Uni Dreams Demo ***V2.2***

[xortan]

Great concept Can't wait for it to finish.

[Spooky]

The game is really interesting for me..I can't wait to see it finished!!
I played it on firefox too,and had encountered the same "resizing issue",I found it not bothering though..
in the first encounter of helena : You feel a sharp tap on your shoulder� I think there's a missing symbol on firefox
If I try to clean the men's toilet it brings me to a broken link
If I try to clean the girl's toilet it says me that I've already cleaned it

anyhow,really nice work,the quality of the picture is absolutely fantastic and so is the setting..I also liked the characterization (is that the right word?I'm not very good with english,as you can see) of the girls as far as I have seen..the only major problem for me is that now I want to play day 3 and it isn't ready!!

Hi Sylakone,
thanks for this project! It looks very promising and I can't wait to see the rest of the story unfold .

a small bug report on version 2.1
I can confirm caravaggio's observations, I get the text error on day 1 (after leaving the mistress's office) as well: You feel a sharp tap on your shoulder� (in firefox and ie9)
Day 2:
- trying to clean the men's toilet in the early evening leads to a broken link (kat_blocker3_1 but the file in the folder is named kat_blocker_clean3_1)
- suprising Kat ends in another broken link (kat_sneak1_1 but the file name is kat_sneak3_1) and the follwing file kat_sneak3_2 is missing
- if you go upstairs in the afternoon the text above the map gives an afternoon indication but the text below the map continues to show "It's early Morning."
- in many of the screens is still a very small link to gym1_1 with the mouse-over "See what the Gym facilities are like." (it is easy to miss, so probably no impact for most players)

Well, let's see what day 3 brings

[sylakone2]

@ carravagio The finding booze is for day 3 I have sorted the Girls toilet bug.
@ Spooky thanks for all the bug reports. I will look at them and fix them.
The kat locker is for day 3 so I will have to see why there are some links to it in day 2.

Thanks all for your comments and bug reports.

[TheBrain]

Just to let you know, I would want to try this out again, but since I'm limited to my netbook at the moment I only have a limited resolution (1024x600). Your images are very large and there's no rescaling, so maybe 2/3 of the game fits on my screen. Even when using the scaling in my browser (Firefox) it resets after every click, which it doesn't do on any other website...

In the current day and age it's not that far fetched that people might want to play your game on smaller screens (netbooks, pads, phones, etc.), so some sort of dynamic rescaling would be something that really would be beneficial.

In addition I agree that you shouldn't use PNG as your image format. PNG is nice if you're showing a high-quality render, such as people do in the "Sexy girls" section. But when you're distributing a large amount of images such as in this game, JPEG is the way to go. At low compression you're still going to cut your file size at least in half and the compression will barely be noticeable. On top of that, your renders won't receive the same kind of scrutiny that a single high-quality "artwork" render might.
(Example: A few years back I manually touched up a photo of Sarah Michelle Gellar which I wanted to use as a desktop background, but had tons of JPEG-artifacts. After all, I would be looking at it a lot. But if you were just going to look at that photo for a few seconds (like you would in a game), you'd hardly notice the artifacts.)

[julier]

I have found several bugs that are "invisible" to the user because you can still get the "reward". For example, in file pclean_check1_1.html you load the workout variable but then you check for Helena. So, depending on the random initialization of Helena (because it is undefined) you will get it or not.

I recommed to use functions like the Choose function that is included in _functions.js. That will simplify the code and avoid many of the bugs. Since you will check a lot the time, I would make some functions to do that. If you don't know how, I can help you.

Also, to avoid problems, be consistent with the use of capitals (for example, never use it in variables). This is specially relevant to the file names. Only Windows doesn't care if the file is called Helena.html or helena.html. All the operating systems will get an error! And remember that most webservers (if you plan to make it online someday) use Linux. It was a pain in the ass playing the game as it is now in Linux. To be honest, I have seen this bug in many of the HTML games, including some pay games like those from Chaotic.

I agree also on the JPEG. Note that PNG does not give you better quality because it compress (reduce) the color palete, thus you are loosing some colors when you save it as PNG. Any gradient will always look better JPEG.

PNG should only be used with flat colors (e.g. comic style) or if you need transparency.

[TheBrain]

I agree also on the JPEG. Note that PNG does not give you better quality because it compress (reduce) the color palete, thus you are loosing some colors when you save it as PNG. Any gradient will always look better JPEG.

PNG should only be used with flat colors (e.g. comic style) or if you need transparency.

That's not really true. Yes, it can do paletted images, but this is not standard. PNG uses lossless compression, while JPEG is lossy. So the PNG compressed image will be bit-identical to the source, while the JPEG compressed image isn't, so JPEG always looks worse (assuming no palettes are used).

[wagner]

I agree also on the JPEG. Note that PNG does not give you better quality because it compress (reduce) the color palete, thus you are loosing some colors when you save it as PNG. Any gradient will always look better JPEG.

Are you confusing PNGs with GIFs? While you are correct about PNGs being good with cell shaded content, it is because a PNG is similar to a ZIP file. If you write out a low entropy text file, such as a single phrase copied several thousand times, it will compress down to little more than the space of that single phrase. Similarly, if you have a low entropy image such as a solid color or a repeating pattern, PNG will compress it very well. On the other hand, a high entropy image like a photograph compresses poorly.

[julier]

JPEG can also be lossless (although it is uncommon). I should have clarified that any gradient will look better in JPEG... with the same level of optimizations (roughtly same size). For example, if you use Save for web... in Photoshop it always use a palette for the PNG.

A simple linear grandient is a low entropy image (that's why JPEG can compress it a lot), yet PNG does poorly.

[TheBrain]

JPEG can also be lossless (although it is uncommon). I should have clarified that any gradient will look better in JPEG... with the same level of optimizations (roughtly same size). For example, if you use Save for web... in Photoshop it always use a palette for the PNG.

A simple linear grandient is a low entropy image (that's why JPEG can compress it a lot), yet PNG does poorly.

Funny, I just tried the gradient thing and PNG stores it much better than JPEG (2.9kb PNG vs 17.6kb with JPEG on 0 compression). Turning compression up to get roughly the same filesize shows clear quantization artefacts on JPEG. Btw, you shouldn't confuse 0 compression on JPEG with lossless compression, because it isn't (lossless compression is somewhere in the JPEG standard it seems, but I haven't seen it implemented in any software I use).

Anyway, this is exactly what wagner mentions: PNG compresses well on low entropy images and in such cases often does better than JPEG (with the same filesize), especially when sharp edges are present.

However, to come back to this thread (which we are rapidly derailing here...), for a game we're not interested in lossless compression. We don't care if a few pixels have slightly different values from the source. And then JPEG is clearly the better choice because you can tune the amount of compression to your needs, even at 0 compression a complex image is reduced at least half in size with no visual differences.

[sylakone2]

Hi all thanks for your feedback.

I have thought about changing to the jpegs. The only problem is that. I will have to reselect the jpeg version of the image for each and every html file. Which will slow down the next day somewhat.
will start saving any new images I render in jpeg instead of png from now on. I think the reason I used the png's was my first game I made I used the Renpy game engine which basically had a static background.
So I used png's for the characters because i needed the transparency as the character images were just the character with no background.

Obviously in Unidreams I am using full rendered locations and characters in the 1 image.

@ Julier

I think you will find that the pclean_check1_1.html is not used. That is probably a left over from when i was experimenting with gettting the right variables to work.
You will notice that the file pclean_check1.html is the one that is used. You will also notice that it needs to be afternoon to see Helena at the pool if you check that check file. Although thanks for the suggestions.
As for Javascript I am still a novice so I am always happy to learn more. I also noticed the issue with captials in the early days so I have tried not to use caps later in the game and will at some stage change the names to not have captials for the html files and pics. It has not been high on my priority list because I use Windows and was not planning to be running it online to begin with.
Since you have mentioned that plaing the game on linux does cause issues I will look at sorting it before I finish the game completely.

Again thanks all for you feedback.

[sylakone2]

Hi all please read the first post in this thread.

I have made a bunch of changes based on your requests.

Please download the new version which is much much smaller and let me know if you are happy with the way it is now.

Thanks

[tlaero]

I just tried out V2.2 and it's coming along nicely. The English and punctuation has radically improved since the last time I saw this. And the rendered backgrounds are fantastic. Are you using stock images or rendering them yourself?

I took a look at the code a bit. Are you having trouble with variables getting lost? Maybe you set one and later it's back to zero? Many browsers limit the number of cookies you can have, and the variables use cookies. You've got a TON of variables, so you might end up with trouble there. If you do, I can help fix it, but it will take some reworking.

I'm close to uploading a new version of Adventure Creator, but it would take some work to convert what you have over to it. You're probably better off sticking with what you've got and not using the next AC until you start your next game with it.

Tlaero

[sylakone2]

Hi Tlaero

Thanks heaps for the feedback, It's good to see you back as well.

Welcome back!

Yeah I'm rendering all of the backgrounds I bought almost all of the school scene by Greenpots from Renderosity.
It does give me the ability to do the full 3d environment as well as in the future to do full animations but that is way down the track.
The unidreams version 2.2 is the jpg verion of the unidreams 2.1 which uses png's.
The picture quality is a lot better with the 2.1 version but as you can see way too big.

I didn't realize there was a cookie limit but I will try to reduce the variables. Although for something so big I am probably going to need more yet.

Do you know what kind of limits browsers have?

Again thanks heaps for you help and advice.

Sylakone

[tlaero]

I'm pretty sure I ran out of variable space in Christine, and that game had a lot fewer variables than you do. It was why I developed the new scheme I used in Life With Keeley. How many of your variables are counts and how many are simple "yes/no"? I have a way to fit 32 yes/no's in a single variable. It's a tiny bit more difficult, but worked well for me.

Separately, have you ever considered moving the "check" functions into _game.js and getting rid of those check htmls? I did the check htmls to make things easier for Chaotic to switch, but it's really a lot better to have all of the game functions in one place.

I never saw 2.1, but the backgrounds still look great in 2.2. It's very cool that you're rendering them.

Tlaero

[sylakone2]

Thanks again for your sage advice and feedback.

I wasn't sure how to do the checks in the _game.js which is why I went with the easy but cumbersome option.
I would like to learn how to use the functions like you suggest.
Most of the variables are yes/no variables. Although i do have some count variables like the ones I use for time and day.

Thanks again for you advice and feedback.