Dev Update 1/9/22 (Patreon)

Hey friends, it's Monday and you know what that means! That's right, an all-new Dev Update!

The big news of this week is just that I made significant script progress. I finished off a big scene for Mason, rewrote some content for Pepper, added some events in the opening that referenced whether you kept Gabby's files in the last installment, and  added a little Jamie content. So, things are rolling right along on that front.

More frustrating was the rendering side of things. This lobby scene/set which I've used several times was just consuming a ton of memory, which made it difficult for me to use my normal trick of doing small partial renders, and checking poses in IRay view within Daz. This just meant a lot of duplication of effort that I normally don't have to deal with, which just slowed me to an absolute crawl. I'll look at optimizing that set soon, to avoid this problem in the future.

In the meantime, I'm actively looking into a new video card for rendering, with more VRAM. It's been years since I built a PC, so I'm doing my research before I crack mine open and start monkeying with it. No idea if I'm going to run into a cascade effect where new video card --> new power supply unit --> new cooling system. But oof, some more VRAM would be nice. I'm pretty conservative with my rendering, and careful not to overload scenes with too much stuff. But, every now and then I push up against the limits of my humble 3060, with its whopping 8 GB. :'D

I've also been posting little odds and ends over on the Discord, which you can see up top. These aren't planned for immediate inclusion in the story, just some fun little ideas spurred by patrons' comments.

Alright, that's all I have for you today! Hoping to hit the rendering hard this week, since I now have several scenes fully written, and this cursed lobby scene is done.

Until next time -- take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!