[Progress Report]: 19th of November (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

MADNESS BECOMES ME

The above render is from Riley's H-scene event as the winner of the previous poll! The main story animations for a totally separate event have already been complete, and as I write this, Riley's animations are ongoing. I've been more or less eating, sleeping, and breathing renders for the past two weeks, and that will also be the case for the final week. I'll go into details in a bit, but I also want to congratulation Harper for winning this development cycle's poll! I'll be working on her build up events next week as well.

I've mentioned this in the past, but as the quality as the game's renders have increased, so has the time they take to produce. On my old hamster machine, each render was around fifteen to twenty minutes, which is quite a long time considering that doesn't factor in posing. When I upgraded, my render times decreased to about six minutes a render, which is what I've been working at for the past two years.

Now, that increase allowed me to continue my preferred pace of development of roughly 10 events per cycle. This was, until, the quality started increasing so much that the flaws were also amplified. In the same way that CGI looks worse in 4k resolution, bad renders look worse in higher quality lighting. The big lighting overhaul unintentionally caused by a combination of nVidia drivers and Daz3D software updates that I was complaining about several months ago has been affecting my ability to make renders incrementally over time so insidiously I didn't notice it until the Sandbox Overhaul.

Those of you who remember my original posts on the Sandbox Overhaul know that I had intended much bigger plans for that segment of development, but I instead truncated both its development and ended it's phase quite quickly in favor of the main story because, as I was becoming aware, I just couldn't get the renders out fast enough. For months I thought I had "lost my edge" or gotten lazy in some way I couldn't see, even though my hours spent on the game were increasing, which is when I realized what had actually gone wrong.

It takes two minutes to pose a render, and six minutes to produce it, but because the quality is higher, I need to adjust (repose) the render and then make it again very often. This means that my actual render time had gone up from the original hamster fifteen minutes to sixteen minutes at the shortest. Many renders often require me to repose three or four times. Ironically, this wasn't an issue in the very beginning because the quality was so bad that I didn't even know if the characters were looking into the camera half the time. They just needed to gaze in the vague direction of the player. Now, all renders have actual highlights on the irises that will direct your attention. You can see that in the image above.

That render took six minutes, but I had to adjust it three times, so the final product was closer to half an hour. Half an hour for a single image when I'm producing on average one hundred each week.

The Early Build is coming out next weekend and I am aiming for six to seven events. It's a miracle I've been able to get that far, because animations events are the worst offenders. It used to be five days from start to finish to get out a full animation event. Now, it takes close to nine days.

The silver lining, or what I hope will be the silver lining, to all this is that the final computer parts have been purchased and I have the new rig sitting half assembled on my desk in the other room. I'm going to have those final pieces arrive this week, and begin the data transfer over the next weekend with the hope that it works and I can begin the next cycle on the new hardware.

I'm... quite nervous. I don't often build computers, and I'm having all the usual worries about breaking things even though I've double and triple checked the part compatibility and viewed several tutorials on it. It's a strong computer, and I'm hoping it will be what I need to get back to 10 events per update and finally start making real progress in all aspects of the story.

That's it for me this week. I'm back to rendering. The next time you'll hear from me will likely be after Thanksgiving, and I want to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you for all of your support,

~Solace