Friday Update #13: Komm Susser Tod

It all comes tumbling down, but I hope I haven’t been letting you down too badly with the delays.

(Before we begin, check out this punk remix of one of the most iconic anime songs of all time by GumX. Yes, that is a thing that exists, and yes, it’s way better than it has any right to be. It’s only 3 minutes long compared to the nearly 8-minute length of the original, so give it a quick listen. Even if you don’t think it slaps like I do, you’ll probably get a chuckle out of a song that translates as “Come, Sweet Death” being remixed into something that would fit perfectly on an album from The Offspring if not for the Japanese accent of the lead singer.)

(None of the links in the “Hardware Issues” are affiliate links that I get any money from in any way, shape, or form; I just like documenting things and showing what I was either looking at, had, have, or will have.)

So not only has there not been a release in over 4 weeks, but it’s not even Friday! What’s going on?! Why is CaptainCaption slacking off?!

Well actually, I’ve been working myself ragged with 10+ hour days, but Friday Update #13 is an unlucky one. Everything keeps breaking in both the figurative and literal sense. Making things worse is that repair work keeps getting interrupted with finding new cracks that need attention, which has led to massive delays with that upcoming 0.7.3 release.

Let me give you all a quick rundown.

re:Dreamer’s Intro

First and foremost in the delays, the intro rewrite is way more complicated than I thought it would be. I quite literally expected to be able to slice it up into individual parts, condense the parts I need to no more than a third of the size of the current intro, and bind everything together with minor edits with rewrites to the condensed parts or entirely new writing.

Well, it turns out that this plan falls apart at the first step. As it is right now, the story content before the friend selection that gates the major routes is far too densely interwoven to cut it up to the extent that I had planned.

A few parts can be used wholesale, such as the therapy session, which I am making a mandatory event because it makes zero sense for the reader to not explicitly state an important variable of what Zach thinks of his transformation into his dream girl (remember that unfinished Student Transfer scenario I wrote?), but the vast majority of the needlessly long and rambling intro flows into itself with very little in the way of clearly delineated starting and stopping points.

What this means is that I am not slicing down the current intro to a third of its size, but instead writing a new intro that is a third of the size of the current one.

The current intro is just shy of 40,000 words long. A third of that length is roughly 13,000 words, which honestly is not that daunting as a raw number. I am not a particularly fast typist because I have a degenerative nerve disorder that affect my hands with tremors and lower overall muscle coordination (early onset Parkinson’s, if you must know) and my typing speed is a below-average 30 words per minute most days, but even that would only take a bit over 7 hours to crank out. So why haven’t I gotten it done yet?

Well, because re:Dreamer is a game, not a plaintext file. I have to write those 13,000 words, but I also have to animate the sprites, build expressions, add sounds, declare speakers, define variables, and so on.

To tell the truth, it’s those expressions that are slowing down my writing the most. I haven’t had the expressions of the new sprites seared into my brain like the placeholder’s did after about 3 months, and I have to consult this expression sheet I made as I type, which prevents me from just entering a flow state and visualizing what I need.

But to even further bog things down, because these are expressions built from the raw Clip Studio Paint files TiltSHIFT sent, I was able to separate the parts of the expressions and even make new ones. With these parts (regular eyes, special yandere eyes that have reduced glow, eyebrows, mouths, the 4 levels of blush, and emotes like tears and sweat drops), I can make custom expressions to extend Zoey’s range far beyond the 24 default expressions above. However, this versatility comes with the drawback of me having to actually see what is made in-game because there’s no way for a flat expression sheet to show all of those combinations.

Like this “eyes_2 eyebrows_10 mouth_2 sweatdrops” one for nervous smiling or laughter that I’ve grown particularly fond of, I have few of these custom expressions predefined that work just like the base expressions so I can speed up my workflow, but the rewrites are still rather slow going. Everything is outlined, but the outline to game transition is a tedious one.

Miscommunications With Artists

Let me preface this by saying I am not insulting them or anyone else for lacking the fluency in English I have as a native speaker or claiming anyone here but me is an idiot. I only know English (and arguably Latin and snippets of Ancient Greek, but my knowledge of both has severely deteriorated since leaving college). Even if they don’t have full fluency with my language, each of them has fluency in their own respective native language and at least partial fluency with English, which beats what I have.

So while both TiltSHIFT and Quindal/Kuwandiaru (the background artist Espeon and I have been using) know how to read English, sometimes their understanding of English has been frustrating to deal with. I am a writer who excels in text-based communication. Yes, I am often more verbose than I need be, but I enjoy the act of writing so I tend to draw it out, even when I know that “brevity” is the soul of wit (if you don’t like Shakespeare, take any of these quotes about concise writing being better).

While my lengthy background in TG caption writing and my past and former experience with writing TG visual novels has made me better at incorporating multimedia, such as images, into my writing, the text does the important work while the media supports the text. When you are communicating with someone who doesn’t have the understanding of your language that you do, you need to reverse those priorities.

I’ve gotten familiar with how to best work with TiltSHIFT, which is giving him lots of images as references of exactly what I need and a little bit of text for context. The recent Transformation HCGs design document shows that in a real-world example, but even then the images/text ratio wasn’t optimal. So far with this commission, there have been 3 miscommunications where he wasn’t able to parse the text explaining what was needed, which led to a redraw.

Now thankfully, despite this issue being about miscommunications, TiltSHIFT and I are good at communicating with each other in each step of the design process, and we’re only at the sketches phase right now (some of which you can check out here), so corrections only result in a delay of a few hours (though he’s in Indonesia and I am in America so I either have to become nocturnal like I am right now or accept that there will be some delay between us communicating at anything besides the very start or very ends of our days).

Meanwhile, I’ve never worked with Kuwandiaru before, and I handed them a rather detailed design document for the backgrounds that TiltSHIFT’s work will be placed on top of. I thought the mocks of the rooms and the highlighted yellow text stressing the importance of making the final drawings match the mocks as closely as possible was a foolproof combination, but we’ve had to go back and forth with several revisions. We were not able to communicate with each other effectively about what changes needed to be made, which eventually led to me just asking for their Blender file and making most of the room for them. While I know how to use 3D modeling programs, my experience is with engineering things like aPriori and AutoCAD, and they use Blender, which is intended much more for 3D animations. Admittedly, with how many free CADD programs exist, I think Blender is a bad choice for anyone who makes architectural backgrounds to use as art drafts, but I digress. The point is that adapting myself to Blender’s differences took 6 hours of work, which could have been used on something else.

Art Edits

You might be thinking that art is not the priority with the delayed 0.7.3 update, and while you would be right, I am very much on a ticking clock with art in a different way.

Links to the full-sized versions.

I am in the process of remaking TiltSHIFT’s Clip Studio Paint files for the shower HCGs so that they structured in a way that fits the demands of the game, such as adjusting the Zoey colors to match the sprites (such as softening the shading style of the skin and blackening the hair), toning down the overlay filters, making things internally consistent, and labeling layers and folders. These last two are monumentally important, because as I noticed when I spent the 2 weeks of the 0.7.0 update and beyond teaching myself how to edit in Clip Studio Paint so that I could rebuild his sprites files to something that could be turned into actual layer parts for sprites, he’s notoriously inconsistent with how he does things, and this inconsistency means that I have to hand-check everything and can’t use any automation scripts.

For instance, when it came to the first layer of the skin shadows, sometimes he’ll use a multiply blend layer at partial opacity, and sometimes he’ll use a darker normal blend at full opacity. Both produce roughly identical result that you might not notice unless you were looking at one style of skin shadow shading and immediately replaced it with the other style of skin shading while keeping your eye on the image, but that is unfortunately exactly what these images are being used for. With the communication issues outlined above, telling TiltSHIFT exactly what he needed to change would have resulted in weeks and weeks of delays as he adjusted the sprites and then readjusted them when something wasn’t explained in a way that bridged the differences in our understanding of English, so it was going to be both faster and more accurate to make those edits myself, even with the giant requirement of becoming self-taught with Clip Studio Paint.

I can’t draw. My handwriting and drawing skills were awful even before I started getting tremors on my writing hand, but I am adept at editing someone else’s drawings with image editors. Hell, I first taught myself Photoshop as a horny teenager so I could take pictures of anime girls and change their hair colors or make their boobs bigger, so this was a return to form for me in a way.

Still, the marathon of editing sessions for 12 hour a day for weeks I did to get the sprites the way they are now were hell. I got significant eye strain from intensely staring at small parts of my monitor for several hours a day (more on the issues with that later), and I feel asleep at my desk twice and woke up with a very sore neck and shoulders. Hopefully, you can understand why I never want to have to do that for TiltSHIFT’s art ever again if I can help it. He has my edited sprites file so that he knows what to do when he continues those sprites after the transformation and alone masturbation HCGs are finished, but he doesn’t have examples of the way I need the HCG files structured. The shower scene HCGs took about 18 hours of editing to get to where they are now (and the rear sex one still needs the variations edited, which will probably take at least 6 hours because of how many variations that one has). The transformation HCGs are going to have exponentially more variants than these ones, so unless I want to spend every waking moment editing the final deliveries with Clip Studio Paint for a few weeks, I need to get TiltSHIFT these completed files edits before he starts the linings (that’ll be in about 10 days by my estimate).

Hardware Issues

These ones actually makes me want to die inside.

Keyboard(s)

I’ve already documented my disastrous foray into a PC upgrade back in later January with Friday Update #9, but recently, I’ve been on a binge of Linus Tech Tipsfor background noise as I work on. I usually have YouTube on autoplay for this and let the almighty algorithm decide my next video, and one of those videos was this one about going beyond buying mechanical keyboards by building a custom mechanical keyboard.

Now admittedly, “The Worst Hobby on the Internet” should have alerted me that this is an interest that only leads to woe, but the several mentions about lubing mechanical keyboard switches intrigued me. re:Dreamer development and Genshin Impact have largely sidelined this time consuming hobby, but I speedrun an eclectic assortment of games. One of those games, Bomberman Hero, requites very precise movement with the Nintendo 64 controller, which has a plastic joystick infamous for wearing out and becoming loose. To that end, I became interested in controller maintenance and really optimizing the user experience with regards to the controller they use and the quality of the controller they use.

Along the way, I’ve learned that:

• WD-40 Silicon is the best easy to find lubricant for N64 joystick housing, reducing the grindy plastic feel of the joystick and greatly extending its lifespan. The ideal way to lube your joystick is by taking your controller apart and gently greasing the moving parts in the joystick with decanted aerosol lubricant and a cotton swap, but if you’re lazy and don’t want to take your controller apart, you can just spray a quarter second burst into the joystick well and still get decent results.
• The Xbox Series controller is the best 3D game controller on the market and is an improved Xbox One controller, which was already a great controller.
• The Xbox Elite controller is not worth the $150 price tag, like, at all. The customization features are a gimmick, the weightier joysticks have severe snapback issues of springing from the circle gate back to the neutral of the potentiometer and then having so much inertia that they travel past the dead zone of the other side, and for something that is advertised as having metal parts and more weight, the thing is more fragile than the regular Xbox One controller that is mostly made of plastic. I went through two of them that broke in a year in a way that aftermarket replacement parts couldn’t fix before deciding that Microsoft had hoodwinked me twice and I wasn’t going to let it happen a third time.

That’s why I was thinking I could easily do the same sort of lubing job with my keyboard, a FILCO Majetouch 2 with MX Cherry Browns.

So I ordered my lubes for $30 total (A thicker TriboSys 3203 for the MX Cherry Brown switches and Krytox 205g0 for the stabilizers), watched a video about what to do, and got started.

The first signs of disaster started with the plate. If you don’t know, good keyboards have a big metal stabilizer plate over the circuit board that the switches are on to reduce vibration and improve durability. This plate was actually not just holding the switches, but it was held down by them, meaning that I couldn’t access the plastic tabs to open the switches and would have to desolder every last one to get to any of the internals to lube.

My hand tremors were rather bad that day, so I burned myself 3 times and broke a socket hole on the PCB before I decided on an alternative.

I used an X-ACTO #11 blade to cut the tabs off the top part of the switches in a dovetailed pattern so that I could lock them back into place, but I quickly realized that the cutting angle of a #11 blade meant that I could only do this on the switches on the edges of the keyboard.

I went to Hobby Lobby (I prefer Michael's because that store isn’t owned by literally insane Christians who illegally smuggled artifacts out of Iraq to display in their private Bible museum, only returning them when they got caught, but they closed recently when all the retails stores in my area got hit by COVID-19). They didn’t have the X-ACTO #17 and #18 chisel blades, but they did have a cheap-looking $12 X-ACTO hobby blade set with 3 chisel blades from some company I’ve never heard of. I distinctly recall thinking “How bad could it be?” as grabbed it off the shelf.

Well, two of the chisel knives dulled on me to nearly being unusable in about 10 minutes, and the other exploded on me within 3 cuts in the way that makes you know that the steel they used was slag garbage.

I eventually finished with the dull blades, but the bad tools and hand tremors meant that the results were sloppy. The lubrication itself went well, but some of the leaf springs on the bottom switch housings got slightly deformed as took off the top parts of the housings and bending them back with pliers produced imperfect results. Also, having to switch to vertical cuts instead of dovetail cuts for the switch housings meant that I had to use hot glue to reattach them.

Still, I finished the project without any other catastrophes, and I so pleased with the results that I even made a Twitter thread on my main about the process, ending with how good the switches feel and how the keyboard is an amazing experience to use now.

Except it isn’t, because I hate typing on it.

To explain, each individual switch feels fantastic to operate, but because of the sloppy variable quality of some of the steps, the result of each keystroke feels subtly different on many of the switches. It’s like eating a high-quality cut of meat, but it was grilled in a way so that the cooking isn’t even. The taste is amazing, but the texture is awful, ruining the entire experience.

Oh well. It was a learning experience that taught me that lubed switches are godlike as long as the result is consistent.

The stimulus check had just come in, so I looked long and hard for a realistic way to get a lubed 104 key built, but as that video I linked explained, the world of keyboards is fickle. Full layout PCBs existed, but the only one not sold out was the NerD 108. I got within a hair’s breadth of committing to a custom build, but all the case options sucked, so to ignore the revelation about lubed switches and replace the butchered Majetouch 2 with a Das Keyboard 4 Professional.

I was in checkout when I happened to see this.

I had looked into modular full keyboards, but the HEXGEARS GK705 Kailhzhas some very suspect build quality and dubious support for Cherry MX switches, while the regular GMMK has great reviews but is sold out everywhere except an Amazon.gb listing for a used model at $200 (before shipping).

At the time I came across the Barebone Edition, it was $70, and I instantly yoinked that shit.

I then got 120 Cherry MX Brown Clears, 10 Cherry MX Blue Clears, and 10 Cherry MX Red Clears for $80 total (protip: buy switches in bulk from some merchant who offers bulk discounts, like MechanicalKeyboards.com). I also got some stiff thin O-ring washers )for a slightly dampened and slightly shortened keystroke) and Ducky doubleshot BPT keycaps with shine through (I agonized over getting colored accent keys for about 90 minutes until I bailed on the concept as too ricer). I also got a very cheap lube station for $23. The quality is only slightly less dubious than Hobby Lobby knife kit, but the only thing I don’t already have is the key part tray and the switch opener. One is a sheet of acrylic that they can’t possibly fuck up and the other is a tool that I would like but don’t need when flat head jeweler screwdrivers exist.

All of that very coincidentally gets here later today and I’ll post the play-by-play once it’s done because I can’t really do anything for re:Dreamer until late in the evening (more on that below).

Monitor

Right after the last disastrous upgrade on my computer, my main 27” 2K IPS suddenly died. I ordered replacement display driver PCBs from China because the monitor backlight still working made me suspect a shorted capacitor there, but the monitor was more damaged than that. It was an older monitor, so I got a replacement 1080p as my main from Best Buy and had been using that since.\

On the first, I finally saved up enough to afford the main 27” 2K IPS replacement I had been eyeing that a friend suggested, but Amazon pulled a sneaky “There is a newer model of this item:”

The reviews were slightly better, and it wasn’t too expensive of an upgrade. The recent Patreon surge to $1,600 left me with more money than I expected after the necessities at the start of the month (seriously, I never though the game would ever get this much attention, and thank you all so much), so I changed the purchase to that.

And like a dumbass, I didn’t do the real monitor review site check.

This particular monitor has an abysmal pre-calibration score of 4.6:

The ASUS TUF Gaming VG27AQL1A has poor out-of-the-box accuracy, even worse than the ASUS TUF VG27AQ, but this may vary between units. Most colors are inaccurate and white balance is very off. The color temperature is warm, giving the image a yellow/red tint. Gamma doesn't follow the target curve well either, as dark scenes are too dark and bright scenes are too bright. There's an sRGB mode available, but it results in a slightly worse color and white balance dE.

If you’re in re:Dreamer’s Discord server, you’ll see that the “Devs” role that Espeon and I are the exclusive members of is orange. On this monitor, out of the box, it was supernova red.

I tried to use monitor ICC profiles from TFTCentral’s database,but nothing fully fixed the red tint. So yeah, I needed a monitor calibration tool. I got the SpyderX Pro for $170, which essentially made the $480 VG27AQL1A cost $650 to be usable, but of course I forgot my $50 SpyderCHECKR 24 color calibration card, because monitor calibration tools need to be calibrated before they can calibrate your monitor (I know several cheaper alternatives exist, but reviews keep mentioning how fragile they are and that the colors fade quickly).

For a $700 investment, this monitor better make the Zoey art good enough to come to life and suck my dick.

CPU AIO Cooler (and CPU)

My Corsair CPU AIO cooler has been dying on me since late 2020 when an ASUS driver decided to just corrupt the firmware and leave the pump at the max speed forever (even a Windows reinstall didn’t fix it). Running a full pump forever is going to kill this thing fast; ignoring the mechanical wear, more air has gotten into the sealed AIO system in the 5 or so months that it’s been like this than the rest of the 3 years I’ve had it.

I have an Intel i9 9900K, which is a fucking furnace of a chip. My desktop tower also sits right next to me on the desk, so I hear most air coolers and can’t stand the hot air going towards me, so liquid cooling is the logical choice.

As the previous fiasco with an AIO cooler mentions, I recently got a NZXT Kraken X53 which is a 240 mm and cools my 2080Ti with a Kraken G12 GPU AIO bracket mod (despite NZXT specifically mentioning my exact model of GPU as compatible with this system, I had to cut down not just the bracket but my GPU’s cast aluminum frame to use it, making the thing impossible to resell). The thing was slightly loud, but I was an idiot and forgot that putting an AIO’s pump above its radiator is a terrible practice, so after I did that it was much quieter and I was impressed enough with NZXT to get the 360 mm Kraken X73 to replace my dying CPU AIO cooler.

I pull the Corsair AIO cooler out but instantly notice an issue with the NZXT one: the heat contact plate has a nasty 5 degree incline dent in it near the center that prevents a flat surface from being created to contact the CPU. That is extremely deadly with a chip as hot as the i9 9900K, so I decided to return it for a replacement and put my Corsair AIO back on for now.

But now the Corsair AIO cooler is actually dead.

I have so much to do for re:Dreamer that not having access to my desktop is intolerable, so I decided to lap the NZXT AIO cooler’s plate.

It’s taken a few harsh lessons, but I’m starting to learn that my hands are no longer precise enough to work with delicate electronics without having some sort of tooling to rely on. I rig an improvised crosshead piston system using an electric drill, brick and cardboard guides, an old cane, a brick weight for downwards force, and a rotating brace around the cane head for the plate so I can sand in all directions, then run the thing over higher grades of sandpaper until I hit 600.

This took 5 hours to do, and while the result wasn’t perfect and had some rounding on the edges of the oversized circular plate, full flat contact was made with the CPU.

I get it installed, and within two seconds of powering on I head an audible static discharge noise and smelled ozone before the system shut down.

I honestly still don’t know what happened, but my CPU died spectacularly.

Thankfully Amazon has same-day delivery for the exact replacement CPU, but it was still almost $400 and this burns up the last of the stimulus check, and I’m just sitting on my ass as I wait for it to get here.

I want to stress that I am not incompetent with DIY. I know my way around a tool bench, and I’ve been using power tools since I was 4 for various projects; I’m just having a hard time compensating for the relatively recent development of my hands getting worse from the degenerative disease I have. Electronics are delicate, and bad hands break them. I’m also apparently just getting really bad luck? I don't know, I guess God is owning me for being such an unrepentant horny bastard.

Anyways, that’s about it for the breaks and fixes for this month that I can name off the top of my head. There’s the constant tinkering of little things, like:

• Me recently adjusting the frequency ranges of the vocal SFX files to be consistently around a contralto (the reason why is a subject I can go into an entire Friday Update with, so I’ll save it for another time).
• Optimizing the layeredimage sprites to not do a stupid thing like use a fully transparent 1 pixel by 1 pixel .PNG file whenever I needed a blank layer and instead use a Null displayable of the character size, fixing Zoey’s B pose (the arm clutching one) so that the nipples are darkened to match the other poses, and making proper versions of Zoey’s base sprite layer with the middle of the thighs cut out that is automatically switched to whenever she is wearing certain bottom clothing so that the skin on her inner thighs doesn’t bleed through her clothed thigh gap.
• Cleaning up some of the font stuff, like gathering licenses in a concise organization structure and finally setting up proper oblique glyph substitutions for the unique Ai speaking font (Playtime With Hot Toddies).

But those aren’t very exciting, now are they?

As for when 0.7.3 is going to be ready… I hate to say “be patient” when I’m already 2 updates behind what I should be delivering, but keep in mind I am only one person and there is a limited amount that I can do by myself. Espeon is very hands-off with this game, but not only are these all things that she can’t help fix, but she’s is in the process of moving with renovating her new house and selling her old one, which have left me flying solo. I’m putting as much work into this game as I possible can without going insane, but there’s a lot to do, and given the encompassing nature of the intro rewrites, I can’t just release what I have now and release the rest next time.