Be Like Water...

Hey all,

Tapping into the old Bruce Lee quote as a launchpad for today's free public post that's all about water.

For those following me on the hellscape previously known as twitter -- or on the much less cringy BlueSky, I recently mentioned some issues with water in the game. Later that translated into the random picture of Mom-Fucker in the hot tub here. While I've never considered myself an artist, I do think the process of creating things improves over time-- frequently causing us to look back at our previous works with a much more refined eye that sometimes lingers a little too long on the faults. The Revamp is all about upgrading the original version of Straight!? to make it fairly consistent and just give you a much more detailed depiction of the story and the world and the writing. What I don't want to do is revamp this story over and over until I drop dead.

However, one thing that has driven me crazy in the Revamp has been water-- particularly the pool. I tried to do some work on this prior to the Revamped pool appearance and improved it slightly but I've never been happy with the pool water and every time I do a pool CG, i'm reminded of it.

So periodically over the course of the Revamp, I've messed around with the water here and there, making tweaks that quite honestly, didn't matter and my progress sucked, lol.

Until I did a thing.

So in the next Revamp update, we'll see a complete overhaul on the swimming pool water. This change will span the entire game and include all past pool shots. I've already re-rendered 127 game images that go all the way back to Zack staring at the pool for the first time, tryouts, and the first few swim practices. These will all be included in v14, replacing the old images for consistency. All future pool images will use this new water texture.

The big thing here on the water is that it's friggen transparent. The water before was like Jello-O. You could kinda see a hint of something but it was super opaque. In addition, all my underwater shots had to use a completely different texture because the original water wasn't a clear construct-- it was a solid so light couldn't pass through it at all-- which is why it's so dark and murky. These new images capture the essence of water a lot better. I really wanted to be able to see through the water a bit and then get that weird wiggly distortion from the ripples. Now you can see character bodies and swimsuits under the water and it just pulls things together a lot better.

Today, I've included a short slideshow of images to show you Before/After shots from the Revamp pool shots. It basically just alternates from old/new/old/new. The final shot is actually a new pic from v14 that you haven't seen yet but it's a good example of that ripple distortion so I'm dropping it in here as another example.

Also, for anyone worried about me spending time on old things like this rather than moving forward with the development: this didn't slow me down really at all. Fixing all the previous images took probably 2 hours and then I just rendered them overnight while I was asleep over the course of 3 days. Didn't impact current development other than I spent about 2 hours on texture replacements and it was boring :p

Let me know what you think.

And stay tuned. I'm pretty deep into the next update but I'm still struggling on how to actually explain my percentage of completion but I'm around 200 CGs into Chapter 7 and I'll be sharing some of those very soon.