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.

Hello again crew, a short update for this month because I don't have much to say. May was a bit better then April with 26 renders being completed as opposed to the 21 of April. It took quite a while to render a single image for on the scenes because I wanted it to show a full bridge and it took a few attempts of making changes to even get it to fit in the VRAM buffer for my GPU so that Daz would render using the GPU, and then making further changes to get it to render in a somewhat reasonable about of time.

Nothing else beyond renders was done this month.
Attached is the 4K render for one of the images done this month because I decided I think it works quite nicely has a desktop background or lock screen image.
Edit: I have also pulled the trigger and finally purchased an RTX A5000. The card will likely arrive sometime late this week or early next week. Once that arrives and is setup it will help to improve the number of renders completed. It will also help to enable the use of more complex scenes because I can offload them specifically to render on the A5000.

I am going to keep this update short because there isn't much to say.

This is coming out about a week late due to me having had too much fun checking out Terra Invicta again after setting it aside for like a year or two to let development progress on the game. As a result of that I also didn't get quite as many renders done as I would have liked, only having done 21.

Depending on how many renders get done I will likely end up doing a second Alpha release in either June or July.

Its that time again.

I want to start off by saying that I plan to release that Alpha build style release for 0.6 later this week, probably Saturday. The reason being that I am trying to squeeze in a few more renders so that it doesn't end in the middle of a conversation for dialogue on a branch.

On that same note, I am planning to only make that release available for $10 month, Captain tier, supporters. This is for two reasons, one this isn't a feature complete release so I am not planning on it being made publicly available on certain sites. Nor is it a release that I would necessarily encourage people to play unless they really want to, in which case I would appreciate the additional support if someone decides they are one of those.

Now onto the meat and bones of these updates.

This month I was able to spend a fair bit more time working on renders, though admittedly most of them this month were for a branch that probably isn't super popular, so in April I may revert back to a focus on the more important branch and main story line renders before looping back to these later on.

As I have mentioned in the past the script is basically done, so any work there at this point is really just editing which I don't do a great job of tracking.

On an unrelated note, I have somewhat thought about doing a short story set in this same universe, but I haven't made a decision on that. This idea came about because of an event that took place during an ongoing campaign of a certain sci-fi 4x spreadsheet simulator. This event focuses on defending an important choke point leading into Terran space against a hive like alien species similar to how I in-vision the Zuk'ats. But that battle is still ongoing in that campaign and I am not sure yet if it would be worth the delay it would cause for development of Andromeda.

As I mentioned in the Discord server (link) towards the end of February I started having issues with the breaker for the room my computer is in randomly tripping again, which is annoying because it had been a few months since the last time it happened so I was hopeful that whatever was causing it had fixed itself. As a result of this issue I wasn't able to get all the renders I needed done so that we wouldn't be in the middle of a conversation. As evidenced by nothing having come out this past Friday, or thereabouts, I ended up making the decision to hold off because I really don't want a release to end in the middle of a conversation.

Linked below are also two extra renders I ended up doing when I had to create a scene to use on a prop for one of the scenes for this update.
Proton Drive

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.