Hello again crew,

I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is Alpha 2 for chapter 6 is almost done. The bad news is I need about another week to finish it. Unfortunately I was fairly busy dealing with personal matters this month that I wasn't able to get as many renders done as I would have liked, with only 11 renders being completed.

I only need about another 9 renders to be at a good stopping point. The scene that follows is fairly long with a lot of renders, some of which may be animations if I think that adds to the feel, that I don't think its worth my delaying alpha 2 until after that scene is rendered. Now unlike alpha 1 which I only made available to Captain tier supporters, the plan for alpha 2 is to make it available to all supporters. The reason for this is that I want to get something released more widely to show that development is still actively being done. You might be asking yourself now "why alpha 2 and not alpha 1?" To which the answer is that I didn't feel like alpha 1 had quite enough content to make it available to all but the people that really wanted to see what happens next. Alpha 2 is sitting at 912 lines of code, which I feel is a decent amount of content for more widespread still in development build of chapter 6.

One last thing I want to mention is that I have shut down the old WordPress hosted website that I used to have, and basically never updated, and instead switched to a self hosted website at https://triangulumgames.games/. This new website provides more flexibility regarding what can be done on it. It also features the ability to support development directly through there and when you support directly through the website I receive a larger cut of your support.

Good night crew, its time for another monthly progress report. As with previous updates this one was focused on renders. I know I mentioned back during the report for April that I was planning on a second alpha release at the end of June or July, but unfortunately I didn't manage to get all the renders I wanted done so the current version ends in the middle of an action sequence. Hopefully the end of August will have us at a more natural stopping point.

This month is a short update because there isn't much to say when you are focused on renders. This month I managed 72 renders, part of that is due to animations that I will be able to reuse in the future.

Hello again crew.
A bit of a longer one this time. As mentioned in the edit for the last debriefing I finally pulled the trigger and purchased an RTX A5000 to setup in a second computer to use as an Iray Server.
Introducing Dazzy as I call it. It's a hand-me down computer from a family member after they built a new system and an A5000 slapped in as a replacement for the AMD GPU that was in it previously.

I have run into some issues with Iray server that I am working through so that I can use it to its full potential. The error I get when these issues happen is "Socket write operation failed" from what I can tell from the user guide for Iray Server is that usually points to running out of memory, and Dazzy only has 16GB of RAM at the moment. I have since ordered a 64GB kit of memory to put in my main system and then I'll put the 32GB kit I currently have in my main system into Dazzy, which will hopefully be enough to resolve that issue.
But what I have been able to get out of Dazzy so far has helped to speed up rendering quite a bit as mentioned previously resulting in 64 renders done this month, which may not seem like a lot since I've had previous months where many more have been done but those were as a result of long animations but that isn't the case this month. Most of those were individual renders or replacement materials to use on a screen that is part of a scene.