Welcome back crew, it's time for another briefing. Like I mentioned in the Discord server a few days ago, I am getting this out right at the end of the month because I was trying squeeze the last few renders I needed in before the month was over. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get all of those renders done, I have about 12 left.

Because this month was focused on trying to wrap up the renders for 0.5 part 2, I didn't manage to get any script work started for 0.6, and just had some minor touch ups on dialogue for 0.5 part 2.

As for renders, I managed to get 87 renders done this month before getting this posted. Most of those are as a result of doing an animation that I can reuse in the future to help with showing the passage of time and locations. As a result this came to a 55% increase in renders over last month.

As I mentioned earlier, their are about 12 renders left to complete. I figure those will take 2-3 days in all to setup and render, I then give myself another day to re-render any renders that have issues, I will then need a day, maybe two, for bug testing and fixing. All in all, my expectations are that the latest this next release will come out for Commander and Captain tier supporters is August 8th, unless some major issue occurs.

Welcome back crew, it's time for another briefing, though now I realize it technically these should be called debriefings since they happen after the fact, maybe I'll correct that when I start releasing some for 0.6. Getting this out fairly late in the month. Been very busy with work especially here at the end of the month so haven't really had time to set aside for working on this, but I want to get it out before my calendar ticks over to July.

As noted last time, the script for 0.5 Part 2 was mostly done, so this wasn't exactly a very productive month when it came to script work. With only 33 lines of code done, averaging 1.10/day being needed to wrap up the update, didn't end up spending any time working on the 0.6 script. The update could have been longer if I added some other scenes, but I decided those don't really need to be included as part of 0.5 and will work just fine being in 0.6. Of course since less work was done to wrap up the script this resulted in a -95% decrease for both the total lines and average lines per day.

As for renders, which was most of what was done this month, I managed to complete 56 renders, granted a few were done last month but completed after the briefing was posted so I counted them in this month. Compared to last month, that was only an 8% increase in renders, but that does indicate to me that I should probably expect to be able to do 50-60 renders a month, when not doing animations (I think I mentioned it before, but I count the individual frames because I have Daz render as frame animation instead of as video), especially when work is focused on renders.

That is actually good news though in my opinion because it helps me to be able to plan better how I break down updates going forward as I try to get into a 3-4 month release pattern, of course more then 2 data points would be more accurate but that is what I have right now. Now how many renders still need to be done in July to get part 2 out? Well like last time, I can't give a 100% accurate value for that because some renders will likely be reused, but to give an idea, according to a Ctrl + F for the word placeholder in VS Code, I am looking at around 46 needing to be done.

Edit: Forgot to update my script to replace the placeholders for the last batch of renders I completed. So their are actually only about 34 images to render.

Welcome back crew, it's time for another briefing. Getting this out now, since I don't expect the progress on renders to really change all that much by this time tomorrow.

So this month was a very productive month when it comes to script work. With 685 lines of code done, averaging 22.10/day. Compared to last month that is a 351% and 336% increase respectively. With how well this month was going, I was hopeful that I might actually manage to finish the script for Part 2, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. Granted it is very close, so unless I have something come up, I would expect to have it done next month and be able to focus entirely on render work afterwards.

Speaking of render work, I did start working somewhat on that and currently have completed 52 renders, with some more being rendered as of posting this, which will be included as part of next months progress to make my life easier. Compared to last month, that is a 58% increase in renders. Now as of this briefing, and remember the script isn't complete so this number is likely to grow, I have already planned for about another 99 renders needing to be completed, some of these are also likely to be repeated though so in terms of unique renders that number is actually slightly lower, that number was gathered by just searching for the word placeholder in my script.

On an unrelated note, while working on the script this month for Andromeda. I did have an idea come to mind for a future project and felt the need to write down some ideas for this other project. I do want to make it clear that while I am mentioning this I don't plan to actively develop two projects. I just don't have the time or resources for that and so Andromeda is my focus, but that I am also thinking of the future for when development for Andromeda is done, not that I expect that to be anytime soon since we haven't even left Terran space yet. I may work on the script and "game bible" for this other project over time when script work for Andromeda is done and I am just waiting for renders to be completed, but it won't be under active development like Andromeda is.

That is it for this months briefing, progress is going probably the best its gone to date. The financial support, mostly coming from Patreon, has me now seriously looking into what I might put in a second computer that can be dedicated to making renderers. The biggest question is what do GPU do I use for a second computer. DAZ Iray renders benefit a lot from an Nvidia GPU with lots of VRAM, so the obvious answer is go full-bore and slap a 4090 in there, but the issue there is two fold. One I don't know if I want a beefier GPU in this rig compared to what I have in my personal rig and second is that their continue to be reports of melting 12VHPWR cables and I just don't think I care to deal with that. Of course, any future rig I build is still going to be a ways out, so maybe by the time it happens in the next year or so, they will have ironed out the issues with the 12VHPWR cables and I can consider going full-bore and get something silly like a 4080 or 4090 for a computer, probably end up putting it in my personal rig when that time comes which would still do render work and put my current 3080 12GB in the second computer.

Good, evening. Time for the first briefing for the part 2 release of Andromeda 0.5.

First up, the elephant in the room. Part 1 of Andromeda 0.5 was released on April 19th. As per the membership tiers that I have setup, it will be available exclusively to Commander and Captain tier supporters for 1 month, becoming available to Ensign tier supporters on May 19th for one week before becoming publicly available.

Next up, a quick run down of work done in April. Their were a total of 152 lines of code done, a few reasons for this, but the biggest is that work was mostly focused on the finishing touches for getting 0.5 part 1 out. This resulted in a 67% decrease in lines of code completed compared to last month, most of those lines through were getting work started on 0.5 part 2. Their were 33 renders completed, main reason for such a low number is because to finish up part 1 their weren't that many renders, I did also get a few done for part 2, but haven't gotten into full swing with that yet. This resulted in an 88% decrease in renders compared to last month, though last month also had some animations which do inflate the number of renders.

Work is already underway for part 2. It's a little too soon for me to provide any sort of semi-accurate estimated release date, but the hope is within the next 3-4 months.

Going to get this out now, before I forget tonight.

The script for this first part of 0.5 is done. I might fine tune some dialogue, but I am not expecting any real additions to the script for this first part.

For this update I got 466 lines written, though admittedly like 200 of that was copy and pasting somethings in 4.5 to fix a "I didn't really think about a situation where you don't kiss Isabel and then chose to go off with her after saving her father." Just another reason to test play your stuff extensively and have beta testers.

Due to some issues I had this time with the Esmeralda holo, not sure why since nothing changed with the model, resulting in Daz getting stuck on "Iray (Scene Update) : Updating section objects", even let it go over night once and it still was stuck on that step, when trying to render if that character was in the scene I had to redo the character, they do not look the same because I do not recall the exact character model I used previously. At some point I will probably go back and replace the old model with the new one in existing scenes, but I don't know when that will happen since that is time taken from working on new content.

As for number of renders I have 273, if you count some that are currently still rendering as of this post and won't actually be completed until after the month ticks over to April, but that I decided to include in the March count since they started in March. A large part of that is because of me trying my hand at creating short 60 frame animations that can be looped from single frame poses, one of which if I have time I will need to rework due to me being an idiot and forgetting that Daz doesn't remove expressions when you delete keyframes.

So this resulted in a 162% increase in number of lines done, if you include the 200 some odd that were copy paste, if you don't include those it is only about a 4% increase. As for renders completed their was a 26% decrease, same reason as last time that is largely because I don't have a bunch of 100+ frame animations that were being re-rendered due having a better grasp on Daz now.

Now I do have a family situation going on, so I will likely end up going out of town for about a week sometime in April, I don't know when exactly that will be, but I will post in the Discord server when I know. This will result in me not being able to work on the game during that time, if I remember I will try to have Daz redo that one animation set I mentioned before that I wanted to redo.

Since this is mostly just rendering scenes now instead of also working on the script, I want to say that the update will possibly come out near the end of April or early May. Just depends on how quickly I can get the remaining scenes setup and rendered. I do think going forward though I am going to try and stick to smaller multipart updates that come out roughly every 4 months, instead of these larger updates that take close to year, since this is briefing 9 and the update isn't coming until late April or early May we are looking at briefing 10 possibly coming out before the update does.

No images this time, because I don't have any extras or other scenes that I want to share.

Time for another briefing. So, I figured it was about time that I started more accurately tracking my work, so I created a spreadsheet to track lines of code and renders that are completed each month.

So for this month I managed 178 lines, this results in a 78% increase in number of lines worked over last month. For renders I managed 371 renders, which is a 33% decrease in renders over last month. Granted last month is largely because of re-rendering older animations with newer techniques, and because some of these animations are as long as they are, that number for last month and this month are fairly inflated. But work on remastering the previous updates is now completely done, and so all work going forward is new content only.

I am still trying to get to what I think is a good stopping point for a partial update, but I fell like I am close and so this upcoming month will probably be the last month of script development for this first part of 0.5.

Depending on how renders go, I think it might be possible to get this first part of 0.5 out within the next two months, possibly three if I end up with a render that is more complex then I expected.

Don't want to leave you all with no images for two briefings in a row, but also don't have a ton extra that I want to share, so just the one this time.

Also didn't have any extras created for Valentines this year, because I was busy with the move that I had mentioned a number of times previously. That move is now complete and so will not interfere with development any more going forward