Hrm....some of you are starting to get rather good at this. Certainly some of the points raised are correct....
Righties, after slogging away the news is that I could release Chapter Two this weekend. Except I'm not going to. Let me explain why and what I'm going to do.
Essentially, I made a mistake in using an asset for the accommodation scenes. The room used, after a lot of tweaking, does look great and on testing rendered at a reasonable rate. However, once I start dropping characters into it, it slows to a crawl. Especially, as I have the realism turned up to the max.
Now on a lot of assets they have spines and bones so you can eliminate aspects of the room you don't need, which is my usual trick. In this case sadly the asset isn't designed like that. It's the whole room or nothing. My second go to of rendering the background and then adding overlays of the character on top in this instance just looks...wrong. Softening or blurring the images or trying depth of field adjustments still give a very fake look - which is what I'm not after at all. I also bought and tried Scene Optimiser, which although works on some aspects of the room makes other aspects of it look frankly quite terrible (I concede this may be due to my only just getting it and not having much time to learn the ropes of this particular script however).
And yet, if I ran a handful of more renders, I'd be finished so why no release?
In short because using this asset going forward just isn't sustainable. The accommodation scenes going forward will get a lot more complex, especially down some paths, and the continued use of this asset will slow further chapters to a crawl which isn't what any of us want.
I also don't really want to use one set of rooms for this Chapter and have Ophion station have a room makeover for the ones going forward as that would look, well, silly if nothing else.
However, what I have done is bought yet another set of assets. The new room is one I build in components and therefore is a lot more under my control allowing me to dispense with most of the set as I need for each scene. This, even with test characters in, has reduced the render time from 90 minutes to about 20.
So, I screwed up a little I'm afraid but have rectified my mistake. I'm telling you now in advance of the charge in case any of you wish to change your minds regards patronage before the February charge hits.
The new release date, given I need to re-render four scenes will be the 9th February.
I can appreciate many of you will be disappointed by this news - which I totally share. I am, truly sorry but this is due to me trying to achieve the highest quality possible for you to enjoy. Oh...and me being a bit of a ditz of course...
I also still have "God of Wars", "Persona 5" and "Horizon:Zero Dawn" on my list to play.
