Dev Blog #022

It's been two weeks already! Well, more actually, I forgot to post an update; I've had some tech issues this past week.

Clone Wars

No, I'm not talking about Star Wars. I decided to do library cleaning in Daz because I haven't maintained it in months. I discovered I had some duplicates and wanted to purge these, thinking hey, I won't have that many right? I used WinMerge to compare two folders and discovered more files than I thought. So, I went to each location and deleted the files individually, which was a MAJOR mistake. I accidentally deleted a primary folder and fucked up the file I was currently rendering.
· Lesson One: Never manage your library while rendering a 900-frame scene.
· Lesson Two: Don't delete any files if you manually compare two locations.
· Lesson Three: Find an application that does this for you but allows you to decide which files you want to delete.
I found a perfect application called 'Duplicate File Finder'. I had to pay for it to delete the duplicated files. The program is excellent; you post a link to the 'Master' folder(s) and the 'Target' folder(s). Tell it to make a comparison and wait until it's complete. It will give you three options 'Delete Oldest', 'Delete Newest' or 'Let me Choose'. Let me choose the best options; it allows you to review each file, and no, I didn't review each file. I wasn't prepared to check over 300,000+ duplicates totalling over 100+ GB of data. But I did select all copies in the target folder and hit delete. This way, I could choose which folder kept the files, making my life much easier. This whole process took me three days to complete as I was comparing quite a few different libraries, but now I'm down to only two of them, and they're duplicate-free.

Power-Ups

Other than the epic battle of the clones this week, I needed some power-ups; oh man, I love the smell of new electronics! I had been rendering a 900-frame scene this week; unfortunately, it's not new. Instead, I'm replacing my demo release's original animations with better-quality versions. The originals were rendered using a GTX 1660 Super and were at 720p because I didn't know what I was doing, and my hardware was pretty shit. These upgraded animations were rendered on my RTX 3060 and oversampled at 2k before encoding to 1080p.
With my PC otherwise engaged for five days, I thought hey, I'll work on my laptop and do some script work etc. Well, that took about a day to do, and I was twiddling my thumbs, so I decided, you know, I need a new laptop that can run Daz, allowing me to pose scenes while my PC is rendering. So day and a bit later, my shiny new ASUS ROG Flow X16 arrived, and a fucking love it! It's versatile, and I enjoy the tablet experience. When playing an AVN, I can download the PC version, hold the laptop like a tablet, and navigate using the touch screen; so good. So a few hours after unboxing, I was ready to go and realised I needed to copy my Daz Libraries over, and this got me thinking, do I need two copies, or can I work smart and have one library for all machines?
I chose the 'one library to rule all libraries but to do that, and I needed more tech upgrades and a ballache of a tidy up of my existing Daz libraries. I have a Synology DS218 NAS with 2 8TB disk drives, well did; now I have a DS218 NAS with no disk drives because they're both fucked! At £175 for each new 8TB drive, they can get fucked. So instead, I bought a 4-drive SSD dock by Sabrent and a new router with a USB 3.0 port for network-attached storage, a NAS but not a NAS. You've already read the epic tale that is the Clone Wars, so that I won't bore you again. Unfortunately, the router hasn't turned up, and I have had to buy a second one because the one I wanted 'wasn't in a saleable' condition. I have to wait another two days for the new one to arrive, and then, hopefully, I can have one library to rule them all.

Epilogue

As you can see, this week has been a legendary epic, but there's more. After rendering over 1000 scenes this week for animations, I got them all encoded and looking fantastic. Only to find that at the end of one of those scenes, Zero Seven was missing her facial markings and cybernetic eyes, which meant re-rendering the last 100 frames of the 900-frame animation. But due to being too eager to purge the clones, I have a lot of downloads to find, and there's no point in doing this until the new router arrives.
I haven't been completely absorbed into this because there was quite a bit of downtime while files were being scanned, so I managed to help a few other devs with their games. I made a few logos and animated splash screens, one for Cr8tive M3dia and another for Shaddy Games, which they both loved. I enjoyed making the logos, working with After Effects and searching for music and SFX to mix into the final animations.
Anyway, that's it from me for now; hopefully, I'll work on new renders the next time I update. Oh shit, I forgot to say the script has been 100% finished and QA'd by Thor's Hamster, and I'm also about 50% through the coding and scene allocations in RenPy.
Snowy