DevLog: Grinding Hard (and Deep)

Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board.

House-keeping note: I accidentally set LAST WEEKS DevLog to PAID ONLY. I'm sorry; this was a mistake. Please read last week's DevLog here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/141718044

TLDR;

• Significant progress on Scene 8

• Transparency about release timeline

✅ Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

This DevLog will be short (finally!).

• Scene 8 Development - Made substantial progress continuing work on the scene. I don't want to jinx it, but I think I'll have the nearly 300 rendered still 4k images finished by next week. And yes, 300; this is by far the biggest scene that I've created, which is also why it took so long!

⚙️ Technical Corner

Linux (Ubuntu)

If you have read the last few DevLogs, then you should know that I have been making Linux/Ubuntu my daily driver. It's been a fun transition, definitely more advanced, and I'm having a great time! Besides the hardware issues in the past few weeks, I don't think Linux itself has slowed down my progress.

EEVEE + Compositing = Faster Iteration

Alright, I know it's not all that fancy or flashy, but believe me this constantly blows me away every time I think about it. This scene has got nearly 300 images (at 3840x2160). I wanted to do a "preview" of what the scene looks like, so I did a quick test render of all the images. Blender's EEVEE burns through the renders like crazy; we're talking about 15 seconds EACH. That's the entire render queue within nearly an hour! Are the images 100% super perfect? No. But the quality is certainly better than where we were a year ago, AND its improving more and more. I'm excited.

👀 Sneak Peek

💬 Community Corner

I want to air a grievance with myself and progress, even though there was no public timeline. I had quietly and personally hoped (and planned for) an October release for this latest update. Obviously as you can tell, I'm still right in the middle of development and the release didn't make it as I had secretly planned. And while I'm not making excuses for why it has been slow to fruition, I want to explain why - I also want to NOT become what a lot of other AVN devs have become with their tenure and DevLogs: complacent.

Also, I want to let you know that it'll be unlikely that I provide any sort of timeline (ever) publicly. Because time and time again, when a timeline is provided, it's almost always completely inaccurate - it's just so hard to properly provide a timeline, AND stick to it. I don't want to provide hope for a date, and then disappoint.

What I've noted that caused the update to be pushed:

• Surgery & Recovery - I had surgery right after Chapter 1 Part 1 release; the original timeline didn't account for this or recovery time

• Animation Expansion - The first scene originally had one animation, but I felt it needed more. I'm proud of the results, but it also pushed the timeline

• Hardware Issues - As documented in the past two DevLogs, this added weeks of delays

I want to be transparent and honest that it's been 4 months since the last release - that's not the intended release cycle. I provide these weekly DevLogs specifically for accountability, not every few months like others. I'm constantly working to improve speed and output consistency, and I'm working hard to get this update completed!

I want to thank EVERYONE for reading and for your amazing support. And I'll see you in the next one! 😍

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️