For a visual representation of how much longer this episode has taken; this is the table for the static renders.
There are nearly 900 more still renders for Episode 9 than 8, but release will have taken an extra 12 weeks, which was already and extra 6-7 more than the previous couple of episodes.
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There are actually over 50 less animations, but i'm not sure how consistant he is with tracking them. From what he's said this episode has more long form animations and animations that are made up of smaller animations, so it's possible this is actually many more for episode 9.
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For this episode he had Covid, he had the issue with the music and he had the issue with the guy selling the game. So perhaps that's worth 3 weeks, so maybe the episode could have arrived a few weeks earlier.
The real concern I have going forward is animations. His average for this episode was 7.6 a week. Episode 8 had been 13.3 and episode 7 was 12.5. You have to go back to episode 6 before he got the 3090 cards to get to a similar average of 7.7. That episode only had 162 animations.
Perhaps if he fully upgrades his rigs to the new gen of Mobo's, Processors, RAM and 4080 GPUs he can get back closer to the episde 7 and 8 prodction cycles even with the new style of animations. Truthly I think a combination of this and cutting back on sprawl are probably the best way forward.