What Happened and What’s Next

What Happened With 0.4

First of all, I'm sorry for being away from social media for so long and barely replying to anyone, especially on Patreon.

I've finally finished this update. It's been a hell of a few months. My original plan was to finish it in around three months, but pretty much everything that could happen ended up happening.

Now that 0.4 is finished and available to everyone, I want to give you a quick summary of what happened during these months and, more importantly, explain how I'm going to approach development from now on.

My original plan was to take a few weeks off in January after finishing the previous update. Unfortunately, I got pretty sick and ended up losing practically the entire month.

In February, when I was finally able to start working normally on the new update, another problem came up. My GTX 1080 stopped receiving driver updates, and although I could barely use it for rendering anyway because my scenes wouldn't fit into its 8 GB of VRAM, it was the push I needed to seriously rethink the way I was working.

Until then, most of my scenes ended up rendering on the CPU. A single render could easily take between one and two hours, and even then I often had to use a denoiser afterwards.

For a while, I was able to borrow an RTX 3060 with 8 GB of VRAM, and I discovered something I wasn't expecting: some of the same scenes that wouldn't fit into the GTX 1080's 8 GB could actually be rendered with the 3060. Newer GPUs handled and compressed the scenes much better, and suddenly some renders that used to take up to two hours were taking around 30 minutes, while also coming out much cleaner.

So I made a somewhat risky decision: temporarily stop developing new content and optimize all the environments and characters in the game with the future in mind.

That ended up taking all of February and part of March. DAZ doesn't exactly help with this either. Some scenes can take between 10 and 20 minutes just to load, so when you have to open them, make changes, run tests, reload them and make sure nothing has broken, it's surprisingly easy to lose entire days.

Eventually, I had to return the 3060, so I decided to buy an RTX 5060 Ti with 16 GB of VRAM to finally get rid of most of these limitations. I really wanted something with even more VRAM, like a 5090... but at this point they cost more than a down payment on a car, so that's not happening.

Luckily, the difference has been huge. I can now render practically every scene using the GPU, and many renders that used to take one or two hours are now finished in 5 to 10 minutes. And without having to run them through Blender's denoiser!

I started making pretty good progress with the renders. But at the same time, I had to rewrite the entire event system from the previous versions. It simply wasn't good enough for what I wanted to do with repeatable events.

Things were moving along pretty well, but at the beginning of May, I had to start working overtime at the carpentry shop because I was pretty short on money. (I'm a carpenter, for anyone who still doesn't know. I don't do this full-time.)

The problem is that work completely swallowed up almost my entire summer. There were days when I'd get home and barely manage to make one render, or none at all. It's been a hell of a summer. I didn't really say much on social media because there wasn't much point. I preferred to spend what little energy I had actually working on the game.

I understand that some people won't really care about any of this and will still be disappointed that the update doesn't have enough content for something that took 8 or 9 months. This is just an explanation of what happened.

What I'm Changing From Now On

Now for what actually matters...

From now on, updates will focus on one scene at a time. Basically, instead of working on several scenes at once, I'm going to focus on a single one. This should help me work faster, improve the writing (which I know I've been pretty weak on), and most importantly, improve the animations.

The animations so far have been too robotic and too short. That's something that really bothers me, especially considering they didn't exactly take me a short amount of time to make... But before, my GPU didn't give me much room to experiment and improve them. Now it does, although because of the lack of time I mentioned earlier, I haven't been able to give them the attention they need yet.

Another thing I've spent quite a lot of time trying to get right in DAZ, without getting the result I wanted, is breast grabbing. So I'm going to start doing that in Blender and then bring it back into DAZ as morphs.

By focusing on just one scene at a time, I'll be able to release updates more often while improving the overall quality at the same time.

Another thing I'm going to do is add a progress tracker to Discord, so you'll be able to see how far along each part of the update is. I'm not going to give release dates. Instead, I'll update the percentages as I make progress.

I'm also already working on a system to save expressions and poses for each character. That way, I'll be able to load the expression and pose I need for each render and set everything up much faster. (Yes, until now I've been making them pretty much from scratch for every scene, sometimes using DAZ's own presets as a starting point, which don't always look as good as I'd like.)

What's Coming in 0.4.5?

Yes, I'm calling the next update 0.4.5. It'll basically continue Isabel's repeatable event. This time, William (you) will have to learn a little self-control if he wants to make it through what Isabel has planned for him.

Thanks to everyone who's stuck around during these months, to everyone who's continued supporting the project even when I could barely post any progress, and also to everyone who's simply playing the game now that the update is available for free.

I'm really happy to see that you're enjoying the game. It gives me a lot of motivation to keep working on it and keep making it better.