Progress Report 23

How about a... Bit sooner report?

Planned to make a report later for the weekend, but today has been kinda meh so I'd rather cross something of the list rather than nothing at all.

Ignoring what happened today, last 2 weeks were... Very good. The rendering was definitely rendering. After the last report, I finished those other male npcs (and I'll still need some more), and I got back to the Ep3 hotel map and finished the bottom floor of it. It's more or less the same design, but I made it narrower by a lot as there was no need for such open big space, and it feels much better with a lot of npcs around.
And speaking off... H o l y shit did I yeet a lot. In quite a few renders you can see a lot of npcs or characters we know on screen, with multiple renders/scenes with 20 characters either fully visible or just around the camera angle. Naturally, that causes a long time to load the scenes, and the fps in them is around 2 fps 🤣
But! I got told months ago about a neat little plugin that can help me somewhat, and it already saved me a lot of time in those scenes (one button makes all npcs blue colored, removing all visual details and making them essentially 0 performance hit till I press button again).

Even though the slightly challenging aspects of it (I can't even watch youtube, PC is trying to use around 75-80 gb ram and I have 32), the rendering went very good. With 2 days to set up everything, first Ep3 renders began on 26th of April, and in first week, I completed a nice 240 of them. The week after was a bit more challenging and had 2 days kinda off, but even with that, progress was good. Till today, I got a total of 457 Ep3 done, which is just shy of 30 per day in their rendering period. Pretty good result, considering I included the off days!

I am done with the small intro, the challenge receiving, and the Beer pong is essentially done (just missing a few renders if you lose the game). Hoped to complete till end of Sunday, but some IRL and overall slow scene fps took me away from that goal.

For this ongoing week, goals are much much smaller. What I mentioned at the beginning, the day was meh due to me being in a bit of an annoying medical back and forth process. To not go overly into details, I have another appointment on this Friday, and alongside possibly going one more time back and forth, losing time and patience, it's reasonable for me to make small expectations for when I do get back home and stressed out.
So goals are to make this week are the Monthly renders with Eiko, finish up the small remaining Serena renders, setup the full upper floor of the hotel (will receive some similar improvements and also lightning changes) , and start with a new challenge I've added into the game. Small section, but I think people will find it cool.

Post is already quite long, so not much else I wish to share about really. Naturally, I keep seeing here and there posts (it's obviously warranted) when update, and naturally I cannot give any information yet. The only sensible thing I can say is that still multiple months away. There is, after all, around 4 000 renders to go through for Ep3 + new content for Ep4, of which now I've done 450 in around 16 productive days. Those numbers are already quite high per day compared to some devs, so if you just multiply that till you get to 4 000, you should get a feeling of how much left at the very minimum (and add ~3-4 weeks extra for animations, sound, testing).

As always, thank you for those still supporting, and love you all
Kat <3

P.s. Warm May started, still no ants found. I'm ready for war.

P.s.s. Sneak peeks should be coming this month, and probably each month till the last phase!