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Managing expectations: I've got people visiting for a few days, and also just got sucked into Baldur's Gate 3, so not going to be doing a lot for the next week or two. ;)

Nice set!  The ezcomposites work and everything!

Nice to see the office with like 6 ladies in it. Though I guess I forgot to check with you which spot Saiki would be in, else I would've made sure Crystal had some alternate composites going on. And there's a resizing issue with the ezcomposites sometimes when there are 5+ players, so that's what I'll be dealing with next.  Oh and I finally found an office-y outfit for Denise so she'll be taken care of. (some time in 2026)

Couple office tips:

• Those chairs are bit tricky to sit in. For the composite shots I recommend sinking the model's butt into the chair a bit more than normal so they don't look like they're floating over it.
• Composites on the front two chairs spots will block the view of the rear two chair spots if they are not sitting in the chair. Sit down, Sandra.
• The spotlight for the composites doesn't extend as far as it should on the sides, so alternate composites of the ladies standing behind the chairs might come out kinda dark.  (see Rosie's alternate composites).  Cheat and boost the lights if you need to on those.

Denise!

Oh yeah she's definitely going to be the last one done.

Eventually.  Gotta get these 4 ready for business first, though.

Updated the render toolkit to 1.11.1 to fix some small issues. (mainly the rear-left chair was floating a few inches up in the air.)

Yes I just noticed that too.  Looks like Stripe is holding out on us again :)

EZcomposite! 

I also took the liberty of adding a few props and moving the chairs around to make the place a bit less sterile.   The props are all from the other CSP room sets, so you probably have them already.

The background took over 3 hours to render, but Leah rendered in 2 minutes. :)

That looks better than I thought it would. The velvet feet are a little odd, but it's not the most noticeable thing ever, and if you can split that surface then it's a win.

Working on an office ez-composite for you now.

Next problem: Those chairs.  They look too good.  That yellow really pops. Unfortunately, it's going to outshine the ladies and clash with skin tones when under-dressed ladies are sitting in them.

And double-unfortunately, the office set does not come with alternate textures for them, nor does it have separate surfaces for the different parts of the chair, so changing their color is probably going to be more trouble than it's worth. Which is too bad, because they're kinda perfect in all the other ways. They look comfy and luxurious, they have detailed textures, they're the perfect height, and they're really easy to sit characters into in various poses.

See what I mean? Leah's exposed skin should be the main attraction here, but instead it's getting lost in the yellow chair. Dark-skinned ladies will probably have issues here too: they'll contrast better with the chair, but since they tend to need more light for their skin tones the chair will get even brighter and colorful around them.

For comparison, same exact image with the boring grey office chair swapped in. Now you see Leah.

Now I'm realizing there's also a lot of skin-matching beige in this office. That desk could probably use a few more things on it to break that up. And that random coffee-table texture I threw on there was definitely not a good choice. 

The 5 player thing is a bug. But it works fine for 6, so keep adding players :)

And your bug-finding bounty is... you get to pick which location gets ezcomposites next!   Tavern, lounge, or bedroom?

If someone is in a finale, they are not going to be in the ezcomposites, or trigger them, so that's probably why.

Also note that the more ez-composites a player has, the more likely those are to pop up, so that should improve a bit over time since future sets will likely have a lot more of these.

Quick update since that seemed to cause some confusion:

The game has been updated to use all-webp images to reduce the download size, but jpgs and pngs still work fine, so all the extra content out there is still perfectly useable.

The jpg and png files still work with the game, if that helps.

Not really. I removed it. Thanks for finding that.

Ok so I spent like $30 on all these sets, and played a bit with that DAZ scene Stripe shared with me. So now you're all getting a free educational lecture. :)

Here's the set as Stripe had it.  I just dropped Leah in it and pointed the camera at her, and upped the depth of field to make the stuff in the back blurrier. No other changes.   The lights do a fantastic job of lighting the room, but they're not doing our subject any favors:

Note how this looks more like a nice picture of the office that happens to have Leah in it, even with her right in the center. .  That dark outfit absolutely does not pop, even her bright red hair is barely standing out, and it's getting more light that the rest of her. Also, the light is mostly coming from above, so eyes are shadowed by the hair, and legs are shadowed by the skirt big time.   Quite realistic, but also not optimal for the shot.  Those yellow chairs look fantastic, but that's not what should be catching our eye here.

I tried keeping the same lights but added a couple spotlights pointed at Leah (one rear, one front), and then increased the exposure a bit to compensate for all the extra light. I only tried a couple values so this can probably be tuned a bit more, but I think it makes a pretty good difference:

Now it actually looks like Leah's the focus of the picture.  Her face is where my eye gets drawn to first, the light playing in her hair looks delightful. The sweater is bluer. And we can see her eyes and legs!  (the legs should've gotten a bit more light, but I was afraid to light up that table too much and I got a bit lazy.)

So, yeah, those omni-lights are great, but you still need the spotlights.

It's definitely much more raunchy than the game as I release it, so it won't be included in the stripe-megapack that's officially available for download with the game, nor will I link it in the sticky downloads post.  Posting a link to it here would be fine though.

Picked all 3 up while they were on sale, though I'm quite busy at the moment with stuff for the next release, so probably won't have a chance to make any office sets for a while.

Love the setup.  Nice office, plenty of room to work with, a variety of desks and chairs to have finales on.  Most importantly, the lighting looks great. Throw in a few accessories on those desks to liven them up, and it'll be perfect.

Is that the plain Premium Business Office set, or did you mix in other stuff?  Looks like it's 50% off right now, so I might pounce.  The table doesn't seem to be part of it though. Different set?

That's a pretty good start, and a very cute character.  

That spotlight on her chest is washing things out though.  Try dialing down the intensity of that light, or increasing the exposure on the camera until the skin tones look right. If you get the skin tones right, no one will care about the rest of the image being too dark or bright. ;)

Looking forward to seeing more of that pastor!

Oooh.  Been away for a bit, so that's something exciting to come back to!  Looking forward to trying them out.

Ugh those teal chips are burning my eyes.  :)

I have the Z-set too. Nice set of poses and stuff but the Z on the card-backs is kindof annoying so I never used the cards.

The V2 Leah always struck me as the nice school teacher type.   Rosie is more like the stern gym teacher though.  

That one seems reasonably fixable. Though that logic is super prickly at this point so I'm not going to make any promises.

Definitely can't make that one work. They're in the same spot so game logic-wise that's a blocker, and the art also isn't compatible: Leah's beach chair is in a different position for each finale (pushed out to the right and mostly off-screen for Rosie&Crystal).

That's what you get for using Edge. :-P

That looks promising. I am sure the Denise fan club is going to want to see the rest of that.  

Those poor cards and chip textures are starting to looks real dated though.  You might want to look at using the FG poker room ones, that's what I used in the tavern renders:

https://www.daz3d.com/fg-poker-room

Why are her glasses all tinted?  Did you do that or did I screw up and include her beach sunglasses in the updated render toolkit?

One more idea:  maybe you set some kind of global CLASSPATH on your machine that is overriding the one in the game jar?

Very nice update. Looking forward to those finales.  I updated the link in the sticky post.

Bad news for you though: I just figured out how to add support for WEBP files, so after the next update you can do even more file type conversions!  I'm hoping this will shrink the binary download size by like half for the main game, which is a pretty huge savings.

All the player images show, but not any of the standard ones from the resources folder.  I'm guessing this has something to do with that resources folder inside the jar not being found. Maybe try re-downloading the game? the jar file may have gotten corrupt or something.

• What does the main menu look like? (I'm guessing missing question-mark button for the random player?)
• What about the sound?  (I'm guessing the player talking voices are there, but no music or shuffling sounds?)
• Anything helpful in the text logs?
• What resolution are you playing the game at? 
• What OS?

That's not a familiar bug.   Can you post a screenshot?

Also try starting the game from the command line and post anything that looks like an error from the output.

java -Xmx1200m -jar csp.jar

Nice boots!   Now take them off.

Right, the game does do that. I'll look into adding a way to toggle that off selectively. People have been bringing up the difficulty pretty regularly.

Tried your set and it played pretty well.  Gifs seem to get dropped now and then, but normal gifs are doing the same thing at the same rate for me, so I'm guessing it's not because they are gigantic animated gifs, and just some intermittent bug with loading gifs. I'll see if I can track it down but no promises.

 I'm impressed at how well the system is handling those. It probably helps that you only have one per step and there's only 1 animated opponent, and cartoony things compress better than photo-realistic video, but still. And yeah, spam-clicking the portrait is going to trigger multiple loads of it at once, and that's bad juju for just about any machine.

The game does cache images once they load, so that explains most of the behavior you are describing.  That's also probably why the images seem to continue animating from where they left off when they cycle back.

Wow. Impressive. That's a huge... download.   Thanks for sharing. I didn't realize Blaidd was already a wolf dude in the game. I'm guessing Solly Sundyz isn't going to be super cool with links to download their art being here though, so I'll go ahead and cut those out for now.

  Kinda curious how you are able to beat him with like 13 steps though? Did you make an avatar with a larger number of clothes?

I'm curious now. Did you actually make a set with a bunch of animated stuff? How did the game performance hold up?

As for the furry thing, just because it's not for everyone doesn't mean it's not for anyone.  And I like it when people use my product. I'd love to see a couple shots of what that looks like and maybe give set-making tips/feedback if you're up for it.  And I'm probably fine adding links to any sets you want to share to the bonus opponents sticky post, too.  

Come to think of it, a furry warrior wouldn't even be out of place in the medieval tavern sets, and the Jamal and Jong avatars are missing composites there. Things might be getting furrier around here.

Nice set.  I definitely enjoyed that finale. The sticky post for Aubrey has been updated with your link.

I didn't expect animated gifs to work at all in the game.  That's kind of amazing that they do!  I am tempted to use them for undressing animations in the future or maybe finales, but there's a few catches:

• Animations are a ton of work and time to create (both for me and my poor computer)
• Animated images take up a lot of disk space, which will quickly inflate the size of the game download
• The game will probably run out of memory if there are a bunch of these going on.  It's already a problem with regular images on some computers. New images stop loading successfully and you get a lot of black

I did see it go blank a few times on gifs which usually happens when an image fails to load or the system starts running out of memory, but it doesn't happen very often and I didn't see an error message, so I'm not sure what the problem actually is or whether I'll be able to fix that one.

I'm curious what you've been making with these now!

Woohoo!  Can we get a sneak preview of Aubrey's first draft? :)

That does not sound right. Can you post a screenshot or a video of the problem?