Dev Log : When Man Makes Plans ..

More scenes for Chapter 3 ticked off the list - but sometimes .. sometimes .. you wish there could be more.

I started a new scene last week. It's not a big one - certainly not compared to some of the others done lately. It's also a stand alone scene without any branching (other than a couple of lines that get changed) .. Figured I'd whack through it fairly quickly and be on to the next scene in no time.

Which has now reminded me of a mantra I used to have : When Man Makes Plans, God Laughs

Now, I'm not a religious fella. Not at all. But this mantra came to mind when I got into the guts of the scene.

Firstly, I've tried something out. Something different. If you remember Bex from Chapter 2 (spoiler for those who've not yet played through) - we delve into her mind and she imagines a few scenarios when trying to work out how she wants to move forward. Hey - she's an artists .. she visualizes. She lives in a little world inside her head. Plays out scenarios etc.

Well, we jump back in and out of Bex's head for a little while in Chapter 3 and instead of little animations and what not - I thought I'd try to have us explore what's going on in her mind a little differently this time - using a bit of coding and effects work within Renp'y itself. It's nothing major - but helps tell the story in a little cool way.

Well, I had that done in next to no time .. plan on course for a quick scene completion and ..

And then God started to laugh.

If anybody can remember a post from a while back when I mentioned PC memory issues? Well, it started up again .. I started to get the BSODs with a vengeance. So much so, I've had to pull a stick of RAM out of my system.

And then a major render issue cropped up.

Normally, I strip all pre-installed lighting from an environment I use (whether for Behind The Curtain or a general render) and rebuild it all to my liking. Well in the Coffee Shop where Bex works - I didn't do that in Chapter 2 and so, to keep the lighting consistent even in Chapter 3 - I kept the same lighting setup.

Now, there's nothing wrong with the lighting as such. But, I ran into a little problem with the consistency of the lighting within the scene. Stand Character A at Point X and they look fine. Stand Character B and Point Y - absolutely fine. Move Character A to Point Z - a mere 2 feet from Point X .. Mother of God - what the fuck has happened there!!?!?! Harsh spotlights can play havoc. I only realized how much in this particular scene after I started moving characters about.

So I've had to manually adjust the lighting for each shot. But not only that to keep the consistency from image to image - but I've had to manually adjust the lighting for each individual character in scene.

This means I can't .. "auto" render multiple frames due to always having to adjust the lighting - and I can only see what NEEDS adjusting .. after test rendering ..

.. in addition - as some of the images have multiple characters either as main or background .. the reduction in memory due to having to pull a stick out means that I've having to render some of the images in stages .. Render those 2 characters first and then re-render the image but only with the background 3 characters and then composite them in Photoshop afterwards.

So a scene that should have only took a few days currently sees me on Day 10.

Fuck off!