Idea/Question about Character Viewer being abandoned

[Vile]

Would it be difficult to commission someone like Akubar who created Princess/Witch Trainer or anyone to create a character viewer? I mean, there's enough interest so people WILL pay if you need to do a fund raiser, even though it was already apart of the original reached goal list. Making it happen is 100% possible .. but if the problem is money then... ask? *throws money at tits team*

Here is an example of his work for those who are unfamiliar but you can dl the game for free on his website.

 

[NotYouNorI]

With the sheer, ever growing amount of different bodyparts present in TiTS?  You can't put a price on a person's sanity like that.

 

[Noob Salad]

Nonsense; go look at 4chan's /stg/, a lot of that was volunteer work.

 

[Vile]

With the sheer, ever growing amount of different bodyparts present in TiTS?  You can't put a price on a person's sanity like that.

First let me say that I'm not trying to be ugly but I don't understand that logic.

How can a game that funds over 2000% of what it was asking for and an additional $23,399 PER MONTH can't fund a character viewer? We're talking about a game that makes over a quarter of a million dollars a year through donations alone. Somehow that just makes no sense to me. This shouldn't be blown off or accepted as, "Meh it's just too hard." This is something that was promised as a goal that people pitched in their money to reach. Why can't there be at least an effort to make it happen? At least offer a reasonable explanation why you can't.


"We need to raise this amount of additional funds to hire these people to make it work."  Ok. Let's make it happen.

 

[shadefalcon]

"We need to raise this amount of additional funds to make it work."  

I don't really think it's a question of money, just how hard and time consuming it would be. Time that could rather be spent on making the rest of the game as good as it can be.


+ There are many, many, many things the character viewer would have to accomodate to, especially considering that this is a game in progress, with people being able to share their ideas and get them implemented in the game. In the very least, should such a feature be implemented, it would have to be after everything else is written.


...damn I wasted my 900th post just like that...

 

[Vile]

I don't really think it's a question of money, just how hard and time consuming it would be. Time that could rather be spent on making the rest of the game as good as it can be.


+ There are many, many, many things the character viewer would have to accomodate to, especially considering that this is a game in progress, with people being able to share their ideas and get them implemented in the game. In the very least, should such a feature be implemented, it would have to be after everything else is written.

Then hire people? Hiring a separate team won't effect the games development in the slightest. I'm not an expert at coding but even I know there are character creators already made that can work adequately. 

A free game made THIS but a game that rakes in several hundred thousand a year can't do something similar?

 

[shadefalcon]

The second problem still stands though. Not only would one have to accomodate for all the different body parts, tentacle cocks etc. One would also have think about the little details like butt rating, muscle and thickness combination, appearance flags in combination with different global values. It would be quite a mess to accomodate it all. It's certainly not impossible, but it would be very hard. And with all the new stuff that keeps coming it would only prove to get tougher. + I think there was something about so many images would increase the bytes of the game significantly. 


And in the end, it's fens game and his decisions. Most of the time we can only hope to see that something will happen.


Nice dress up game btw. It reminds me that I should try out witch trainer

 

[HugsAlright]

I feel like a smut game with character creation of this caliber is meant for one's I M A G I N A T I O N.

 

[Nik_van_Rijn]

This is something that was promised as a goal that people pitched in their money to reach. Why can't there be at least an effort to make it happen? At least offer a reasonable explanation why you can't.

Can any of the real old guard and/or staff members confirm this? As someone who was more than a year late to any of the one-time payment funding drives, I have no idea if it was the case, or about any of the details.

 

[Savin]

Can any of the real old guard and/or stuff confirm this? A

1. $80,000: Loeri will port the CoC character viewer she's been building to work with TiTS too, and any unique art will be commissioned from AF.  As Loeri isn't under contract or anything.  Should anything unforeseen interfere with this, more art and commissioned writing will be done instead.
   

Loeri vanished and hasn't been seen in years. Ergo, as promised, that budget was redirected towards art and writing. 

 

[Noob Salad]

What you're proposing would be a massive undertaking

I disagree.

that no one has the patience to even be bothered with

I agree.


In other news one of my favorite Doujin groups releases a game every quarter with more than 100 unique CGs in HD and with limited voice acting. They charge $13 per game.


TL;DR: just hire japs bro lol

 

[Vile]

That goal was well-worded. And I mean that non-sarcastically. A 100% legal commitment to a character viewer would've been suicide.

Loeri vanished and hasn't been seen in years. Ergo, as promised, that budget was redirected towards art and writing. 

First of all I respect you guys in your decision if you simply wished to redirect the funds elsewhere and wanted to leave it at that. With that said, the wish for a character viewer is still out there. With beyond double the success of that original 80k goal, would it still not be possible to hire someone else to continue a character viewer? Especially considering the new continuous stream of funds from Patreon.

 

[Noob Salad]

It might not be literally impossible, but it'd be damn close. 

Did you not look at the link Vile dropped? That much was done for free, by volunteers. And you're saying we'd have to have every possible combination (even though you clearly know what bases are) which is simply false; that'd be n! otherwise and absolutely ridiculous. We'd have layers instead. And even then some things would be ignored for practicality and modularity. Like height, thickness, and tone. Possibly even femininity/masculinity. Is that not as good a viewer as what you were imagining? Of course not, because that'd be impossible. I'm just trying to explain how it could be done, while everyone else keeps insisting it's impossible. Especially when less people have done more in less time with less money.


I don't even want a character viewer. That's money better spent on a much needed image pack to add flavor to NPCs' scenes.

 

[Nonesuch]

First of all I respect you guys in your decision if you simply wished to redirect the funds elsewhere and wanted to leave it at that. With that said, the wish for a character viewer is still out there. With beyond double the success of that original 80k goal, would it still not be possible to hire someone else to continue a character viewer? Especially considering the new continuous stream of funds from Patreon.

The first thing to say is that the bottomless pot of money isn't that bottomless. Fen can correct me on this, but last it was discussed about half of the apparent monthly total doesn't even clear. Of the remainder, Fen employs Savin and Gedan full time, Shou I believe part time. So whilst TiTS is solvent there really isn't a vast sum knocking around for ambitious projects, despite what a glance at the Patreon suggests.


What a character viewer would require is a talented, trustworthy, extremely dedicated and hard-working artist who had a basic grasp of code, understood the moddability required and be willing to be picked up again after the event to continuously supplement his/her end product. This individual does not exist, or if they do, the rates they would charge puts them out of TiTS' reach. Misty above has exaggerated the level of complexity a bit - things like height and clothes could be left to one side for the sake of streamlining - but really, it's a Sisyphean task once you look into it.


In the CoC years bushy-tailed volunteers would often turn up, offering to improve the character viewer or build another one from the ground up. Inevitably what would happen is that they would turn one or two models out and then quietly disappear. What I guarantee would happen if an enthusiastic artist offered to do one for TiTS, or one was contracted, is this: they would create a basic system, get a few different bits and pieces working with it, maybe get as far as creating a Leithan lower body... and then there would be nothing but radio silence. We'd be left with a knot-coded abortion which will torment everyone with its wasted potential, which means that a great deal of effort and possibly money will have been spent on getting something worse than nothing.


As already said: It's not impossible, but close enough to it that it's not worth considering.

 

[Couch]

As far as not requiring a million billion tiny pieces of artwork for everything, you're probably better off using a 3D model, which can more easily handle things like height/thickness/tone sliders and having different bits for heads/tails/wings/etc. stuck on.


The problem of course is that A: if anything this requires even more skills that aren't widely available than a flat image character viewers, and B: if it's not very high quality it's going to look even shittier than a flat image viewer.  Which were already horrific on the rare occasions where they actually worked.

 

[Galgano]

This is me just spitballing, but how bad would it be to do it in 3D? It would still be a lot of work with the different models for each arm, leg, tail, etc. However, you could make a system where model parts would connect at a specific point on the base of the model. Then you would lerp the various stats like thickness, femininity, and other such stats

 

[Zavos]

What about moving froward.   Every new transformation and equipment piece would need their own art for the character viewer, which would inflate the workload for new stuff.  And also make the chances of anything not from the core creators like Savin, Couch or IVI minimal at best.  Throttling the potential of community contributions to this game is really not worth an extra toy.

 

[MESeele]

A character viewer is a crutch for lackluster imaginations. Why is this even a thing. Fengames; and indeed all text-based games, require an imagination to properly enjoy. It feels like a bunch of people are in want of a movie when the book is better in every way. Maybe they're those people who close their eyes and are greeted with nothing but black. But then, they wouldn't gain much from these games anyway?


Bust images and backgrounds are flavour to help focus, they're definitely not present to fill in everything.

 

[Red1979]

Look at this website that makes custom 3D printed figures. I think a system like that would work quite well with the dynamic nature of the game. 
Hero Forge

 

[Noob Salad]

>3D
>3D Printer


Hmm.

 

[Krynh]

Look at this website that makes custom 3D printed figures. I think a system like that would work quite well with the dynamic nature of the game. 
Hero Forge

Custom only in that they are a series of pre-designed templates. 

 

[Nik_van_Rijn]

This has always sort of been my personal opinion on the idea of a CV, but I can still understand peoples' desire to see their character(s) represented visually. Having just received my first pieces of commissioned art from a very talented artist, I have to admit that the experience of seeing a character you put creative effort into realized in such a fashion is quite enjoyable. Getting Aislinn's busts from Chesh left me smiling for like two days straight.


A CV might not have quite the same effect, but I imagine it would be something similar. The idea itself isn't terrible, but rather its execution would be excessively difficult and, in all probability, impractical.


That being said, people that really want to see images of one of their PC's should really consider commissioning an artist they like. Yeah, it'll probably be pretty expensive, but art is work. I don't regret a single penny of what I spent on Aislinn, and I honestly think Chesh gave me a fantastic deal.


If people are really willing to throw money at a CV as Vile said, I think that money would be better spent investing in individual artists and helping them continue doing what they love to do.

On one hand, this will necessitate people spending money on each individual character they make, as opposed to dumping it on something that they hope will allow them to get an image for all of them.


On the other hand, it requires a good artist, and in some cases a very specific art-style, to take some of the really out-there character concepts TiTS is capable of generating and make them look any good.

 

[Ethereal Dragon]

If time allowed, and commitments and all that jazz, hiring an artist and then having someone else do the interjection of the artwork into the character viewer program thingy would work I would think. I honestly wonder how much of the funding fenco has left over at the end of the month from patreon they have left over. I mean I would think any artist would find it a great boon to be hired and get a steady income if they're working on a project. But again of course this game IS getting larger and more races and body parts are getting added. Maybe it's a project that could be taken on after TiTS in content complete ( doubtful since it'll probably be having content added until fen says the project is done and over with.)

 

[Neoptolemus]

As a starting point there are (according to the wiki) 259 body types in the game at present:

• 8 skin types + 4 perks
  
• 21 face types
  
• 7 beard types
  
• 7 hair types + 4 perks
  
• 13 eye types + 4 perks
  
• 22 ear types
  
• 14 tongue types
  
• 10 horn types
  
• 5 antennae types
  
• 17 arm types
  
• 27 leg types
  
• 15 wing types
  
• 30 tail types
  
• 28 cock types
  
• 16 vagina types
  
• 7 nipple types
  

Some of these could probably be excluded from a CV and some others could probably share artwork. On the other hand some would require more variations, you'd need at least 16 torso images for instance (with and without tits for each skin type). Supporting different skin tones, hair colors/styles, multiple genitals, more than two breasts, hips, lips, butts, testicles, masculinity/feminine faces or taurs would all increase the number of variations needed, substantially in some cases,