Status Report 5/25
Firstly, I apologize this post is a day later than normal. A family member had a false alarm emergency that made the last 2 days a bit hectic, but fortunately it seems like it was a very minor scare. I added a pair of previews from a scene I was originally going to keep hidden since I'm a bit late.
Episode 3 Status:
About 25 renders remain for tonight and tomorrow, but the rendering task is just about completed at last. The episode is right around ~1,200 renders but I’ll provide an exact number in the changelog upon release. This makes episode 3 just under the length of episodes 1 and 2 combined. E1 was a bit over 500 and E2’s patch was a bit over 800. About 80-90% were rendered in 4k and the remaining chunk were done in 1440p. I tried some new lighting techniques and settings, so hopefully I can take some feedback after release and continue making improvements to the renders into episode 4.
Now my PC will move onto animations which I expect will take around 2 weeks to render, but that’s just a guess and not a guarantee, could be a bit shorter or longer. I definitely have improved a lot on these since past episodes but still am constantly trying to make improvements in DAZ and learn new settings and tools. Hopefully, these will feel like a fairly substantial upgrade from the ones in the game currently.
While the animations are being done in DAZ, I am going to spend time writing the codex updates, prepping rewards, setting up pop-ups, and coding a few extra screens which will be a small new element for the episode. The overhaul of the UI will be done after all of this as well as some small miscellaneous code, most likely once animations are finished and coded/tested to be working properly.
Finally, I’ll finish with thorough testing. I expect there to be a bunch of bugs after the new UI is put in that will be a bit of headache to fix and I’ll likely find a bunch of small ones after thoroughly testing different decision paths, especially with the new stats being implemented for the first time.
All this being said, I finally have a
hope for a release window in my head. Rather than overestimate like prior, my plan is to share a
hopeful window in the next public status report after the animations are just about done. I just don’t want to predict anything yet because I’m pretty bad at coding and while I know how I want the overhaul to look and work, coding it to actually operate correctly is another story. All that being said, as the tracker shows the release is on the horizon and I’ll provide more concrete news soon.
Thanks again for sticking around and reading through these, enjoy the rest of the weekend and see you in the next post with hopefully good news.