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Well.....hello again. Forgive my frustration at the moment as I'm coming off a day long battle with Daz. Got some news, good and bad. I mean, the bad isn't all that bad, just incredibly frustrating. But we'll get to all that.
The Good
Things are still moving along well. Work on Cassie's sex scenes progresses (sort of, we'll get to that in the bad), and we've started live streams on Lupita's next chapter.
Conversion of the old material is proceeding albeit slower than I would like. As I'm plowing through a lot of the old code I'm seeing a lot of...experimentation...on my part and that of my predecessors. Seems like we tried out a few different formats for the sex scenes and associated variables before coming up with the "sex menu" system that I'm planning to run with going forward.
That lack of consistency in how things were being handled is slowing the conversion down a bit because I'm having to invent some work arounds to make those scenes work. Eventually when time permits, I'll slowly start replacing those early scenes with updated versions that make use of Roger's skin tones and the Red/Blue track shifts I'll be using going forward.
That said, I'm not the type of developer that likes reworking old material. I've done those scenes twice already and the idea of doing them a third time bores me. Thus reworking those old chapters will be a very low priority task that gets worked in here and there while the render queue is full of new content.
But that said, production of new content is going along very well! The streaming process is pretty well worked out and I'm very happy with the amount of work we do in a live stream.
I'm very excited about 2021 being the year of regular updates and tight release schedules. I've been more than ready for this game to take off and now that my only responsibilities are writing stories and making art, I think we can get a lot done.
Assuming Daz gets it's head out of it's ass that is...
The Bad (or The Aggravating)
So yesterday turned into a complete waste of time. I pretty much lost the whole day fighting with Daz and Nvidia.
As you know, I recently installed a pair of RTX2070's into our primary computer. Everything was working well as far as I knew and we were chugging along. They yesterday I noticed that Daz kept dropping back to the CPU for rendering. After installing the RTX's I never really bothered to check the status but for some reason yesterday I did.
Anyway, Daz won't use the RTX's for whatever reason and I make the mistake of trying to figure out why. BEST OF LUCK RIGHT?! Cause with Daz you get what you pay for. So for Zero dollars I can pretty much expect less than minimal support and thread after thread of independent Daz users frustratingly comparing notes to figure out how to solve these problems.
First test, update Daz. I know, stupid right? But my rational was that in the newest versions of Daz you can turn off the processor and use the cards by default (previous versions let you prioritize the cards but would still fall back to the processor if need be). Well I did that and then nothing would render except the CPU. Cards would throw and error and Daz would crash. (A few lucky times it caused a KernalException which crashed the whole computer).
Ok, next step, update the Nvidia drivers. Three different drivers later (I tried all the ones the threads recommended for use with Daz), still nothing. Still defaulting to the CPU but this time I get a nice message saying that the reason it defaulted is because Daz could not allocated 6MB of data to the 7.5GB available on the card...well ok. Fuck.
No one could apparently figure that one out either. So I roll back Daz to a previous version. That threw a whole new set of errors and exceptions. Finally, at about 9 o'clock last night I threw in the towel and gave up.
I reinstalled the latest version of Daz, updated my Nvidia drivers to the most current configuration, and said fuck it. I'll just render with the processor until such time as Daz and Nvidia may or may not get their shit together.
The silver lining is that the i7-8700k still does a pretty damned good job with the renders. The above image only took about 5 minutes to render using the processor alone. So our operation is not crippled by any means.
It's just frustrating to be sitting on $1200 of idle hardware and it burns me to think of how fast those cards could crank out this same image. Oh well.
I refuse to lose another day fucking with it so for now, processor it is!
The Ugly
Gollum's scrotum...? I don't know. I don't really have anything to put under the Ugly header but it felt obligatory to have it.
Anyway, that's all for now! We'll keep chugging away at renders and get some new stuff to play.
I should have Cassie's 9th scene ready for playtesting tomorrow and hopefully scene 10 sometime next week. Should have some Lupita material to playtest then too! And some more converted scenes.
We've got a strong wind behind us, so let's keep this baby moving towards that horizon!
Thank you for your support and encouragement!
Cheers!
