Happy Friday!
My cooling systems have been tuned up, and after some changes with the placement of my render stations, the heat is now manageable - hopefully for the duration of summer.
All PCs are rendering animations, and the speed has improved as a result. 78 animations remain in the queue, and based on the remaining frames, I believe we're looking at roughly 35 more days of rendering to complete the entire queue - that is, if the speed stays similar to this week. I'll keep you updated on this.
When the final animations in the queue render, some PCs won't have any work, which could make the final stretch a bit longer while we wait for a single PC to complete the remaining file. I will try to balance this as best I can so the PCs finish at the same time, but it's very tricky.
And when you render animations, it's bad practice to let multiple PCs work on the same animation file, as even small changes in software versions can subtly affect the output and cause flickering when the animation is put together. I count on the final animation being completed within 4 days after the queue has fully depleted.
The credits section for Season 3 is now locked, and no more entries can be added. Thank you to everyone who supported me at that level. I have now finalized the credits section in-game.
I tried compiling a Season 3 distribution for the first time. It was a bit trickier than normal releases, as the new 4K mode made the process longer. It took me 45 minutes to compile and zip one distribution file.
What I can see is that Season 3 is currently 102 GB for the 4K mode and 23.5 GB for the full HD mode. The final sizes will be slightly bigger after the remaining animations are included, but at least there's a ballpark figure for the game size now.
And as unzipping the distribution files requires roughly double the disk space (one part for the .zip file and one part for the unzipped folders), you can see that the 4K mode as a zip file on Patreon isn't a feasible standard.
I've been testing Discord Rich Presence and realized I needed to change the code that didn't work properly on Windows 11. I updated it and even improved it to ensure all images worked as intended and that it remained stable when playing. It should now be good to go, but I will conduct more testing as I polish the episode.
I completed the end-of-episode reports, adding the needed art and tweaking some sentences. I believe it now works as intended; polishing and testing will reveal if it needs further tweaks.
I also completed work on the final main girl branch, proofread it, and started polishing the Others branch.
What's left to do is:
2 Special render sets for Camila and Bella
Polish the episode
Finish rendering the animation queue (estimated 35 days)
After that, beta testing can begin. And speaking of it, I have started preparing the task lists for my testers. So far, I'm up to 26 bug fixes to test and verify, and 23 tasks with sub-tasks to test for Episode 12 (some easier than others).
This week, I also continued testing a new feature that is likely to be included in v0.12.0 if everything continues to go well. I will announce what it is a bit later, as I don't want to make any promises if I change my mind. For now, I can say that it's a feature that can be toggled on/off.
Have a nice weekend
Dr PinkCake