Hello!
Time for another all members dev log. A lot to say this week, this might be a long one. Please enjoy the above previews before I talk at you a lot.
Man, is it good being able to work and render with no errors or crashing. I've been consistently able to build the render queue up to 50+ renders every day and have it run through to the next day with no issues. (the current scene's render times are anywhere from 40-90 minutes, so the queue never finishes by the next day, so the queue is steadily getting longer as i add to it each day, but i now have no concerns that it'll crash or anything). It's nice to feel focused and productive again. I'm still not confident enough to call the problem completely fixed, because I still don't know exactly why it began to become more frequent, so it's possible I'll get the errors and crashes again in the future, but for now having two clean weeks now with nothing going wrong is really nice. For the free members who won't be aware of what I'm talking about, basically I was experiencing a few errors and crashes that were basically unexplainable, during both posing of scenes and rendering. Crashes of just DAZ Studio, but also of my whole PC, complete freezes, all sorts of issues really. The traceable DAZ errors being problems that seemingly have existed in DAZ Studio for 5+ years, but had no concrete fix. The random complete PC crashes being similarly unexplainable. Thankfully I've got it all working okay for now, so now I've had two clean weeks hopefully that problem is behind me.
Now, the numbers. We're up to 2557 renders and 20/27 scenes complete. I'm most of the way there with the 21st scene too. After scene 21 is complete, the remaining scenes are all quite long, likely 1 week plus per scene. 22 in particular will probably take two weeks to complete.
I do have a small announcement to make that I'll make now so you all can see. There will be a ~10 days pause in development at the end of June and the start of July. I'll be out of the country at this time, so won't be working on the game. There will also not be dev logs in this period. I'll pre-make a few 4K renders to go up in the usual Monday/Wednesday spots the week I'm away in place of the poll and voted-for render. While I'm away my office is also being renovated, so I'm not in the position to be able to set up a long render queue for my PC to work through while I'm away either, as I need to completely empty the office for the renovations and have no practical other place to set it up or anything. So it'll be a complete pause on the rendering side of things for ~10 days. I will work on planning/writing ch5 in what free time I get while I'm away, however, so work won't stop completely. I'm also planning on making a working build of the game up to where I've rendered so far, to do preliminary testing if I get time for that too.
I've said during the development of ch4 that I was aiming for a summer release. I had a secret goal of getting it out during June that I hoped to accomplish, because I knew this hiatus was upcoming (and a pause is more inconvenient late in a dev cycle when everything's written and the renders are the bottleneck; early into a dev cycle there's a lot of planning/writing to do before the rendering can start), but unfortunately this hasn't happened. The small consolation I'm taking is that if the update had been the size I had expected (~2000, 2500 at most) I would have achieved my target, so it's not a case of me not working hard/fast enough, just that ch4 ended up being significantly longer than I'd anticipated. To further put things in perspective, we had 21 dev logs for the prelude, which consisted of ~1600 renders. In the same timeframe, I'm over 2500 renders for this update. So I'm still comfortable that my current workflow is conducive to a good pace for updates.
Taking all this into account, the current rough release window is early August. I have probably around 6-8 weeks worth of work still to go on the rendering side of things, plus time for testing/proofreading etc. before release.
Hopefully this is understandable for you all! Trust me, this deep into the dev cycle the last thing I want to do is take ~10 days off now it feels like I'm so close to a release. I can offer the reassurance that after this trip, for the rest of this year, and honestly next year and the foreseeable future, I've no intentions of travelling anywhere else, so this should be the last development pause for a long time.
Thank you all for the support as always! There will be a dev log for the next two Sundays (21, 28) then a break before resuming for the 12th, with the next all member dev log a week later on the 19th where I'll hopefully update you all once I'm back on the state of what's left to do.