Yet another "special" teaser image.
Recently, a discussion started up on the Patreon page regarding ultra-high resolution images and why they aren't used more frequently in graphic-heavy games like BEW. Our friends over at Tora Productions (Dreaming With Elsa, Finding Miranda, Pandora) posted a very high res image on their page, which is what started the conversation. Mortze was just showing what he could do and had no intention of suggesting that he would use that quality in games. He has the same limits as Wolfschadowe or any other part-time game maker.
Wolfschadowe is just as capable of photo-realistic renders and did one, which has already been posted into the Awesome+ patron group. The image looks great as a one-shot but we can't expect to see BEW rendered in photo-realistic quality like this because we want to play the game some time this decade. Such quality is easily achievable for a skilled render artist like Wolf or Mortze but each image would take well over 2 hours of work. BEW has over 2300 images through version 1.65, with hundreds more to come with E7. Do the math. That would mean thousands of hours spent just doing the image renders! Wolf made the decision at the very beginning to try to make a game that has very good images that he could finish in our lifetimes instead of a game that would never be playable because so much time went into the artwork. Professional studios have multiple artists working on very high-end workstations full-time, so they
can do it. BEW is a hobby, done in spare time, and can never compete with the pros in this way.
The attached image is just a demonstration of what Wolfschadowe can do with his current rendering assets. He spent almost exactly 2 hours of dedicated time and it is still not really finished. He pointed out several errors and glitches in the image, all of which could be fixed with more time. Download the image and zoom in and you can see some of them - a seam line on her shoulder, a missing tear duct in one eye, a "scar" on her chin and some others. To fix these little issues is simple but time consuming. Another 6 hours or so would leave a virtually perfect image. The problem, of course, is that Wolf has a game to develop, write, program, finish and get out to users, not to mention a job, family and life. 2 to 6 hours per image is simply impossible.
The problem becomes compounded when working in a dynamic environment like BEW. If the game space was static, one time-consuming set-up might be all that was needed for a whole scene. Since BEW changes with every character, camera angle or room position, it would not be simply a case of doing the set-up and then shooting all the images. Every image would have to be set-up individually. Even the simple scenes like Brad's bedroom would require a separate setting for each image as he moves about the scene.
At any rate, here is a test render of our favorite bartender, Faith, in near photo-realistic Ultra HiRes. She looks pretty good, I think. Just don't expect this resolution in the game. The improvements I showed earlier in the two views of the strip club are pretty impressive as it is and this way we get to play the game in a reasonable time frame.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
Now consider the time to do the items on that list. I think I might have left a few things off the list as well.