Another week, another being busy!

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 Ok, that made no sense. Anyways, Got another weekly update post to go over, so no time for the foreplay nonsense!

> Game Jam Time??? <

Brief announcement, I will be joining the Pirate Software Game Jam! ( https://itch.io/jam/pirate )
I’m currently just working alone as I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try finding a group if I found I didn’t have time or desire to push forward, but I think it’ll be a good chance to stretch outside my currently running projects and release something small! The theme of this game jam is “It’s Spreading” and I already have a concept I’m working on, there’s other requirements and such but you can check the link for more details. Supporters will get access to builds once I have them available, then once it’s submitted the game will be free for everyone to give a try! The game jam is running from January 12th 2024 6:00 am to January 26th 2024 6:00pm (PDT I think?), wish me luck!

Side note, if anyone is interested in joining me on this venture and want to be on a team with me, I am more than open to accept! Just contact me on Discord as you usually would and we can chat about it! (The rules allow for teams of up-to 5 members in size)

> Update on the CivitAI situation regarding Clubs, Paywalls, Ect. <

Last week I had put out a large article talking about CivitAI and the release of a features they called Clubs, which was a thinly veiled paywall feature which has a large number of dangers attached for not just the AI community, but also creatives as a whole. I went over a lot in my article. ( Link here – SubscribeStar – https://subscribestar.adult/posts/1135370 / CivitAI – https://civitai.com/articles/3651/civitai-clubs-paywalls-pay-gates-and-the-dangers-they-propose ) Since then, after seeing the massive amount of feedback from all over the AI community, CivitAI took down the Clubs feature and put out a follow up article talking about future plans. ( Link – https://civitai.com/articles/3694 ) The article is long and has a lot of interesting ideas, I won’t be going over this article like I did the last, but I will be writing a follow up article soon speaking more about the community. I did, however, want to point out that CivitAI does seem to be on a much better track than before.

Full disclosure, after my article, Justine Maier (known on CivitAI as JustMaier) reached out and offered me a chance to speak with him, as he wanted to speak with me to understand my thoughts in more depth and get feedback on some of the future ideas they were preparing to present, and was even shown much of the article they released before it was ready to provide my own feedback. I’ve spoken in the past about how I’ve communicated with the Team at CivitAI directly before, but I still feel it’s important to mention as it could create a bias. The CivitAI posting of the previous article also has comments between Maier and I (completely public) about various issues regarding the systems, and if you’re interested in more from the CivitAI team themselves I’m not the only one they took the time to respond too. I did get permission to speak about this in my follow up article I will be working on soon.
 
To wrap up this little update, I just thought it was important to recognize that CivitAI was able to take feedback, realize the community’s concern, the mistakes they’ve made, and work toward correcting those issues in a very public way, if you haven’t given their new article a look or given your feedback, I highly recommend you do! It’s important that we praise companies when they are able to recognize the potential harms of their actions and are able to course correct to something better for everyone involved. Although it may be the bias I mentioned earlier, I don’t think the CivitAI team had any ill-intent in any of this, they were simply misguided by dangerous voices that very much exist and will continue to try and push us toward a worse place, but if we keep our voices heard and collaborate on issues like this, we can keep this space a fun and welcoming one for the foreseeable future. This, will be what my follow-up article tackles. I hope you end up reading it when it comes out!

> “Out of Disk Space” <

So… this happened. I won’t get into much detail (maybe I’ll reveal the full details of the projects that caused this in a later weekly post) but it did end up taking an unfortunate amount of my time away this week. In-short, I’ve been building datasets and have a lot of AI model work going on that has started stretching my storage limits quite extensively. However, I currently operate at a loss, so I can’t just go out and buy some expensive storage solutions, as much as I’d really love to. Q.Q But yeah, without boring everyone’s ears off, I had to figure out some new storage strategies for my current hardware and really cut-back on my data hoarding habits. I’m experimenting with new data management tactics and if it all works out maybe that’s a future article in the works? Guess we’ll find out if 2 weeks from now I’m still complaining about having no more storage space! >.<

> Skyrim Mod – Succubus Heart 5.3.3 DEV (With Basic OStim Support!) <

DL Link : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yqt2P0fu2JRsjOIcuD7kAa03JuQ3rvZw?usp=drive_link

Succubus Heart got a massive update this week with a new Framework detection and switch feature! Currently it supports SexLab and OStim Standalone, though it could theoretically support more if that was ever required. The catch? I don’t know much about OStim so I’m struggling to test stuff… However, if you’re an OStim Standalone user and would like to help out please feel free to join the discord and give the new Succubus Heart 5.3.3 DEV a try! This also comes with other features and upgrades of course, changelogs in the usual place!

 OStim limits I’m already aware of…

This week was kind of a mess and I hardly followed my original plans, but hey, that’s life I guess. ^-^’
 Ultimately, this week was dedicated mostly to getting Succubus Heart with OStim support working properly and researching more into the LLM translation workflow I spoke about 2 weeks ago. I originally only planned to get a dev environment set up for OStim but it was really nagging me so I braved it and asked the OStim community for help. This, along with support from our awesome community, helped me get over the last few hurdles to getting things running and working properly! So yeah, as mentioned, Succubus Heart now supports OStim! But… it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. I originally planned to make a script and translation sheet system for Succubus Heart to re-compile in various languages while working with the community to refine translations starting as LLM output. However, my attempts at this script didn’t really work out like I thought it would for technical reasons (has to do with character set handling in psc files and how they are compiled) so I instead had to go a much more complex route for me, which is using xTranslate and learning how to export a sample translation so people can build upon it. This is probably where I should have started, but it’s still not ideal, Succubus Heart uses a LOT of custom strings and builds them over time with item names and such, so going into xTranslate blind isn’t a good experience, but hopefully I can figure out a way to make this more consistent. (Investigating a way to make my proposed translation script thingy but for xTranslate instead) For those unaware, xTranslate is a translation tool specifically built for Creation Engine games, so this method won’t carry over to other projects unfortunately

Other than that, aside from a-typical communication stuffs I mentioned earlier, I had to shift focus onto my storage situation. While I was working on Succubus Heart I was also shifting around databases, reorganizing files, finding/deleting duplicates, and doing general maintenance. Despite my Skyrim install being on a fast as hell M.2 Nvme SSD, it still takes ages to load up, same with CK, so it left a lot of small windows for work to get done. I also, probably against my best interests, to rewrite the booba article from scratch and will be working on that in small amounts. Another random tangent, it got super cold here (-8 f degrees was the low yesterday) and this house wasn’t really built for this so I decided to work on one of my model merges as an excuse to use my hardware as a bit of a space heater! Was productive too! I found some new merge chains that I think will lead one of my merges to the finish line, hope to try and see if it all works this week then iron out final issues while testing!

Also worked on some AI image touch-up stuffs with the intention of posting to Pixiv like I mentioned, but I’m slow, so it didn’t happen. X.x

Going to focus rather heavily on the Game Jam stuff and finishing some plans from last week while shifting focus.