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These renders are not related to the plot in anyway. They are just that extra renders stuck in a folder.
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Hello crew, with us getting back into the swing of things its time for the regular progress updates.
I meant to get this out a few days ago before the month ticked over to July, but I ended up being a bit busy with life finishing out the month.
Life changes
As I mentioned a week or two ago in the Discord server I have started a new position at my job which grants me a little bit more free time throughout the year since I will have company holidays off, while my old position I still had to work those days, with the exception of one of the three major holidays at the end/start of the year (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years).
Technical Difficulties
I had some technical difficulties this month between VS Code and GitHub getting de-synced, is probably the best way to describe it, and that took me a while to fix, turns out the best solution was to make a local backup of my build, delete the original copy, use the GitHub app to download the repository, and then overwrite the downloaded copy with the local backup, and so far that has worked without issue.
Speaking of GitHub, while I haven't seen any bug reports made using the previous methods I have used, in the event people run into them, so I have a way of publicly tracking them, I have setup a public GitHub repository to use for making bug reports going forward, it can be found here. I think I do a reasonably good set of test runs so bugs, at least on Windows, will hopefully be few and far between, though we will see just how messy things could get down the road as things branch out more.
Progress Report
Now for what you all are actually here for, the progress report. But before I get into that I do want to mention that this month I decided to change up how I track the work done, before I would just count the lines in VS code of both dialogue and code as one number, this month I decided that going forward I am going to track dialogue and code separately from one another, and also tracking dialogue a bit more accurately when dealing with multi-line dialogue.
On that note, the numbers. This month was a bit light on work as I was still trying to get into the grove of dedicated work again, so only 33 lines of dialogue and 35 lines of code were done this month, though I suppose in someways that is actually probably not too far off from where I usually am for work in that past when life isn't getting in the way, I just admittedly feel like it should be better. I only got 4 renders done this month, which were the Father's Day renders for Captain tier supporters. I also really need to get to work on renders if I want to try and have this update out by the end of the year. Maybe I'll have July focused on getting some of those done?
Hey everyone, been a long time since an update has been provided. I had originally been planning to make a post about two weeks ago, but then I got distracted and in someways I am glad I didn't make the post then since I have some additional information. I also know I said on Friday I would have another post the next day, that changed because I decided that I wanted to include some extra renders with this post, but those are still being rendered at this time, so this post will be updated in a few days to include a zip with all the images.
Good News:
Let's start off with the good news, that work project that I have been working on since late November will be ending at the end of this month, as I was informed last week, this will give me a fair bit more free time to spend on development, it also results in me returning to my old schedule which I think also worked better for me to have time to set aside for development. Even while working on this work project I have still spent some time working on development when I have had the change, though I have done a pretty poor job tracking the work month to month, so I don't have a month to month breakdown of work done, but I am looking at about 500 lines worked since I went basically radio silent, though some of that is fixing up grammar and spelling errors that have been around for a while, I really wish Visual Studio Code had a functional spelling and grammar checker because I don't write my dialogue in a word doc first, though maybe I will explore how that impacts work flows in the future.
I have not fully decided one way or the other for this, but I am considering holding off on releasing Chapter 6 until the end of the year, and just doing it as one big release, and hopefully 2025 will be the year I can finally commit to a release schedule that I have wanted to do for a while, but something always seems to come up.
With all this news, I do want to state that billing will resume in the next couple of days for the June billing cycle. Thank you to all of you that have been patient through my radio silence and I am happy to finally be able to dedicate time to development again.
Changes to releases:
I am sure many of you follow releases of these types of games on a certain website, that I shall not name, and know they recently had a security incident where old user accounts were hacked and used to upload copies of game updates that were modified to include malware. This is something that probably should have been a possible concern for releases for a while now, but has generally managed to avoid causing any major issues. As someone that studied cybersecurity, this change going forward is something that probably should have been done from the start, but as mentioned these types of incidents have generally managed to avoid causing any real issues so outside of an abundance of caution didn't really seem to have a need before.
To avoid this potentially being an issue in the future with my releases, I am going to include the SHA256 hash for my releases in the release notes. That way if you download a copy somewhere and run it through a hashing tool for SHA256 and get something different then what I provided, you will know that file has been modified in someway. To start us off with that, going back to the most recent release the SHA256 hashes are as follows:
PC : 6DD249F213520C21A31AB4535EB304D5DFD2F93F23C908C0A92090EAEA44875D
Mac : 42711D023F127309AD9D40E679376628A2FED06B815988C89C5EDCE226610635
The PC (Windows & Linux) and Mac versions will have different hash values due to differences in for example file structures.
Hello everyone, it has been quite a while since the last post and I do apologize for that. I have some good news but I have a separate post going up tomorrow about it, I wanted to keep these posts somewhat focused. So this one is just a quick think that today is fictionally the birthday of the crew's Assistant Chief Engineer, Destiny Washington.
Usually a post like this would be limited to just the $10 a month supporters, but I have decided to make it available publicly as an exception just because of the lack of communication these past few months.
Hey all, a quick little progress update, was going to post this later on Saturday, but since someone asked over on Patreon I figured I'd just go ahead get it written up after work. The work project that I has kept me busy since mid-late November seems to be quieting down quite a bit over the past week or so. So it might be coming to a close soon"-ish." I haven't been provided with a time frame for when it might end, and my schedule for the next two weeks is already setup and is the same as its been since I started on this work project so it doesn't seem likely to be ending this month, but as said before maybe soon. Once I know when it will end I will make an announcement, likely in the Discord server, so join if you haven't already (https://discord.gg/jzAsznhqHN). Once I know when the work project is over I will likely pause support for an additional month so that I can use that month to get back into the swing of things.
Second System updates
Before we get into the main reason I was making this post. I recently found out that Iray Server is apparently now free. Which makes it even simpler for me to setup a second computer to offload rendering onto. Because before I was thinking I would need a full on windows machine with a fair bit of storage to store all the Daz assets. Well not anymore, now I technically just need a server with a bit of RAM, a high end Nvidia GPU, and a fair amount of storage to store the renders on until I can transfer them off the render system. It will still be a while until this gets up and operational, its just going to be easier now. The main thing holding it back it going to be cost. The closest GPU to my current one in terms of CUDA count is the RTX A5000, which is around $2,200, the next step up which gives me more CUDA cores so renders are faster per card is the A5500 which is about $4,500. Realistically I'd probably go for the A5000, because its cheaper so it would be easier to afford multiple of them and 2 of them would have about 6000 more CUDA cores then the A5500 for basically the same material cost and so should be a fair bit faster as a result.
New Omnishaders in Daz
But now for the main reason that I was making this post. Daz recently released an update that added omnishaders for hair (and fur), that in theory helps to make hair more realistic in terms of how light refracts off it, etc. etc. aka makes hair more realistic, and I am curious as to which of the looks you all prefer? Below are two pictures using the MC for Andromeda, one using the new omnishaders and the other is the hairs normal Iray based shader. I will likely do some more of these using the other characters since for some characters the preferences might change, but for now I only have the MC done. Admittedly the omnishaders do require some more work at the start to get them to look nice, and some hairs will probably require more work then others, but once the settings are dialed in they should be pretty set and forget, baring any major changes to how the shader works.
So, my question is, do you all prefer A or B? This is more so out of curiosity and to get some other opinions so I can't say if it will actually change anything about how renders are done. A B
Sorry for the radio silence since early November, this is due to two things though the first is the bigger cause.
A few months back I volunteered to take part in a project at work, that project started mid-late November and is just taking more out of me then I had originally expected it to. I also figured the project would run for a month, maybe through the end of 2023, or two months at absolute most. We are now about a month and a half in and I have been informed today that we still have no idea when the project is expected to end. So mostly for this reason at this point I am going to place the Patreon on hold going forward. Development will still continue and I'll try to still provide updates from time to time, but I will likely be even less active with updates going forward. Once I have an idea as to when this project will end I will post an announcement and say when the Patreon will start up again. I am hoping that this project ends soon, because we have expanded the scope beyond what it was originally meant to be and brought in more people to help, but the new people just aren't holding up their end of the work, so work on the project is mostly left to me and my team, some of whom have now also left the project as a result of changing roles in the company.
Holiday obligations got in the way of me being able to render scenes. If asset creators for Daz did a better job of using unique naming conventions for parts of their assets I might have been able to set up a render queue in Daz using one of the add-ons that add it, but because of repeat IDs caused by creators not using unique IDs in their assets, Daz throws and error when you have multiple assets installed that reference this ID and I would need to have a way to click past this error every time it showed up, because their is no good way to do that setting up some sort of render queue just wasn't really an option.
*I don't have anyone supporting over here on SubscribeStar so I'm not going to bother placing this on hold.
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