DevLog: Images and the Frustrating Consequences of DoF

Hey all,

So I've been meaning to get a DevLog out lately but instead I've been on damage control so I wanted to check in and essentially update everyone while continuing to chronicle some of the crazy shit that happens while you're trying to make games.

This devlog is specifically going to focus on some image problems I've been having and I'll check in about the entirety of the update in the next log that I'll drop pretty soon.

So I have a confession to make: I was an entitled and ignorant asshole not long ago. 

A few years back, I was pretty heavy into MMO's and I recall being frustrated on update days, never understanding what was taking so long. Like many, I additionally became frustrated when a new update would come out and consequently break something else that was completely unrelated. While I never took my frustration public to message boards or anything toxic like that, I still became angry-- mostly based on my own ignorance. Little did I know, how easy and how common things break based on a few small changes.

So in v0.20, the last scene for the update introduced DOF (Depth of Field). For those unfamiliar, this simply means that the game camera will now focus on specific things the way that a movie camera would. This usually just means the background or foreground are blurred the way the human eye would naturally behave. This adds (literal) depth to the game but also "depth" in a sense of realism that we weren't able to see up until now. I have planned to use it fully throughout the game (which means thousands of pictures need rerendered and completely redone). However, short-term we're going to continue to see DOF in v0.21. 

Which leads to the problems that I've run into:

So I've attached some images uptop to show you what I'm talking about. To clarify, this is an image used in v0.20 to avoid spoilers. The first shot is the one you see in game currently and does not use DOF (everything is equally in focus). The second one uses DOF. You can see the windowsill specifically blur a bit like the human eye or a real camera would since we typically focus on the human face over environment. While this shot does not show the drastic blur we see in the bar scenes (things get more blurry the further away from the camera they are), I wanted to use it to show the actual problem. Notice Zack is in focus (specifically his face) and the windowsill is then blurred behind him. However, the background outside the window is clearly in focus again. Essentially, this is impossible to have happen in reality and it's distracting--but not necessarily game breaking. It's even more apparent in shots like the bar where the outside backdrop was very far away and should have subsequently been extremely blurry. Basically, DAZ will not blur backdrops naturally and that's a friggen' problem.

We ran into this problem in the bar last update but it's haunting me again, this time creating even more of an issue. A lot of what saves time in the game is being able to reuse previous CGs for later shots. For example, if Zack and Braden are talking in the new dorm room, I can potentially reuse or modify old shots and apply them to future dorm room conversations to save development time. However, because DOF is introduced after the dorm room, we may see shots using DOF and others not using DOF. This likely won't be greatly distracting until we see one shot with DOF merge into another shot without it. For example, in the pictures uptop, if we moved Zack's arms away from his face and blurred the background at the same time during a picture transition, that may be distracting and potentially misdirect the eye to what it should be focusing on. It's not game breaking but people notice things like that and for some, it breaks emersion.

Solution

I spent the weekend redoing dozens of shots. This includes completely deleting all backdrops from the shots included in update v0.21 and shifting the course of image creation. Honestly, this is still good practice because it's ultimately going to be a transition to the game development strategy we would see in the revamp as well as future projects (this is still the rough draft, y'all). However, the completely in focus images from v0.20 (like image 1 shows) remain in game at this time. Jordyn will have the horrendous task of adding in ALL backgrounds in the game now and then blurring them to live in blurry harmony with the changes reflected with DOF (so pray for him).

It remains to be seen how this transition will look as I attempt to reuse focused shots from v0.20 and the new DOF shots together in the same scene. We'll make the decision when we get there but one of two things will happen, we'll either have to just accept that some shots will have DOF for now and other's wont and that may get weird on a few panels; or I have to go back and completely redo every dorm room shot from v0.20 which is around 210 pictures-- delaying things for a minor adjustment. While  I do plan to ultimately go back and redo all the shots in the game anyway, I'd rather focus that just on the revamp so I don't redo all the v0.20 dorm shots and then learn something else forcing me to redo all 200 again. That's extra work, wear and tear on my rig, and it just pushes things back,-- which I'm not ok with. 

Regardless, it's back on track right now with a long list of extra stuff we have to focus on. Lately, I've been focusing primarily on images because the writing part was really far ahead and I needed a lot of action shots to play that out. Normally, I would do an DevLog about the entire status but I did want to draw attention to  some image problems and explain that in detail. 

So go easy on dev teams out there, it's crazy how much stuff happens or breaks for stupid reasons that you don't even think about as a player.