Chapter 1 Dev Check-In

Happy Sunday everyone!

Work is proceeding apace on the chapter 1 update.   Kentyrr and I have been focused on the middle section of the update with a ton of progress, especially in art as our render factories have begun kicking out images at an amazing rate.

We have two more scenes to complete before our beta 1 is released to testers!

There does remain a bug in the current version of DAZ which is causing us some headaches with specific scenes:   In short, iRay crashes if a plane intersects another object.   We use planes for billboard crowd assets and weather effects, and some Chapter 1 scenes absolutely require them.   We're hoping the bugfix arrives in relatively short order.

Right now, Chapter 1 sits about about 66% of the Prologue images and with the remaining scenes, we expect it to be somewhat larger than 0.1.

EviteGames has been kind enough to work out a gallery feature which we plan to implement in 0.2 as well!

Thanks everyone for your patience as we work to bring the new episode to life!

Our new rigs are up and running, and integrated into our workflows now.   Kentyrr is posing about 3-4x faster than before, and I'm rendering the finished work at about the same improved rate.   This means good things for our production cycles going forward.

This did, unfortunately, come at some short-term cost to our development cycle this time:   We probably lost two weeks synchronizing libraries again and getting many gigabytes of assets and development material transferred properly between systems.

In other news, we see there already ports of the prologue that fans have made for the Android Platform and even a Russian translation!

We'll make another dev update after we receive feedback from our beta testers in in the next week or two. 

Those of you who were left a little cold with the prologue ending with a loss will be happy to learn that Chapter 1 will end on a very different note.   :)

In the meantime, happy holidays everyone!   We'll post another update soon!