Changes

Hi everyone, 

I wanted to let you know about some changes to this project. (Summary at the bottom if you don't want to read a wall of text.)

First, a little background: Over the past few months, I had some time off work and I was looking for a project. So I've basically been working on Virtually Naked full-time while treating it financially like a hobby project, and that's not sustainable. For a while I considered making a run at turning this project into a business I could support myself with, but ultimately I've decided to go back to my regular software development job (which I actually rather enjoy) and only work on Virtually Naked in my spare time. 

Given the substantially more limited time I'm going to have for this project, I need to be more selective about what I work on. I've decided to focus on striving for photorealistic rendering (where I think I have some contributions to make), rather trying to play catch up with the cool interaction features that other projects are doing. So Virtually Naked is going to remain a rendering technology demo rather than a full-featured game. But at the same time, I also plan to start documenting what I'm doing and open sourcing some/all of the code so that other people can take what I've done and integrate it into their own projects. 

Finally, I'm going to limit downloads to patrons. Offering free downloads is simply costing me too much. We're only a third of the way into the month and my AWS fees are already over $100 (fucking Bezos!). I've also been hesitating to add new content that will increase the size of the download and drive those costs up even further. Even the minimum dollar per month pledge will more that cover my hosting fees and I'll put whatever's left towards new assets (characters, hair, clothing, etc). 

I hope none of this came off sounding disgruntled. I've had a lot of fun working on this project and I'm thrilled with all the positive comments. But just practically, I couldn't keep this project going in the same way its been running for the past couple of months, so some sort of change was necessary.

TLDR: Virtually Naked will focus on rendering technology instead of building a full-featured game. Downloads will be limited to Patrons only.