I was sorta vague in my last spiel, so I’ll be precise this time. So far I’ve got the game more or less bugfixed up until just before the necropolis, I’ve also gotten all the cinematic renders implemented and tested to that point, next in line 08 of 22: A Heroine’s Trust

Why am I making pre-rendered videos rather than using picture cutscenes? Well lots of reasons, most of which also justified them in Menagerie, basically though it is much easier on the game load. Instead of having constantly refresh the screen according to multiple picture, some of which are several thousands of pixels larger than the screen itself, I’ve endeavored to simply play a video instead. Which is a LOT less processor heavy.

The main impetus (though I was highly considering it already) was in the messenger’s landing scene… when played in MV it hung for over a minute on a white flash before it loaded the 9600x7200 picture which is used to zoom out and be used to show a very basic map of the area and appear as if to ‘ascend’ from the surface of the earth. This was entirely inexcusable.

Now it not only runs smoothly, but because I’m doing most of the animation in vegas, I can infinite layers, smoother transitions, more effects and be able to just drag shit around in the pan/zoom/crop animation editor, rather than fiddle around with fucking picture coords for half an hour.

Outside of 06 due to it’s level of complexity, most of these took barely 10 minutes of time once all the assets were ready.

So it’s faster to build them, easier to build them, and in result, they look better and play better. I can also destroy a lot of what will now be DEAD WEIGHT from the pictures folder. However the games size will likely increase, in Menagerie the difference was fairly minor, but that game had 8 cutscenes, this has 22, and most of them are 15mb in size at least.

I doubt the game will reach half a gig, even still. And considering all the optional shit and the eight hours+ of gameplay, and that it will be a complete game, I’m happy to let that kind of file-size be an aside.