Unfortunately, I need to push back the release of the first part of "Fidelity" to August 9. Backfilling the expanded version of the story with the necessary new scenes wouldn't have been an issue to release as planned. Then my machine or Daz or both started acting up.

Randomly during animation or queued still frame rendering, Iray has been falling back to the CPU instead of using the GPU. This is seemingly at random and with no obvious cause. Well, the cause seems to be it's not releasing all the VRAM between scenes, but I don't know what's causing that to happen now out of nowhere. This has meant much, much longer render times for lots of the stills and animations with only a third or less of the frames usable. The only reliable workaround has been to babysit Daz, shutting it down and restarting between each animation or after a handful of stills. I haven't updated Daz or my drivers in a while, so I'm not sure what's changed.

Anyway, my workflow is cracked, and I'm way behind. Rescheduling for August 9 will give me enough time to finish all the artwork at the current pace and probably squeeze in a little extra content, either another scene or two or maybe unlockables.

Screamqueans Episode 2, "Fidelity," will be released in parts. Part 1 will drop on July 31. The second part will come in August.

Seeing that a full release wouldn't be feasible this month and also wanting to get some content out, I decided to break it up. This has the side benefit of justifying filling out the story with some scenes I had originally planned but dropped in the interest of time. This includes some backstory and a subplot that will help flesh out the story even more, a third lewdable character, and at least two additional lewd scenes. When it's all done, "Fidelity" will be a fair bit longer than "Clowns."

The hosted intros mentioned in my last update will be added for this release along with some adjustments to some of the menus. Unlockables (image and scene gallery) for Episode 2 should be part of the next release, too, but I can't say for certain quite yet.

I'll drop some early previews for members on Friday.