To Be A King - Volume 1 News

Greetings fellow Kings! 👑

We know you love being the Kingmaker and ruling over your subjects, but you will be glad to know that you can now let all your friends take part in the same medieval affair that you have grown to be a part of.

To Be A King now features a demo version which includes 4 drama-filled chapters for a limited time that delivers the beginning of the journey so they can be initiated into the ordeal of royal proportions. 🔥



The demo will be available until August 14th and you can carry your progress to the full game! Make haste and bring all your friends to the court, spread the word and show the world how you reign over your subjects... or would you indulge in the erotic aspect of your influence?

And as always, thanks for all the support fellow Kings! 💖

ITRoy

Good day, afternoon and evening, Kings!

To Be a King Volume 1 is now available with a massive 25% discount! ✨

As part of Steam Summer Sale we are happy to treat our fans to a discount.

Now you too can feel what it is to be a Nobleman who wields his powers just as he sees fit! Will you rule with an iron fist and have your own group of concubines or will you indulge in the drama that ruling a kingdom brings? 👑

Be your own ruler and take the story where your desires lead you!

And as always, Thank you for your support
IT Roy

[h3]Learning new Tools[/h3]
With us halfway through June, there is very good progress to report at the five month mark since I began the Unreal Engine transition. I'm working on custom animations now, along with addressing other issues that I find. Animations and then sequencing those in Unreal Engine will be the final two big pieces. I've brought in another tool to help out with this process to hopefully yield more natural animations. That's going to be a process with training my eye (and learning the tool), but I'm looking forward to it.
 
Along with that animation work is the control rig for the characters. I'm working on that each evening a bit, and I'm adding things to it like expression selections and fine control of facial muscles. It is going to be a process, but this control rig will help me with setting things up in Unreal Engine sequences, and will make small adjustments much easier.
 
At this stage of development, I'm as ready as you are to get the next release out. It is now a time of pushing things that are not essential off into the future. The wonderful news is that all this preparation before all these wonderful new animations can be created and put together for Chapter 11's release is nearing an end. It's been an adventure, but there is a lot of the character and environment work completed.



[h3]Excited for the easier Workflow [/h3]
A bit of good news is that I was able to get all several hundred of my custom Daz poses converted over to animation sequences in Unreal Engine. They are, of course, just a single frame animation, but this means setting up custom animations, or just transitions from something like sitting to standing, is going to be easier for me since I can use these as a base to start those. Very excited!
 


I'll end this five month anniversary post by quickly highlighting what's been accomplished thus far:

• Daz characters converted in Unreal Engine with all their morphs, expressions, poses, and clothing.
  
• Hair converted to the Unreal Engine groom system for high quality and realistic movement.
  
• Character eyebrows & skin textures converted for improved realism.
  
• Real time character physics implemented for the breasts, butt, and thighs (jiggle physics).
  
• Most environments converted into Unreal Engine and using Nanite meshes for higher quality when viewed close up.
  
• Basic lighting presets selected and configured for scenes.
  
• Custom animation testing started.
  
• Clothing conversion process refined, and real time clothing physics added to existing Daz converted clothing.
  
• Initial scene setup testing completed.
  
• Model optimization to improve performance in future use cases.
  
• Character model conversion time decreased from about half a day to under 30 minutes.
  
• New background characters created with LOD support for improved performance in heavy crowd scenes.
  
• Cronut's model converted to a custom posable skeleton.
  
• Facial motion capture support for converted characters.
  

Thanks for all the support, and see you in the next update!

[h3]A Clothing Conundrum[/h3]

My 3D skill tool bag continues to get upgrades, whether I want it to or not. The challenge for the rest of this month is clothing. Daz clothing "works" in Unreal Engine. But much like Daz characters with a basic skin shader and existing Daz texture maps "work" in Unreal Engine, clothing really does not do well. There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest is that Daz's clothing is extremely high poly. There was one outfit with a toga, wrap, and shoes that were higher poly at its base mesh than the Daz character at SubD1 (4X base resolution).

Without getting technical, that means that I'm needing to reduce the high poly count of clothing, especially for Unreal Engine simulations. There are several ways to do this, all with some drawbacks, and that has meant testing, trial, and error, and finally admitting defeat for some outfits. All that new clothing I thought I could wait to mess with later is now one of the easier paths. Wardrobe overhaul for everyone it is. The benefit is that clothing will simulate better in Unreal Engine, have less of a performance hit, and be more realistic to the time period. The downside is getting yet another workflow established, along with improving my skill at custom texturing. Thank god I'm a quick learner.

Here is an updated render of Aelinia:


[h3]Matters concerning Eye-brows, Physics, and Pregnancies[/h3]

Apart from clothing, where work will continue for at least a few more weeks, I'm also experimenting with lighting, getting more environments into Unreal Engine, and making some final character improvements. The character improvements have been the most interesting.

After seeing how good some of the characters looked in UE with their painstakingly crafted eyebrows, I decided to bite the bullet and do it for ALL the characters. Trying to match up custom eyebrows with the existing painted-on eyebrows in their texture maps was…difficult. But I think you all will like the results. It only took me a day to get those done, and I think they match well. The rest of the hair assets are optimized, so now it is just fine-tuning hair physics and going back to adjusting body physics for all the characters. I'm prioritizing the ones I know have to be in Chapter 11.

Speaking of character improvements, I've got a couple of pregnancy morphs added to our ladies for future use (will be optional. Fear not). I keep hoping with each export from Daz and conversion (via Maya) into Unreal Engine that this will be the last time for each character. May Goddess Anna make it so!

A gorgeous render of Flora:


[h3]Few Parting Words[/h3]

All this work sounds like a lot (and it is), but I'm taking a lesson I should have learned before: take some time to do it right the first time. I did not anticipate weight painting clothing, doing custom textures in Substance Painter, or doing custom eyebrows and pubic hair. But better to do this now and get it working than put it off. Lest you fear that I'm taking on too much as a solo dev, just know that my big board of ideas still has a lot that will not be addressed in Chapter 11. I am aware of the balance I need to strike between getting things close to perfect and actually shipping the next release. I knew the characters would be the most difficult part of this process. Sadly I find it intolerable to leave you all with subpar conversions.

[h3]Character work continues! [/h3]

I got some breakthroughs on hair and eyebrows, so I'm hurriedly going through the characters to get all of them done. I also discovered some issues with my sub-surface scattering settings on the skin thanks to a new feature I found with lighting in Unreal Engine. Everyone is getting fixed there now so they don't weirdly glow under brighter lighting.

I purchased new assets on the Unreal Engine marketplace to fill out a few areas, and the environment you see in the video is done, as far as its basic setup. I need to finish up the lighting and interior, but that should be a reasonably quick process.

Cronut is the star of this video as he finally got fully converted. I learned a few new tricks to get him looking decent, but he is now ready for animations, once I finish up his control rig.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Apart from all that, I'm continuing to refine things and optimize my assets. Since I'm rendering everything out myself on my own hardware, it isn't essential. But the optimization helps reduce potential issues later and helps me get more comfortable with Unreal Engine's vast reporting options.

Clothing is a bit behind as I'm waiting for an update for the plugin I use to convert my characters. That should be out within the next couple of days, and, in the meantime, I'm watching some tutorials on clothing and cloth physics in Unreal Engine. I've got plenty to keep me busy, so while clothing is going to be a big piece, it allows me to shift my focus to other items on the to-do list.

You'll be seeing more early animations, once clothing is figured out. Now I must get back to all the things in development that need my attention. I'll try to keep these videos and development updates coming around once a week for the foreseeable future.

Have a great weekend and don't forget to join our Discord, we are hosting a small event featuring Cronut!

Cheers!