Devlog #26 Fun with Motion Blur (& status update)

First of all, for those of you who aren't haunting the Discord server, I've had a smidge of computer trouble. Essentially, the work computer was crashing at start up (between 1 second and about 10 minutes, depending on how lucky I got). I went through the ENTIRE suite of options... fresh Windows install, RAM swaps, drive swaps, GPU swaps, power supply swaps... then I tried a new motherboard, and finally... a new CPU fixed the problems. So I'm back to work, which is great, but the entire saga took over a week away from work time (half of that was waiting for shipping, and the other half was cursing). On the plus side, my old CPU is still under warranty, so this entire fiasco should end with only time (and sanity) lost.

Now, on to fun stuff! As I was piecing together this update and testing things out, I came across some scenes that fell through the cracks and still needed to be posed and rendered, so I've been getting all of those finished. These also gave me an opportunity to play around with some settings that I don't normally use, and I've been enjoying the motion blur (I first started using it with skill animations to help with the illusion of speed). It's a bit finicky trying to get it to look right in a still-frame environment, but I think I'll be taking advantage of it a lot more with animations going forward.

Finally, I've got my current update timeline. Obviously, it's been pushed back a bit (again for the millionth time). I've got one more large-ish scene to do, and another two small ones, which should be finished this week (hopefully in time to render them all over the weekend). I'm still working on placing images and tweaking dialogue and trigger points, but that's starting to reach its conclusion as well. In an ideal world, all of this should be finished at the end of next week, but the end of next week it also the end of the school year for my kids, so if I can't get it out the door before the 25th of May, work will have to take turns with children... which isn't the end of the world or anything, I'll still be able to carve out some time to work on it most days, but it's hard to really estimate how much time will be available.