Just realized I forgot to post an update for February so I'm just going to combine it with the March. This is going to be a short debrief because I did a bad job of keeping track of what work was done when, but progress is underway for Chapter 6 Part 2, probably go with version number 0.6p2 for it. I know I have said it a dozen times, if not more, that I want to a 3-4 month release cycle, well to try and actually start moving towards that i am going to initially shoot for having a new release of some sort, so it maybe a full release or it may be an Alpha/Beta build depending on how much work gets done, 6 months after Chapter 6 Part 1 came out, so since that was at the end of January I am going be shooting for a new release at the end of July or early August at the latest.

Now I will also mention that while working on this update I had an idea for a new game and I've written a few lines for it, but it still needs a ton of fleshing out of concepts and story elements, and realistically I don't think I'm at a point where it would really be a good idea to try and develop two games at the same time no matter how much I like some of the ideas that have come to mind for this new one. So at most development on that one will likely be limited to working on the "Game Bible" for that game that fleshes out characters, basic story points, and the world.

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.

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.