The past week has been productive and full of Windows new product Spanners.

After my pretty good week last week, Windows decided to put a spanner in my works. The result is a complete format and rebuild of my PC. This took me two days to back up my files, format, install Windows, install software and download drivers etc.

Talking about spanners, I got reminded that Americans may not know what this word means. A spanner is a single-sized tool for tightening nuts & bolts instead of an adjustable wrench. In comparison, Americans call any tool for tightening nuts & bolts a wrench.

I ranted about the difference between American English and English. I can't tell you how many times I've suffered from the US-Eng/Eng dictionary changes in Word. We have Noah Webster to blame for this, and he wanted his American spelling to be distinct & superior to English. Back in the 1820s, the English had two forms of spelling accepted for particular words as these words were inherited from Latin or French. England preferred the French spelling so centre, metre, colour & defence etc. Webster liked center, meter, color & defense; he was also responsible for dropping the 'k' after publick & musick on both sides of the pond. History is pretty cool my 16-year-old self would call me a swot for saying this, but I embraced my Nerd a long time ago now, my crazies out for all to see. Anyway, I digress. Enough school talk back to the Dev Blog.

I already talked about this previously that I had made my characters; G8.1's instead of G8's, and after encountering problems, I decided I needed to convert them backwards. I did this for most of my characters, and I hadn't done so for Nate and others. So after the "Windows Spanners" episode, I was excited to get back into Posing and Rendering. I even started gearing up for beta testing, whoop whoop.

So these issues started creeping up, not being able to use expression properly, some other assets not working for compatibility reasons etc. I also started getting 'duplicate formulas' a lot, so after hitting the forums, I was still non-the-wiser. So I turned to my trusty old friend Notepad and noticed I did some interrogating; after a while, I realised I had VS Code and learned that DUF & DSF files are JSON files. This helped me get a better feel of the file build, and I discovered that I had 16,00 duplicate lines of code in one of the files, with the only difference being the Value variable.

As you all know, I'm not a programmer, so sometimes it's all Swahili, but I'm not afraid to hit delete, do a save, and see the result. So what's the worst that could happen? Nothing, that's what; removing the duplicate lines of code fixed my problems. So I had to face the gruelling task of deleting 16,000 of them. Nah, fuck that. I thought I'd remove the offending files from my library and jobs a good un, right? Nope. Now I was getting missing file issues WTF? That model wasn't even in that scene.

Back in Discord, I was pissing and moaning and was told Daz opens all morphs when you launch it, and by opening them, it records them in your files. That goes against logic, right? Why have saved data that doesn't need to be there? A DSF of DUF needs to record the assets and their translations in the scene; not every friggin morph for every model that isn't used. Talk about inefficient and frustrating. I think the guys at Daz need to do some thinking because this shit needs to get sorted. It doesn't allow people to be flexible with their libraries at all. If you made a wrong purchase and wanted to remove the asset, you cant. What if you wanted to work from a different PC that only has your VN assets installed? You guessed it; you can't. You have to have a replica of your entire library all of the time. That, in my book, completely sucks ass! At least give me the option to do a fucking Purge on the file so that it will delete all unused assets.

Do you want to know how I fixed my duplicate and missing file issue? I cheated, that what. I took a good existing file and copied and renamed it to match the missing/duplicate file. Reopened the scene boom fixed, no more issues. Guess I'll have to tackle the 16,000 lines of code at some point, but that's a future me problem.

Another fun task I had this week was re-rendering 40 scenes! So after fixing my code issues with files decided now was the time to dive balls deep into posing, one last push before the demo release. Cockblocked by non-compatible skin materials between G8.1 & G8, I can go G8 to G8.1 but not G8.1 to G8. In their infinite wisdom, Daz decided to split the torso and body materials, which included the neck and back of the head. My only solution was to choose a new skin, and boy, what a difference skin makes to your character.

Most people would be like me and think your looks are defined mainly by your facial bone structure (muscle, bone, ligament and cartilage alike). You wouldn't believe that the skin would have such a dramatic effect, but I assure you it's often night and day; you can even get similar skin tones, but everything looks or feels different. My friend and fellow developer TAR Games produced an image he titled Game of Kells, where he shows just how much of a difference skin makes. He's kindly let me post it here for you all to see. I will also include a link to his Linktree below, he posts content very regularly, and most of it is not behind a paywall, so please check out his Discord and other links.

Image Courtesy of TAR Games

His actual character is the one I have highlighted in the image. Her name is April Kell, and when you see the content he's made of her is not to start simping for her. I eventually settled on a new skin for Nate, I got as close as I could to the original, but it still felt off to me, so whilst playing around, I added some glasses on him, and everything felt right like this is who he was supposed to be. It's an odd sensation to feel, but anyone who's created a character often feels this; it's elating. That also, in turn, involved redressing him, as the clothing needed to compliment his new look.

With all that sorted, it was time to go back through ALL the scenes I had rendered and replaced old Nate with new Nate and re-render them. This took two days to smash out, so on Tuesday night, I set my computer to render the 40 scenes and came home on Wednesday night to 38/40 completed. I cancelled the remaining two as I had some new scenes to pose, but I'll talk about that in the next section.

So with most of my computing issues solved, scenes re-rendered, and four days of my week gone, I need to get back on the horse. So what did I do this week that would be counted as productive? What if I told you I have already started writing Chapter 2? Yes, I have written two full scenes of Chapter 2 and partially completed a third. It'll be next week before I get to write more on them. So I decided that instead of sitting in my car at lunchtime watching Anime or napping, I'll use that hour each day to write the following chapters. But it is the Queen's Birthday and my Daughters this week, so I took the whole week off, so I'm going to become a rendering machine, PC gods permission is pending.

Afterwork I have managed to knock off posing and rendering 22 new scenes, eight new materials (yeah, I made my materials for screens), and completed post work on 62 images. I've even tried my hand a writing a parody of pokemon.

…I will travel across the land, searching far and wide. Each horny mom will understand when the penis is inside. Pokurmom gotta catch them all. Balls deep in you, I know it's my destiny. Oh, you're my best friend; in your womb, I will explode…."

It was a random shitposting on 13 Games' server because someone said they wanted to collect all the girls and my mind went to pokemona and then turned filthy. Honestly, I don't think I would have gotten as much done Thursday & Friday if it wasn't for 13. He's been streaming while creating content for his AVNs, The Fosters & Our Island, and I've been sitting in there, too, chatting away. I have also been watching his stream whilst working on my scenes, fixing stuff etc., so I think you all should thank him and check out his games and Discord.

This post has been longer than usual, considering I didn't move the project forward most of the week. But if reading about my week has entertained you at all, that leaves me a happy chappy. I'm going to love you and leave you, I have got a party to prep for this weekend, but I'm looking forward to having a whole week where I can genuinely focus on smashing out renders. Fingers crossed that I'm telling you I'm in beta this time next week!

Snowy

TAR Games: https://linktr.ee/theamazingrolandder

13 Games: https://discord.gg/GgmDX6KBKf

My Linktree: https://linktr.ee/postboned_games