Chastity Quest - Progress Report

My apologies about harping on about it, but if you haven't read the Post about the Future, please do, it's seriously kinda important!

With that gentle prodding out of the way...I'm sure you've all been waiting to hear about what's going on with Chastity Quest. I've held off saying anything until now, as I wanted to have solid information for everyone before I said anything.

A quick recap for anyone new to the Patreon...last month brought a minor disaster in the form of the heavily modded copy of Skyrim being used for Chastity Quest's visuals going unrecoverably unstable on me. I was able to eke out enough scenes to make an update for last month, out of what dribs and drabs I could make work well enough. But, ultimately, the only solution long-term was to rebuild Skyrim. Thankfully, being an experienced Skyrim modder, I had known that such problems were all-but-inevitable, and had taken the necessary precautions to make sure I could restore the appearance of all the custom-made characters.

The success of that effort can be seen in the attached images! As of last night, I have fully restored a now-much-more-stable version of Skyrim to use with Chastity Quest. I hope you all agree that I managed to restore Kiralia to extremely close to her original! In fact, the only thing that isn't 100% is that I think her breasts are a bit more natural-looking(only obvious when she's nude, honestly). A result of ever-so-slightly different install choice on one of the three dozen mods needed to reproduce her -_-.

Moreover, I spent almost 3 full 8+ hour days hammering at the new installation this time, for the express purpose of making it as stable as I could. I'm ALMOST happy with the result. I still need to do a touch more tweaking/fildding to draw distances to prevent some outdoor lag spikes. On the whole, however, this iteration is MUCH more stable than what I was working with for the last several months. Sadly, there is ONE thing I wasn't able to restore. It turned out that the ENB profile I was using was a major part of the previous instability. So, if the image lighting looks a touch different to you in the new screenshots...that would be why. Unfortunately, I haven't found a suitable replacement yet. Most ENB profiles either have the same issue as the old one (that they haven't been updated for too long and the version of ENB they support is unstable on my system) or they muck around with an extremely-near depth of field which looks great in screenshots...and terrible in video >_<. I'm also a bit reluctant to prod too much at my miraculously-quite-stable mod environment T-T.

ANNNNYYYWAAYYY, down to what this all actually means. As it happens, I was able to get all the assets needed for the first five scenes of the new Build yesterday. My intent is to edit those scenes together today, as well as go back and rip out/replace the problematic Blacksmith code that has been causing a bug I haven't been able to fix since the beginning. Since there is simply no practical way to make this build as big as usual (between Haven's Port overrunning badly this month and needing so much time to restore Skyrim to working order) I've decided to go ahead and try fixing that bug as part of this smaller-than-usual build. Having said that, despite the fact that I call it smaller-than-usual, I think it will still represent a decent build. Essentially, the plan is to put in all the scenes for the second Thieves Guild Quest, which is just as multi-option as the first one was. Well, sort of. Specifically, how you have to resolve the second quest is dependant on your choices from the first one!

In total, there are 10 scenes planned for that quest, so that's the minimum count for the new build. Smaller than usual, but still a decent amount of content, hopefully :-). Depending on how fast or slow those scenes get finished, I may slip in a couple of extra, just to bring the build closer to the usual size. The end goal, however, is to keep the delay down to no more than 3-4 days or so. Meaning putting the game out by the 3rd or 4th of October. Late, but not horribly so all-things-considered!