Weekly Update - Dec 6th

Hi Everyone,

I'll start of with some disappointing news, I think I'm going to be a little later than I had planned for the next update. As I said last previously I was targeting Dec 10th. With 4 days left that looks unlikely at present. I'm just about to complete the 9 total scenes I was targeting for this release and I could just release that however the story is not at the point I want it to be. So I'm holding out until I complete a further 2 more scenes to get it there. The biggest issue I have encountered here has been a couple of scenes that are taking so long to render out. The reason for this is generally, having a lot of characters in the scene and/or the optimisation employed by the environment those characters sit in. A fast shot can render in 10-15 mins but the one that is currently running now is at 66% through almost 2 hours! The current scene is a hefty one too with 75 renders done so far and another 20 or so to go.

So to the better news, I don't anticipate the delay to be anything more than a few days, the last couple of scenes will be a little lighter on the number of renders and feature way fewer characters in them. The scripting is complete for the first part, and all but complete for the rest of chapter. I've also done the bulk of my testing while a wait on the renders to complete, so that should speed up the end to end process I follow at the end of rendering.

In terms of the story and what to expect in chapter 5: To me this is a key chapter in the storyline, our two protags are growing up and learning more about themselves. The story may take some turns, some may not like here but do remember my plan is for 9 (may slip into 10 chapters), so there is a lot of story to unfold. I've also changed a few elements of the storyline from my original plan here, they do not alter the base story arch but I'm happy with the changes I've made to flesh out the overall journey.

So for the stat heads out there Part 1 of chapter 5 currently sits at 3,057 lines of code, includes 9 (almost complete) scenes and has 331 unique renders.

That's it for this week, I appreciate everyone's patience and I apologise for the slight delay but as one of you Patreon's rightly reminded me recently, the focus is on quality not speed.

Have a great weekend.

Fae