Progress Report - July 10, 2023 (Patreon)

Howdy everyone.

I don't have too much to report this week, because it's been... uhh.. hectic.

Family Health Update

If you follow me on Twitter, then you're already aware of what my week's been like, but for those that don't: my Independence Day was celebrated this year by receiving a text from my dad saying my mum was in the hospital for internal bleeding.

That was July 4, the day after last week's Progress Report.

The next 4 days were basically just a play-by-play of keeping a dripfeed of information about my mum's health. They spent 3 days trying to find the source of the internal bleeding, but never did.

Whilst they were searching, they also did some more tests regarding my mum's heart. Recall from earlier posts that I mentioned she has a history of strokes, had her third stroke in April, and tests from that came back suggesting she had a heart attack, when so far as we can tell she didn't.

Well, while they were doing these tests on her heart, as they were hunting down the internal bleeding source, the tests came back reporting she was actively having a heart attack, right then and right there during the tests. Which she obviously wasn't.

So they did more tests and eventually discovered that one of the four arteries connected to her heart is completely, 100% blocked. Normally, this kills that segment of the heart (which is, obviously, really bad) - but somehow her body managed to make alternate paths through smaller veins to keep blood pumping through that chamber. The chamber is still weak and operating at 50% capacity, but it is still alive and can be saved.

They suspect it is this 100% blockage that is causing the tests to report she is having a heart attack - and the alternate paths the body made that is keeping her from actually have those reported heart attacks.

Two other arteries have 70% blockage, so overall her heart health is really not good, and she needs a triple bypass basically as soon as physically possible.

They would have done it while she was in the hospital for the internal bleeding, but they didn't want to perform until they found and stopped the bleeding. For obvious reasons.

Like I said, though, after 3 days of searching, they never found the source of the bleeding. It stopped, which is good obviously, but they don't know where the bleeding came from or why it happened. Apparently though they're not concerned about it, having sent her home Friday and told her to call on Monday to schedule the heart surgery. I'm not sure why they didn't schedule it then and there, but they didn't.

I'm also not terribly comfortable with them not finding the source of the bleeding. Going from feeling fine to nauseous to vomiting up blood in the span of 30 seconds isn't a good thing. But I didn't spend ten years of my life going to medical school, so if the doctors are comfortable with it, then I'm not going to argue with them.

Ever since we knew that my mum is going to need heart surgery "soon" (fun fact - I learned this on my birthday), the plan has been that once she goes into surgery, I head back to my parents' place, so that I will be there when she gets out of surgery, and I can spend a week or two with her while she recovers, to make sure nothing goes wrong. My dad works a hectic schedule and can't be with her for that whole period.

But with her getting pushed into the hospital for the internal bleeding and the discovery of the extreme blockages, the "she needs surgery soon" became "she needs surgery now", and so basically every day for the past week I've been sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting to get the text from my dad saying she's going into surgery, wherein I will hop in my car and drive off.

As such, I've been too anxious to really get any work done. I didn't want to get knee-deep in working on a project, only to have to immediately drop it on a dime for a few weeks to be with my mum. Edge of my seat, as I said.

It's now the 10th (technically the 11th, it's 2am as I write this) and I still haven't heard back from my parents. As I said, it wasn't until Friday, the 7th, that we knew she wasn't going into surgery immediately. And it was around 11pm Friday that I got that call from my Dad.

Then of course Saturdays are my stream days, so I didn't get anything done on Saturday. I've been sleeping like shit all week (no doubt related to all this stress), going to bed at 5am but not actually managing to fall asleep until almost 9am, then waking up around 3pm the next day. And this Sunday my friends and I had our biweekly 3-hour DND session from 7pm till 10pm, so waking up at 3pm I didn't really have the chance to get anything done on Sunday.

Which leads us now to Monday, today, where I have finally been able to get some work done, seeing how I now know that I won't be getting a sudden "you gotta leave right now" text, since we're back to scheduling the surgery and being able to plan things.

Life is Strange Minivid

My plan for today was to lock in all of the voice-acting for the Life is Strange minivid, whose storyboard I posted in last week's Progress Report, get the Chloe's Room map quickly ported from a map into a model set (props light better than maps do in Source Filmmaker, and more importantly maps don't get ambient occlusion, making everything look really flat and floaty), and then start animating the sex scene.

I managed to lock in the voice-acting, sort of. Chloe's voice is hard-confirmed, I reached out to Ivan's recommendation for her, she had interest in the initial project, she sent in some test audio and pulls off a really convincing Chloe (she nails her mannerisms perfectly), and formally signed on for the full project. She actually managed to record all of the non-sex audio for the project and get it back to me within a few hours.

Max's voice is a soft-confirm, I reached out to Ivan's recommendation and she was receptive to the initial pitch, so I've sent off the screenplay and storyboard for her to go over and verify she wants to do the project. I haven't heard back from her yet, and she did warn me that she's really slow to respond during the summer and it may take her until Wednesday before I hear back. But I've worked with her before, I think she'll be interested in signing on for the project, and I think she'll pull off a great Max.

So that's done and dusted, and is a huge relief because casting new characters is always a nerve-wracking experience. I still have PTSD flashbacks to the literal weeks it took Ivan and I to cast Symmetra for Ladies' Night Out.

Next up was quickly porting Chloe's room. That, uhh, turned out to be anything but "quick". Yeah it took me 5 hours. Required writing a fair few tools to pull it off. Getting the room into 3dsmax wasn't that much of a challenge - BSPSource is a clean map decompiler, and WallWorm's VMF+MDL importer system worked like a charm. Well, mostly. It did give an error that amusingly said "I don't know what causes this error, just keep trying and it'll probably work eventually." I didn't bother, because it only failed to load a single prop.

It was getting the room out of 3dsmax that proved a challenge. And I honest-to-god don't know why.

The plan was simple, to rig each prop and individual brush piece (the map wasn't composed entirely of ported props like I thought, the person who made the map on the Workshop actually hand-built the room architecture using map brush geometry) to a bone, so that anything and everything about the room can be posed, adjusted, or hidden.

The problem was that, for reasons I can't fathom, I couldn't actually get the correct positions of the individual pieces in code, for placing the bones. I could get them by hand, but every method I tried returned the wrong position - and a different position, each method.

It took me 5 tries, with painfully long wait times in between (who would've guessed creating 320 bones and then rigging 320 objects would take a while), before I finally found a solution that actually put the bones in the right place.

And then there was the matter of actually getting the models to compile. Source has a limit of 32 materials per model. I didn't think anything of it, and just exported everything out into 3 pieces, so that it fell under the 64,000-polygons-per-model limit of Source models.

Yeah, it turns out that this map uses a terrifying 132 materials. So I had to write another tool that automatically splits the map up into groups that only have 31 materials between them (I don't like to push my luck, and wanted to give myself a 1-material buffer from the 32-material limit). Then there was the issue that a lot of the textures used were exclusively being used for the map brush geometry.

A quirk of how the Source engine works is map materials and model materials use different shaders, and you cannot use one for the other. Maps use LightmappedGeneric, models use VertexLitGeneric, and never the twain shall cross. So I had to go and convert all of the map materials from LightmappedGeneric to VertexLitGeneric. Not terribly difficult, but it was still something I had to do.

Then I had to generate normal maps and add phong shaders to all of the materials, so that they can properly have ambient occlusion - which was the whole purpose of this entire endeavor of porting the map in the first place.

So, yeah. Dust settled on the 5-hour mark for getting the map ported. But, as you can tell from the post preview at the top, it was worth it.

I never got around to animating the sex scene. I guess I'll start that tomorrow.

Everything Else

That's all I have to report for this week. No progress was made on Overbreed or Epilogue. Saturday we worked on Kate Marsh and managed to get her hair rigged and her face posed, and so she received an initial release. That's the only other thing of note done.

Like I said, most of this week was just biting my nails and being too anxious about having to suddenly leave to get any work done.

And whether or not this Minivid gets done before the end of July is still up in the air. That is my goal, but with everything going on with my mum, who knows. My hope is I'll be able to get all of the core sex animation done before she goes into surgery, leaving just the detail work to be chipped away while I am back with my folks. I have dramatically reduced capacity to work while I am with them, as I am sure you can imagine.

But we'll see.

That's all for now. Until next week, everyone!