August 2024 Debriefing

Patreon changes:

Process changes:

Progress Update:

This month I mostly focused on creating some of the Daz3d scene files so that I can more easily just load them each up and render them in turn, I think I've said it before, but one of things that really slows down creating the renders is just the time it takes to import some of the assets as well as then posing them. I would say the script it about 3/4th done, not considering a branching path near the start of the update that I have just skipped over writing for the time being because its not high priority.

May 2024 Updates

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.

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.

Radio Silence

1. 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.
2. 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.

Short pause on rendering

Andromeda 0.4.5 Briefing 3

Andromeda 0.4.5 Briefing 2

Hey all, it's been a few weeks since the last briefing.

I would say the script for this update is around  60-70% complete, most of what is left is writing out the dialogue for the sex scenes. I have blown past the 60-80 images that I projected for this update, currently sitting at 104 images and that only covers around half of the update.

When I don't have an image ready to be rendered I have also been dabbling in seeing what changes I can make to render settings to cut down on render times to see if I might be able to use animations in the sex scenes. So far this testing has shown me that an image with two figures and an environment doesn't look noticeably different between using a Max Samples of 5000 (default setting) and 500. This also cuts the render time down from around 1 hour - 1.5 hours per frame to around 30 minutes per frame, which is a noticeable difference since the animations in question are around 200+ frames.

Luckily though graphics card prices seem to be coming back down and availability it starting to be a thing again so in the next month or two it might be possible for me to actually pick up something like a 3070, might even be able to stretch for a 3080.