well I've cancelled my sub until they get some consistency going, sure this was meant to be out before the new year....... then just delay after delay after delay, some understandable but when you get to your 4th or 5th excuse it starts to just get to the meh! point.
IncetonGames you mentioned on the poll in january that act 3 was 4000 renders big, and as part 1 was 1000 does that mean we should be expecting part 2 to be 3 times as big? also you said earlier this week that there are complications? Do we know when these are likely to be fixed or can you say what they are? a "few days" seems long ago now
Okay so let me explain.
Covid-19 hit and everyone got the stay at home order. This means we all have to work from home.
This was the first hit to our release date.
We prepared for this by giving all our workers a PC from the office (7 of them). So we lost 2 days moving all the equipment. Not a big hit to our release time but when in office all PC's are connected to a server where they get all the files they need to work.
First we tried to put the server online and buy bigger upload speeds. This took 2 days so to get 500 Mbps of upload.
Unfortunately daz was not happy with this setup and it took over 10 minutes to open a single .duf file. Why? Who the the fuck knows it's daz and daz has his own ways.
Okay plan B.
Get 6 hard discs 1TB big and copy all the necessary files to each of the computers. So all the assets and daz content this file's are 550 GB and contain 1.224.043 individual files the copy time around 6-8 hours per HDD and do that 6 times for all the HDD's. (We also had 3 times windows crashing during the copy because why not?)
Okay 3 days spent copying daz content files.
You think we are done copying? Oh noooo... there's more we need to copy the "Work-share" this is the place where we share all the files that are needed to create the game so all the .duf files all images and all animations. How big is "Work-Share" you ask? Oh its 700 GB and 206.022 files. Wait a second 550 GB+ 700GB that more than 1TB oh siiiiitttt..... But why is the "Work Share" so big!? Oh it contains all the files we ever created... Shit okay lets clean this up and only copy the necessary files for the next release of EoL and SwM. One day of clean up later. Work share is now 200GB. Okay copy it to the 6 HDD's. Done. Get it to all the people. Done? Okay, done! (2 days to do this).
Let's start to work online. Everything going smoothly 30 new animations rendered by our animator awesome! No wait a problem. Our animator lives in a remote place with upload speed's of 0.6 MBps on a good day and the size of a single animation 30 second animation is 1GB (Most animations are 60 second or longer). Do the math how long it takes to upload. Okay so put it on a HDD and we will pick it up. Nope! Government forbids traveling by car. Stay at home. Great... But wait he can compress it and send it? Jup. But he does not have that software. Okay fixed that eventually. Let's continue. (Hope you understend that all of this is taking a lot of time.)
Managing all the files sent in, sorting everything, Photoshop-ing, testing, re-rendering it all takes 4 times as long because of upload times and download times.
And there is a ton more shit that I haven't even mentioned. But hey! I can! Then again you will wait longer for the release because I will be typing here.
This are just some of the problems we are encountering day by day and solving them asap. We are doing our best. And sorry for not having the time to explain everything. We are trying to release this as fast as possible and just don't have the time to communicate everything.
