Dev Update #14 (Patreon)

A VERY productive week. The massive environments for the whole city and the palace ran into some snags when the city scene crashed my system trying to render it. Yep, I spoke too soon last week. I did have everything laid out, and the full palace environment did render. However, the city environment needed a lot more optimization, and I went ahead and took care of the palace too so I don't run into problems there later. It took me a bit of digging to figure out where my issues were and how to fix them, but I got things vastly more optimized. We are good to go with both of those without cutting any corners. In addition to that, all the new environments should be done for Chapter 6 (barring any last minute changes or things I forgot to add to my to do list when I wrote the script).

I'm finishing up my HDRIs today for everything. The first step for those was to render the different images I needed. A total of 300 renders were needed. Then I had to create the HDRI images in Photoshop by combining those (100 total!). Final step is plugging these into the different environments and making sure everything lines up as it should. It's been a grind with these HDRIs, but doing testing last night and today with them to see what they looked like made it worth it. Now, when you look out a window, you are seeing exactly what is around that particular room or building instead of something I hope you don't notice the modern stuff in the background. HDRIs will be needed for any future environments I create, but since there usually aren't many of those per release, that is much more manageable than the massive catch up work I had to do here.

I still need to finish up some code, the final new characters for Chapter 6, selecting my music, and a final script check before renders start. It is taking a bit longer than I originally expected, but I did end up adding a lot more than I planned. A ton of new assets were purchased, existing things were better optimized, and I have things, like the city and palace full environments, that will pay off very nicely in the future. I'm extremely happy with the new stuff and some improvements that I made to existing items. It feels good to have all this wrapped up (or very close to being so). If you all only knew the hours that goes into each release…

Enjoy a couple of new renders up top, and I'll see you all in the dev update next week!