This dev diary was originally posted exclusively to patreon subscribers on 1st November 2022.
I'm back!
I enjoyed a good solid week away from the computer to spend some time with my family to recharge but now I'm back in the hot seat ready to get this rewrite in the bag.
A few weeks back I decided to re-invest the Patreon income on a lovely new 4090 GPU. It arrived whilst I was away but it's now connected and wow, what a beast! The intention is to allow me to render more images locally rather than having to offload them to iray rendering servers. Sometimes it can take an hour just to upload a job to an iray server, then you have to wait for your turn in the queue and then you have the actual render time to wait. Sometimes it can take 24 hours to get a render back. Not any more! Now I can have spot renders done in around 3 minutes and full images rendered in around 20-40 minutes. Obviously that doesn't include the time it takes to actually stage, pose, light blah blah but the take away is that this should allow me to churn through renders much quicker!
In terms of progress obviously not much has changed as I've been away but since I have returned I've managed a few dozen renders and we are probably around 50% through Chapter 2. It's hard to estimate as certain scenes have changed order and moved between chapters 2 and 3, but 50% sounds about right. Don't forget however that we will be releasing the chapter 2 and 3 rewrite together. This is unavoidable due when moving scenes around.
SAVES IN THE COMING REWRITE
You may remember some time ago we mentioned that we are unsure if we can keep old saves in the upcoming release. The intention was to try our hardest to maintain compatibility if we could....well it has become clear that we can't. The Renpy engine that the game uses has a very simplistic save game facility. Doing simple things like moving code from one section to another can completely break saves. We have sunk a LOT of time so far in the rewrite into keeping the old save games compatible but it is severely limiting how we can work in the rewrite so I have taken the difficult decision to formally declare that 0.3.1 and below save games will NOT be compatible with 0.3.2 onwards. Making this change will inevitable allow us to speed up our rewrite, tidy the code and increase the code efficiency of future versions. All of these changes will allow for a better game and also let us speed up content updates so ultimately player experience will improve.
Thank you everybody for your support and kind word of late, we really do appreciate it!
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