Brad's Erotic Week (BEW) - S01, E07 (2017-12-04)

[Wolfschadowe]

... I suspect the same will be true with BEW and wolfshadowe. Improvement can already be seen. So it will only improve and what we have now is still quality work. Kudos wolfshadowe.

Some sites seem to be only interested in posting new games as fast as they can regardless of quality while others to emphasize quality over quality and take a very long time to get new games. BEW has both quality and the time frame time between releases is reasonable. Again Kudos.

Thanks ut2stgear1!
Some of it is also a conscious choice for lower quality. I could easily spend all day rendering, tweaking lights, re-rendering, fixing, and re-re-re-rendering an image to get it just right and high quality. But if I do that...well, it would take far too long to get the game out. One render a day, for 4000 estimated renders for season 1...Maths. I don't like Maths, but you get the idea.

I only have about 3 hours a day, on average, to dedicate to BEW, so the real bottleneck is render time. Setting up the scene takes time, then configuring the lights properly takes more time, then posing, then finally rendering. For another image in the same scene maybe you can just repose and render the next image, but if you change the camera location, it's a matter of re-configuring the lights again. If you assume 5-10 minutes to pose everything in the scene, then 20 minutes to get a decent render in a complex scene like the bar, that's a maximum of 6 images a day to render, but usually I get less than that done.

That's one of the reasons I'm excited about the new nVidia iRay render engine. I have to confess, I've burned a lot of time over the last week or so playing with the iRay render engine in the Daz 6.8 beta. I don't quite have the hardware to make it feasible yet for BEW, but by adding a second video card to my render system dedicated to CUDA processing, I can do renders like the one below in spoiler, but with slightly better quality, in about 10 minutes, plus it eliminates the need to futz with lights every time I move the camera. Scene setup takes about 2x the time, but once set up, I can shoot anywhere in the scene, from any angle and never worry about moving lights around.

The character here is in a dark room. The only lights are coming from three computer screens, the illuminated keyboard, and assorted LED status lights. Note things like the keyboard glow on the palms of the hands (seen between the thumb and hand on the left hand), the shadow of the left hand on the left forearm. How the bounce lighting from the screens and the wall behind allows you to see under the desk. Now imagine this quality for all the rest of BEW... It's a dream, but it's doable. It just takes too long to render on my current hardware setup.

Wolfschadowe

[ut1stgear1]

I've actually heard the same thing from other authors of games. Render, render and render. Then there's always "My computer is too slow so need to upgrade or replace" it. I can imagine someone making a movie having the same issues when shooting just one scene. Only on a much larger scale. Take 1, Take 2... Take 100.

edit: Forgot to say that rendering is excellent. Looks like we are in for some exciting changes, not expected, in your scenes. Right now your renderings far outshine most other authors. However, in all of this you mage to not let your script or concept suffer. I think that's a great quality. Even in movies they try to strike a balance so unless they have a ton of money something will have to suffer to keep the quality in other areas. Just keep up what you're doing and we will be more than satisfied.

[Wolfschadowe]

I've actually heard the same thing from other authors of games. Render, render and render. Then there's always "My computer is too slow so need to upgrade or replace" it. I can imagine someone making a movie having the same issues when shooting just one scene. Only on a much larger scale. Take 1, Take 2... Take 100.

Yep. It takes me about an hour per page, when all is said and done. Roughly 45 minutes of that is the artwork. The last 15 minutes is storyboard/outlining/logic graphing/Creating the page/Writing the text/Logic Programming/Rewriting the text/testing/Bugfixing. That's not guesstimating. That's pretty much the actual ratio according to ManicTime (Thanks Kexter for cluing me in to that!).

So anything that knocks time off the render process can have a huge impact to the speed and quality of the overall game. I can drop the overall quality of the images to speed that up, or do what some artists do and just use headlight lighting which makes the characters look flat, but that wouldn't fit my personal aesthetics for the game. Keep in mind that the artwork portion is more than just render time, Setting up the shot so it's ready to render takes about half of that. The cool thing about iRay is that it has the potential to reduce the 45 minutes per frame to anywhere between 20-35 minutes per frame, which is a huge chunk when you think about it. It brings benefits not only to the render time, but also the scene setup and "maintenance" that goes on between shots. Easily half my time between shots is maintenance of the lighting, which is a PITA! With iRay, that maintenance is drastically reduced, and in most cases, eliminated. The other thing is that iRay drastically improves the quality of the renders and images while simultaneously lowering the render time (With that second video card.) It's the first physically based unbiased render engine that actually makes sense to use for my purposes.

Wolfschadowe

[ut1stgear1]

I've actually heard the same thing from other authors of games. Render, render and render. Then there's always "My computer is too slow so need to upgrade or replace" it. I can imagine someone making a movie having the same issues when shooting just one scene. Only on a much larger scale. Take 1, Take 2... Take 100.

Yep. It takes me about an hour per page, when all is said and done. Roughly 45 minutes of that is the artwork. The last 15 minutes is storyboard/outlining/logic graphing/Creating the page/Writing the text/Logic Programming/Rewriting the text/testing/Bugfixing. That's not guesstimating. That's pretty much the actual ratio according to ManicTime (Thanks Kexter for cluing me in to that!).

So anything that knocks time off the render process can have a huge impact to the speed and quality of the overall game. I can drop the overall quality of the images to speed that up, or do what some artists do and just use headlight lighting which makes the characters look flat, but that wouldn't fit my personal aesthetics for the game. Keep in mind that the artwork portion is more than just render time, Setting up the shot so it's ready to render takes about half of that. The cool thing about iRay is that it has the potential to reduce the 45 minutes per frame to anywhere between 20-35 minutes per frame, which is a huge chunk when you think about it. It brings benefits not only to the render time, but also the scene setup and "maintenance" that goes on between shots. Easily half my time between shots is maintenance of the lighting, which is a PITA! With iRay, that maintenance is drastically reduced, and in most cases, eliminated. The other thing is that iRay drastically improves the quality of the renders and images while simultaneously lowering the render time (With that second video card.) It's the first physically based unbiased render engine that actually makes sense to use for my purposes.



Wolfschadowe

Understanding that means that anything that helps you will result in a huge benefit to us the players. The rendering above is a great example of that. thx missed that.

[ut1stgear1]

Hmm. Looking at your message looks like when you quoted me it got outside the quote command. Or maybe it was mine.

[Wolfschadowe]

Hmm. Looking at your message looks like when you quoted me it got outside the quote command. Or maybe it was mine.

Edit to move your reply below my signature.

[Delacroix]

Hello, everyone!
Forum lurker here, that decided to dust off a very old account to say: "Well done. Fantastically well done indeed"

Graphically wise, it was pretty much flawless, the girls were pretty hot (Without overdoing it, which is a welcome change from the usual erotic game) and the ambiences were pretty inmersing, specially the Bar one.

Story wise, it felt *real* which is very important, imho, since you have to buy a story for you to invest time into it. The women's personalities were quite defined, which I liked, and the fact that you could influence them (Corruption level was a good touch) made it all the better. My favourite: Natalie, hands down, with Faith coming as a really close second. And the sexy scenes were impeccable as well. (The thoughts also added a welcomed humour element)

My only critique? The end of the Strip Club left me pretty much chewing my nails in expectation for the Diner breakfast, and now I know the next episode will be the Office one! *sniff*. (I discovered the game but 2 days ago, so no chance of me participating in the election, lol) Think we'll be able to see it any time soon?

Other than that, thanks for making such an amazing game, and here's hoping you guys will keep up the good work!

PS: I think I saw it in previous posts, but if you didn't acquire one already, I humbly offer my knowledge of Spanish to translate the game.

[Wolfschadowe]

... "Well done. Fantastically well done indeed"

Graphically wise, it was pretty much flawless, the girls were pretty hot (Without overdoing it, which is a welcome change from the usual erotic game) and the ambiences were pretty inmersing, specially the Bar one.
--snip--
My only critique? The end of the Strip Club left me pretty much chewing my nails in expectation for the Diner breakfast, and now I know the next episode will be the Office one! *sniff*. (I discovered the game but 2 days ago, so no chance of me participating in the election, lol) Think we'll be able to see it any time soon?

Other than that, thanks for making such an amazing game, and here's hoping you guys will keep up the good work!

PS: I think I saw it in previous posts, but if you didn't acquire one already, I humbly offer my knowledge of Spanish to translate the game.

Hi Delacroix! Thanks for playing and welcome back to the forum! I'm happy that you are enjoying the game. A couple of the strip club endings are a bit of a cliffhanger, and certainly won't be the last in the game. Next episode is scheduled for June 8th, and it's on track.

Don't worry about missing the vote. There are plenty more to come.

As for translations, El Drakki mentioned translating the french version to Spanish, although I'm not aware of any official commitment. Feel free to do what Serge did with the French translation, which was basically showing up saying "Here's the translation." which we then built into the game. Ok, when I say "we" on that one, I really mean kexter. All I did was say "make it so" when Kexter told me he could do it.

Wolfschadowe

[ut1stgear1]

Questions. 1. If end the club scene with zero pts for all women except Natalie who has negative points does that count as ending with zero points for that scene.
2. Does the club scene end when you go home of only after you go to sleep? Having getting Club Regular achievement so I am having trouble finding all endings. I finally followed a walkthrough and didn't get any further in accomplishing that achievement. Bar on that achievement doesn't move. Not sure which endings I am missing. Once the Club Regular is done I think I will have the Private Dance Addict achievement and be totally done.

[Wolfschadowe]

Questions. 1. If end the club scene with zero pts for all women except Natalie who has negative points does that count as ending with zero points for that scene.

Target is 0

2. Does the club scene end when you go home of only after you go to sleep? Having getting Club Regular achievement so I am having trouble finding all endings. I finally followed a walkthrough and didn't get any further in accomplishing that achievement. Bar on that achievement doesn't move. Not sure which endings I am missing. Once the Club Regular is done I think I will have the Private Dance Addict achievement and be totally done.

Club scene ends when you leave the scene. That would be either when you arrive home, or arrive at the diner, (not yet possible), or arrive at the credits. There are 8 tracked endings from the Strip Club to receive the Club Regular achievement. That's too spoilerish to discuss in detail here, but if you PM me the endings you've found, I'll give some clues about what's left.

Wolfschadowe

[ut1stgear1]

Questions. 1. If end the club scene with zero pts for all women except Natalie who has negative points does that count as ending with zero points for that scene.

Target is 0

2. Does the club scene end when you go home of only after you go to sleep? Having getting Club Regular achievement so I am having trouble finding all endings. I finally followed a walkthrough and didn't get any further in accomplishing that achievement. Bar on that achievement doesn't move. Not sure which endings I am missing. Once the Club Regular is done I think I will have the Private Dance Addict achievement and be totally done.

Club scene ends when you leave the scene. That would be either when you arrive home, or arrive at the diner, (not yet possible), or arrive at the credits. There are 8 tracked endings from the Strip Club to receive the Club Regular achievement. That's too spoilerish to discuss in detail here, but if you PM me the endings you've found, I'll give some clues about what's left.

Wolfschadowe

Does mean zero for all of the women including Emily or just the ones in the Club scene?

[Wolfschadowe]

Does mean zero for all of the women including Emily or just the ones in the Club scene?

Zero total reputation and relations with everyone.

Wolfschadowe

[ut1stgear1]

Thanks again wolfshadowe. I have now completed both episodes with just over a month till the new episode comes out. It was really a challenge and with your help and some help from a walkthrough I made it. In the end I found out that each ending or achievement has to be played using the Hard mode to complete. Never played using Medium mode. Hope everyone else was able to complete both episodes.To repeat what wolfshadowe said in an earlier post, Make sure you are reading the whole script to pick up clues about what to do. Helped me find one of the endings I had missed. The clue was there in plain site but still took me a few times to figure it out. That is actually an example of when a walkthrough misled me and I almost missed it.

[massimo]

I'm a new member, and joined so I could compliment the author on creating such a well-developed and compelling game. That's it's a "first effort" makes it all the more impressive. Even at this stage, it's already one of the best date-sims out there. I'm definitely looking forward to the next episode.

[Wolfschadowe]

Thanks again wolfshadowe. I have now completed both episodes with just over a month till the new episode comes out.

Congrats on finishing the two episodes!

I'm a new member, and joined so I could compliment the author on creating such a well-developed and compelling game. That's it's a "first effort" makes it all the more impressive. Even at this stage, it's already one of the best date-sims out there. I'm definitely looking forward to the next episode.

Thank you for the compliment massimo! And also, I appreciate the effort of joining the forum in order to say that!

Wolfschadowe