Collection of good news.
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Hello, folks. It's your favorite absent father who shows up maybe once a month, hopefully bearing good news. Today is one of them days. I know we don't see each other very often, but the love is still here.
I've secured a source of rendering power.
In the past couple of weeks or so, I've dedicated myself to racking up the funds for a private cloud rendering service. It wasn't cheap, and the process was demanding, to put it mildly, but it'll definitely be worth it (RTX 4090 for the win). The loss of the F95 Iray Server during the development of 4.1 was felt to a great extent, and I can't allow something like that to happen again. I've also managed to find a new plugin that will allow me to batch-render scenes on my own local PC without running into bug prompts that require me to monitor my computer at all times. Yeah, that was a thing before, and one of the major issues that prevented me from rendering locally. I don't have to worry about that, anymore.
Though the F95 Iray Server is seemingly back online, sadly, it's clear that it can't be counted on 100%. The private server I got is also surely not something I'll be spending money on long-term (50 USD in my country is worth a whole month of food and other household supplies), but it's good as an emergency switch as my points will never expire. That was the biggest selling point for me. That established, I estimate the Patreon revenue,
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sales, and Steam sales combined are more than likely to cut my overdependence on both rendering services. So yeah, It's grounds for major optimism! At least until the completion of 4.1 and the Steam release, I'm all set on rendering power.
Optimization was key, and now it's on lock.
After a little bit of testing, I've managed to drastically increase performance in the game. It should be running smooth as butter now and should not crash or even slightly stutter, no matter what device you're running it on, which is something I'm very proud of! Performance issues have been a thing for a while, so it feels good to kiss it goodbye.
Into 2024...
...my biggest priority will be ensuring that updates are not so few and far between while still keeping the quality acceptable and ever-evolving. The next steps for me to achieve that are updating my hardware and hiring a second artist to help me with some of the front-end stuff -- mainly artwork for the game. I already have someone in mind for the job.
Recently, I've received a lot of help in some do-or-die situations and I refuse to let it go to waste a second longer. Usually, I'm not one to make promises or set things in stone. There are hardly any reasons to ever do that, and it often feels like I'm setting myself up to fail, but if there's one thing I can promise for sure, is that 2023 was the second and last time I've done a yearly major update. That's a little something to look forward to.
I know reading "main mission: upgrade parts" might feel a little generic and even obvious in this post, as "upgrading parts" has been a priority since the beginning (and it's certainly been written about many times), but with the Steam release in my pockets, that's -- for the first time -- an attainable goal. I just had to let you guys know I'm looking into it. This 7th gen Intel bottleneck-magnet CPU really has to go.
We've got roughly 11 days left until the end of the year, and I'm nothing but thankful that I get to do this for this long. I feel like I don't say this enough, but I appreciate each and every one of you who have followed and supported this project in many ways throughout the years, and I can't wait to show you what its full potential looks like. This will likely be my last post in 2023, and the next time we see each other here, it'll be in a brand new year. Hopefully, I'll get to write more of these.
So... happy holidays! You can still find me on Discord, though.