Not much to say with this update, so I'll keep it short. Chapter 6 Alpha 2 released for Commander and Captain tier supporters on September 6th, as a result it will become available to Ensign supporters on October 6th. It will then be made available publicly to all on October 13th.

On a more personal note, my schedule at my job will be changing in October. I don't expect this to have a noticeable impact on progress, but it is something to bear in mind.

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.

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.