Pic 243: DiaWoF looks like crap, but I'm fixing it. (Patreon)

Last summer, I had cataract surgery on both of my eyes, and it dramatically improved my eyesight. I was shocked to learn, that many of my Daz renders in all games kinda look like shit to me now.

Since I was working on Date Ariane 2.0 at the time, it got first priority. Before the surgeries, I discovered the process of "post denoiser filtering" which removes that pixelation you see in 3D rendering.

Some people love the pixelation because it looks just like "film grain" in a movie shot on film. But I prefer the clean look, so 95% of DA2 renders removes the pixelation with the filter.

The other problem I'm seeing is compression artifacts,this picture is full of them.

This is using too much compression converting PNGs to JPGs. When I was making 1080p images, setting JPG compression to 80 was fine, but the larger 1440p on 80 results in a dirty look.

Last September (post surgery), I noticed this issue in DA2 and went back to the original PNG files and converted them to JPG at 90. That made the images bigger file size wise, but much better looking.

So, my current project is to re-render all of Dating in a World on Fire using the post denoiser filtering, and then compress them to JPG at 90, making it all look better.

A look at https://arianeb.itch.io/dating-in-a-world-on-fire-meet-relay will immediately show you the problem.

What I'm working on in 2026

I'll probably talk more about these projects in future posts, but I'm planning to split my time on three projects:

Dating in a World on Fire - I played through it recently and it's still good enough to continue on. The general plot arc is practically done, but there is a lot of writing to do still. I introduced a "heist" sub plot and I know exactly how that will go, but before that the player and Relay go on a second date, and I have no idea how that will go.

Date Ariane 2: The DLC - I'll discuss working on this later, but general plan is to provide new content consisting of

A second date - Plays just like the first date, but you can't do what you did on the last date. Ariane remembers what you did on the last date and will decline to do that again. This memory is only one date deep, so anything you did 2 dates ago is fair game. But the second date also has new activities that are more second date appropriate.

The next morning - Instead of going home in the morning, Ariane will decide the date can continue into the morning with assorted daytime activities.

I have about 15 ideas for one or both of the above categories. I suspect I'll split my time up between these two projects until I get close to finishing one of them.

Strip Crazy Eights - I want to remake this game using Daz Studio. It's a short project I can probably finish easily.