Does anyone have any idea how many hours / days / months that DPC spent rendering specifically for animations?
Seems like an easy way to cut down render time by 50%.... Potentially shedding MONTHS off of the development cycle.
It was talked about so much and so often around here, and its easy to do the math for yourself too concidering it took 14 months until relase of this episode and we are close to 400 animations.
1 animation per day, thats about the rule for this game.
In 30 fps it would be doubled...
DPC is solo DEV, so... he makes everything about the game, hiring people would NOT help... he would have to manage those people, check every work they do twice, and would be left with work he doesnt want to do all the time because he likes to alternate between work for the game... making still renders one week, while doing mingames the other, or doing some music and so on... variety in his work shedule is something VERY important to keep being motivated.
The animations are pretty fast posed. Posing is the ACTIVE work part by DPC. He can pretty much pose 10 animations a day if he focusses on them. The rendering time is what takes the most time, but is passive work cause PC slaves do that.
So what DPC does is basically this:
filling up the animation rending queue for his PC slaves and build the overall work shedule around this queue. The PC slaves NEVER idle, they are rendering non stop.
IF he would make sure to render those animations way faster, the consequence would be that he has to work faster on every other aspect of the game too, which leads to an unhealthy workshedule like he already had in the past until episode 8 came out and he faced a burn out and changed things. Which would be a stupid thing to do if he wants to finish the game someday.
Comnpared to EVERY other DEV around F95 he still puts out more renders and animations in shorter time than ANY other DEV. Not a single one can keep up, even the bigger teams of DEVs cant compete with him in this regard. Which should be enough of evidence that "more" people doenst make things faster. They tend to make things complicated. It needs a lot of trust and micro-management to work with people on a project like this...
Trust is nothing that comes easy, and DPC is a "dick" himself and dont trust people anyways. I cant imagine more difficult people to work with than DPC... there is a reason why he works alone and its not for "milking" the game. And micromanaging a DEv team is something that most people would not see as fun work. Especially not soembody like DPC. So it wouldnt speed up shit if he hires people, it would kill the game in a heartbeat, thats for sure. He loves to create every aspect of the game by himself, giving up those things would kill his passion so fast... you can be sure he would stop development after a while.
so yeah, the animationqueue is the timekeeper for the DEV shedule... 1 day per animation. And that will stay this way until the game is finished.