Catching Heat 0.3.0 (public)
Disclaimer: These are beta-quality builds. Our AI artist is still in learning. Do not expect visual quality.
This week's changes include:
Visual asset updates (using HD model)
Voice asset updates (new AI voice framework/model)
New AI voice for Elena (powered by @EmpressBlueVA)
2 new scenes
Minor dialogue changes in first few scenes
Additional narration to help with flow in first scenes
Minor character changes (Elena now has "brown_eyes")
Add credits screen to main menu
Replaced some poses in Tess' classroom scene
Switch to webp image format with lossless compression
Statistics:
~148 images
15+ PetaFlop-hours of training
36k training images
Warning: Old saves may not work. As many of the graphics and all voices have changed, it is recommended to start the game from the beginning.
We are excited to have 0.3 finally published. This version contains one of the most complicated scenes we've had to "shoot" to date: The Ceres + Elena pool scene. This scene not only contains multi-actor shots (something our AI model has had difficulty with), but is in an entirely new set being outside, at night, with pool and other elements. We've had to add hundreds of new images to our dataset to teach our AI artist how to draw them. That puts our dataset at 36k images.
Another highlight of this version is the new voices. We are using a new AI voice network and have added voice for Elena, derived from the amazing talents of EmpressBlue.
Upcoming Schedule
Dec 23: Update 0.4 training dataset
Dec 24: Train 0.4 AI model on new dataset
Dec 28: 0.5 Development starts
Jan 29: 0.4 Release
Housekeeping
We are working on some quality improvement efforts for Catching Heat 0.5. It will likely not have any new scenes. Instead, existing scenes should see an improvement in quality. This likely involves adding hundreds more images to our AI training dataset and possibly a new AI network architecture.
