Deep Dive: A Look at the Chapter One Remaster.

Four years ago, I embarked on a journey to create a visual novel called Dreams of Reality. However, the first year of this project was spent trying to figure out how Daz worked. At that time, I didn't have an Nvidia GPU, so my rendering was solely dependent on the CPU. Even though my processor, an AMD Ryzen 7 3700, was considered a mid-tier CPU at the time, it took a full 2 hours to render an image, regardless of how noisy or complete the image looked.

When rendering in DAZ, there are three main limits that can be set: time, iteration count, and convergence. If any of these limits are reached, the rendering engine will stop. Those who render on an Nvidia GPU don't have to worry about these limits as much, except for highly detailed or large scenes. A low iteration count isn't always indicative of a lower quality image. Other factors like detail, scene size, and the number of lights can also play a role. However, a low iteration and convergence will usually result in a noisy image.

This brings me to the issue of remastering chapter one images. When I first started the project, I didn't fully understand how these three limits affected the image, resulting in many noisy images. Halfway through chapter one development, I discovered de-noising, which did improve image quality. By the end of chapter one, I had purchased an Nvidia GPU (RTX2070) and gained a better understanding of these limits. Chapter two further improved my post-processing skills, resulting in better images overall.

As a developer, going back and redoing images can be seen as wasted time, but I began to question whether chapter one was a product I was happy with. Some feedback mentioned that the renders improved over time, and comments from others highlighted the initial images' noisiness or lower quality. While I initially believed that the project must always move forward, I began to have doubts when I stumbled upon an "Uglies of Daz" forum post featuring an image of Emily.

If you play this game, you know the importance of Emily's character to the story and what she means to me. So, when I saw her name on the list and clicked to see her picture, my heart broke. It wasn't because of the model, but because of my own lack of skill and knowledge that had resulted in an ugly portrayal of her.

Although this wasn't the image that broke the camel’s back, I knew I had to make things right. I went back and redid the images from that scene, and the difference was as one person put it, night and day. However, I still believed that spending time on older images was a waste of progress. That is until chapter four began to develop, and I noticed a glaring difference between the quality of images from chapter one and those in later chapters.

I couldn't ignore the mismatch, and I knew that new players would be confused and think that different artists had worked on the game. So, I decided to go through the worst offenders in chapter one and spend time correcting them. I created a list and put it to a vote, and I also decided that every scene would have another round of editing, especially the Kitchen scene, which you'll soon see.

Now, let's start with the Driving scene involving Emily.

The opening scene initially featured an animation of Emily driving as the MC pondered his thoughts. It took me considerable time to create this, using a green image behind the car window and rendering an animation of passing houses before combining them in Sony Vegas. While I was pleased with the added motion blur, overtime I grew to hate the animation.

The scene was revamped, removing Emily’s personal thoughts and the animation altogether. The scene takes place after the MC’s first night at the Purple Orchid Gentlemen’s Club, where either he has had an encounter with Cindy or Emily has witnessed Sebastian assaulting Louise, both events weighing heavily on their minds.

Rather than reading Emily’s thoughts, the scene now features an extended interaction between the MC and Emily. To add depth to the scene, I have expanded further and what was initially 5 images has grown to 16.

The second scene to be improved for update 0.4.8 is the morning kitchen scene between Louise, Emily, and the MC.

There has been quite an extensive rework of this scene, the interaction between Emily and Louise has been expanded, as has the group interaction including the MC.

The conversation choices were limited, and players were selecting one option at a time, this gave the impression there were other choices that were not active. The truth is the conversation flow was badly coded, due to the progression of images of Louise from the kitchen area to the table each conversation choice had to be kept separate.

This has now been improved, adding some additional choices, and having a better progression of the images.

The scene overall has been massively expanded from 19 to 56 images.

There are other scenes and images that will be updated, however the two scenes detailed above are all that is marked for the 0.4.8 release.

I hope this deep dive into the reasons behind the remaster has been interesting, I’m always open to feedback so post in the comments below your thoughts. 

Cenc