Progress Report (Patreon)

Whew! Okay, probably the last progress report until the update. Just as a quick reminder, as of the previous progress report, I moved The Starship Promise short story into next month. If you didn't catch that before, you can do read about the whys and whatfores of it there. The TLDR version though is simply that the SSD failure cost me too much time earlier in the month and something had to give.

Having said that, the only other thing left this month is the Left Hand Magic release. Which is...going. It's not going well exactly. But it's not going horribly either.  Put simply, I'm running into more issues with my workflow than expected...all of them linked back to that bloody SSD failure. I already knew I was going to have some issues with Renpy (at least one I haven't resolved yet as it won't come up until I do the builds). What I hadn't expected was to have an even more serious issue with Davinci Resolve.

For those of you not familiar, Davinci Resolve is my personal preference for video editing software. I use it to make the end animations, including doing all the post processing, speed changes, and so on. Unfortunately, one of the most critical features I use, the ability to create a video clip from sequenced renders, is either missing or not working the same way in the latest version. This was completely unexpected. I lost several hours trying to sort out a solution and never did get it working. Instead, I had to rely on the fact that my Render Box has an older version installed.

Normally, I only use that installation to do quick checks for major fucks up when I first finish rendering a new animation. Thankfully, I had it there as a fallback when I couldn't sort out why the newest version of Resolve isn't doing this extremely basic thing. It did mean both A) A lot of stupidly awkward file juggling between my two computers and B)That I ended up needing to use the Render computer for all the video editing. Which put paid to the plan to have it chewing through some old animations to fix some issues. That annoys me greatly since that really needs to get done. But it is what it is.

Net result is that, currently, I'm not happy with how far I've gotten. I'm about 95% done with the coding, but I haven't even started on the writing. Right now, it's a bit of a tossup if I'm going to have an exactly on time delivery. Unless something goes badly wrong, I don't expect more than a day of delay into next month at worst. But until the issue with Resolve, along with a few other bits of software I use needing to be downloaded and installed because I sort of forgot about them, I wasn't worried about a delay at all. So, we've gone from 'it's almost certainly going to be on time,' to 'probably? Maybe a day late at worst' as being my current best estimate.

That's where things are right now. If there is going to be a delay, I'll put up a note closer to the 30th. Hopefully, I can still get it out time, though.