Hey all, its been a while. Going to start off with, can we just act like 2024 never existed?

Moving on, I am not going to be pausing payments in February. The reason being that I am finally back into a groove of sorts and so barring anything going really really wrong, my plan is to release an Alpha style build of what is currently completed at the end of February, and hopefully the rest of the update won't be not too far behind.

The main thing holding back release at this point is just the renders. I have not had as much time as I would have liked to work on them, add to that sometimes needing to redo renders because they don't quite come out looking like I wanted. The script is largely complete with mostly just some tweaking to improve the flow being needed. Didn't really have anything I would classify as code this month to deal with.

With this update, their will be a split early on depending on if you decided to hang out with Birgitta or not back in Chapter 3.

If you decided not to hang out with Birgitta then you will spend sometime walking around Starbase 40 by yourself and have a lewd scene early on, the renders for this branch are still baking in the oven so I don't have any previews for it at this time.

Hello Crew, so its that time of the month again. This one is a bit longer due to changes coming from Patreon and some process changes on my end.

First, I want to start this off by talking about some changes that Patreon is putting in place. So I had already switched to the Subscription billing model while I was pausing the Patreon, with this you get charged as soon as you sign up and charged again on that same date each month, this only applies to subscriptions made after that change was applied, existing members would continue to be charged on the first of each month. Patreon is forcing everyone onto this by November 2025 and this change is being made due to Apple's Billing Requirements that are now being applied to Patreon. In addition to that, Apple's 30% App Store fee is now going to be applied to all memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app starting in November 2024.

There are two ways to handle that as a creator, you can choose to either eat the fee so that people that sign up to support you through the iOS app get charged the same as everyone else, but you get less from their membership, or you can choose to charge more for iOS memberships so they pay more and you the creator would earn the same amount as if they supported via Web/Android.

Now I have already decided how I will handle this, I will charge more for memberships through the iOS app, but I would advise that you use Web/Android to actually sign up for a membership so you don't get charged extra for using iOS.

Second, I have realized that I have not necessarily been using the best settings in the app that I use for converting from the .PNG renders to .WEBP for the actual releases. In the past I was using the lossless setting, which when converting the files resulted in a file size decrease of around 33%. As it turns out, I am unable to distinguish the difference between lossless and 100% quality, even compared to the original .PNG. And when using the 100% quality option, the .WEBP files are about 84% smaller then the original .PNG.

So I went through and converted the previous images to use the new settings, I might have missed a few and will deal with those later if I did (stupid Windows Explorer was crashing on me while doing this). As things stand at this moment, we have gone from the PC build (Windows and Linux) being about 1.11GB to being about 437MB. Now I do want to note as well that I haven't done a ton of renders for this release yet, and probably won't have any animations, or they will be very short if there are any. But this release may end up being a smaller total file size for the distributions compared to the previous one, even though it has more content.

This month I mostly focused on creating some of the Daz3d scene files so that I can more easily just load them each up and render them in turn, I think I've said it before, but one of things that really slows down creating the renders is just the time it takes to import some of the assets as well as then posing them. I would say the script it about 3/4th done, not considering a branching path near the start of the update that I have just skipped over writing for the time being because its not high priority.