Hey all!
It's been three months since the most recent update of "The Starlit Oasis," so I thought I should post about my progress on the next chapter of content.
I finished writing the script for this update quite some time ago, but unfortunately I have hit a major snag when it comes to doing renders.
If you've never used Daz Studio (the software I used to make my renders), here is a brief explanation for how it handles characters. They have a system called Genesis where a base figure is used, materials are applied, and "morphs" are used to change the figure's shape. When you load a character preset into a scene (I have one for every recurring character in the game), Daz Studio checks every single morph that is in your account's library to see if they are supposed to be applied to the character. For someone like me who has hundreds of morphs on my account, this takes a long time, so I bought a product that is supposed to help optimize things by temporarily hiding unused morphs.
Long story short, not only did it not improve loading speed by a noticeable amount, but the product also broke the figure for the main character/Marcus in every one of the over 1000 scenes that I have set up. The only way I have found to fix it is re-opening each scene, loading in a fresh copy of the character, and copying the pose from the broken one to the fresh figure, which would take me hundreds of hours of work. I'm waiting to hear back from Daz Support to see if there is another way to resolve this, but in the meantime, I am unfortunately unable to do any renders, which is going to delay the release for the next chapter even more.
On the bright side, I have used this time write the outline for the remainder of the story. I believe I will be able to cover that content in a single update, so the update after next (chapter five) will be the one that allows me to release a finished version of the game!
Thank you all for your patience, and I will try to get chapter four out as soon as I can,
- Posh Tentacle