Andromeda 0.5 Briefing 1


Hey all, time for the first official briefing for version 0.5 of Andromeda.

First, I want to correct some stuff I said in my last post.

First correction, I said:
I think I'm going to go back and re-render some of the earlier scenes* to try and bring their quality up. I probably won't do every scene, instead focusing on scenes that I think "I could do this better now that I can render stuff much faster."...
 
*I don't plan to add any new scenes, but the scenes themselves might look a bit different thanks me potentially adding some more stuff or redoing the lighting.

But plans have changed. I am going to remaster the images for every single earlier scene, especially those from 0.1-0.3 (though a few in 0.4.5 could use some touch ups as well but I'm not sure if I'll get around to those by the time 0.5 is releasing). The reason for this is that the few scenes I have remastered already have seen fairly significant improvements in quality, see below. Part of the reason for this is, of course, me now having a better grasp on Daz, as well as having some useful scripts and other assets that I didn't have back then.
Original Scene

Remastered Scene

Another example

Scene

Second correction, I said last time:
Kick up the max iterations and let it stop due to render time. Because each iteration renders faster then with my previous setup it should get through a lot more iterations. Say we assume linear scaling, probably not realistic but makes things simpler, if we keep max render time at 2 hours, since it takes ~30 minutes to do 5000 iterations with the couple of frames I tested, in 2 hours it should be able to do around 20,000 iterations. That is a lot more, but the thing is, the final image will probably still need to be run through an external denoiser (in my case Intel's) and at some point you get diminishing returns in how much quality is retained compared to the number of Iray iterations that were done in Daz.

Well yeah, turns out at the default settings and the internal denoiser set to kick in at 4000 iterations, images look like they were given significantly more time to render, with out actually taking that additional time and having minimal detail loss.

Now, I don't expect to have every single scene remastered by the time 0.5 is ready to release, so this will be a continuing effort. Saves should generally be compatible since I am not touching things like variables. Assuming my assumption is correct the the remasters won't be done by the time 0.5 release I would expect them to be done by the time 0.6 comes out.

This remastering process shouldn't interfere with work on 0.5 because my plan is that I will work on them while I work on the script, but once the script is done I will transition to focusing on doing the renders for 0.5.

Now for the new content with 0.5 itself. This update is going to be more focused on getting to know most if not all of the main cast that is already in the-game, I plan to add a few (mostly aliens) down the road.

Now that doesn't mean this update won't include progress on the central plot. Time is still moving, as the ship makes it's way to it's next destination, it's just not the main focus of this update.

Now for when this update will come out? I can't give anything exact but I would guess around December '22 or January '23. While I would love to get releases out ~3 months that won't be happening this time because I expect to be busy near the end of the year and won't have as much time to work on writing, or more accurately around that time, renders, especially since I don't set up by scenes all in one Daz file plus I use this as my personal rig as well.