Progress Report (Patreon)

Hey! I'm on time with a progress report for once! Wait...pointing out that I often lose track of them probably isn't a good thing, huh? Oops. 

*cough*

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Anyway! General news first. I got the upgrade to my rendering PC done...but it was a freakin nightmare! I didn't lose just one day to the upgrade, I lost two and a half! Ugh! I've been building and upgrading my own PCs for roughly twenty years, and this was the absolute worst experience I've had to date >_<. 

First I hadn't realized that I needed a CPU cooler (usually I buy them bundled with the CPU to be sure of compatibility, but forgot that little detail this time), but then I had several different kinds of nightmare with the new case and it's power hookups. By the way, never, ever, for any reason, buy anything from the company GameMax. There are no words in Entish, Elvish, or the Tongues of men to properly describe my new and unending hatred for them. The fiery, incandescent rage of a thousand burning galaxies is not sufficient to describe my burning, semi-murderous loathing for them. Whoever they are, they better hope I never meet their designers in a dark alley with no witnesses somewhere.

The utter, utter morons somehow built a case that can't power it's own built-in case fans properly. I spent over 3 hours tracing the power runs for the built-in power splitter, only to discover that the damn thing dead ends without actually plugging into the main board. After haunting the internet looking for how it was supposed to work for another 3 hours (since the 'manual' has fewer words than this post and no viable wiring diagram) I finally had to give up. The information just doesn't exist. Which meant I had to order a separate fan controller as well -_-. Which only just arrived today.

Technically, I have the Render PC up and running at this point, well enough to render. But it's still got issues, mostly regarding some incompatibility between the new hardware and the cloned OS I carried over so I didn't have to reinstall everything. Thankfully, those issues are irritants that can wait a day or two for me to tackle, rather than serious issues. Suffice it to say, though, that I'm pissed off at the amount of time I lost to this mess >_<. 

Left Hand Magic

Thankfully, despite the lost time, we're in pretty decent shape here. I've got the render machine running well enough that it's currently rendering the animations for Talia's content. And I expect to be done with said rendering sometime tomorrow morning. Essentially, unless something else goes wrong, all that was lost was any chance of sneaking in the extra scene I'd hoped for. Given the length of the weekend scenes, the Build is still decently sized, so I'm not too unhappy. But I am a little disappointed that circumstances this month prevented me from making the build any bigger than it will be. 

On the flip side, I'm not an idiot and had backed up all the renders first. While the render PC was down I got 90% of the post-processing for the renders and animations done. Mostly while waiting for parts. Meaning that we're still in good shape time-wise. I should only need 2-3 days for programming, which will give me 3-4 days for the writing, editing and testing. Writing shouldn't take more than 2 days this time, I think. Which means, unless something else goes wrong (which is always possible, particularly given how things have gone basically all month), we should at least be looking for an on-time release. Which I really wanted to happen this month, so that I can get as big of a build in for Haven's Port next month as possible.

Mixed Media Short

Aside from the game release, this is the last reward to deliver for the month, and it's pretty much done! I want to do a tiny bit of tweaking to one part I'm not happy with. But after that, it really just needs its editing pass. I'm planning to post it tomorrow, if nothing goes wrong. Technically, I could probably do it tonight. But there's no real reason to try to force it through faster. Particularly as I dislike cluttering everyone's feeds with multiple posts a day. 

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That's it for now! I'll probably do one more progress report before release. But everything is mostly on track!