Progress Report #3 - v0.5 + Equipment Upgrade News
Ahoy, mateys!
First of all, I'd like to apologize for not being as active on Patreon and in our Discord community as much as I would have liked in the recent weeks.
Now, without further ado, let's first address some of the upgrades I've made.
While I was working on the big fight scene, I came to the realization that, despite having very decent specs on my main computer, I was still longing for that extra edge and power to make my posing and rendering experiences as smooth as possible. Since the RTX 5090's release about a month ago, I've concluded that now is the perfect time to invest in a high-end PC setup.
When working and posing with complex scenes with many characters (15+) and big environments (pirate ships, big islands, etc.), it's essential to have a good CPU and a good amount of RAM with great speeds. Each character and texture added to the scene further increases the load and strain on the PC. It has become increasingly more difficult to navigate these big scenes even with 64 GB of RAM. And while there are products for Daz Studio, such as Camera View Optimizer, that can make things easier for bigger scenes, it does add in an extra step, thus increasing time spent on each render.
To make things as smooth as possible, I've upgraded to a custom-built PC with an i9 processor, 128 GB of RAM, and, of course, a 5090 with 32 GB of VRAM. Unfortunately, I've had to wait for almost two weeks for my computer to arrive. The processor took a long time to ship to them, making it unfortunate. I regret any additional delay to the update this process may have caused.
Speaking of Lustful Voyage, let's talk briefly about the game's progression.
In the month of February, I've fallen just short of making 300 renders and 20 animations. And honestly, I'm a bit disappointed in myself for this kind of output. I know I can do way better than this. I became my own worst enemy these past two weeks as I have been expecting the custom computer to arrive any day, and I've fallen for the trap of thinking, "Why should I work on that big scene today? I'll get that new computer delivered tomorrow anyway, so I'll just do it when I get it." I guess it's my fault for thinking I could trust a company to deliver on time when all the components were listed to arrive in 1–3 working days on their website, only for it to get delayed by almost two weeks. Anyway, I digress.
Now, it's crucial to focus intensely and work diligently throughout March and possibly even some parts of April. The v0.5 update will be the biggest to date, so I'm not going to disclose an official release date just yet. This is unfortunate, but the story requires it. There are many environmental changes in the update, so it's essential that I get this one right. I believe 0.6 will revert to the same render count as 0.3 and 0.4, enabling a more consistent release schedule as you've become accustomed to.
Thank you for being patient. Your support is invaluable to me! I'll be releasing a new poll very soon where you'll be able to vote on a potential character that will briefly appear in one scene in 0.5 and more in later updates. And, yes, the character will be a potential LI, so you'll need to choose wisely.
Embrace the tempest's wrath! ☠