (with a fully completable version well before then, fingers crossed).