Hello!
I'm happy to say I am back from my time away, and have settled back into working fairly smoothly. I arrived back late on Tuesday, re-set up my desk area now the renovation work is complete, but waited until Wednesday to actually return to work, as I'd been travelling for the best part of 24 hours.
On Wednesday I turned my PC on, made sure everything was working the way I remembered, and basically got straight back in to the routine of things. I set up the weekly 4K render for this week (which was Taylor) in the morning, let it render out to make sure it'd go up at the usual time, then afterwards returned to working through the renders for the chapter.
The render count is now at 2881, with 21/27 scenes complete. I believe the current scene will take two weeks, roughly. I doubt it'll be finished by next week's dev log, but hopefully the week after. It is the longest remaining scene to be made.
I have been greeted upon my return with render times pushing 2 hours, so that's a slight dent in the overall speed of things, unfortunately. However, my goal currently of course is primarily to get all of the remaining renders posed for the update, and then however long it takes to render is however long it takes. I would still estimate mid August as a reasonable guess for release; if I manage to get everything posed in early August this should be achievable, as I've already done preliminary testing while away.
Alongside testing of what is complete in the update so far, while I was away I also did some editing and postwork for the code and renders of ch4 so far, so that's a good task semi-completed. I also began planning/mapping out the structure of the scenes in ch5. I'm hesitantly going to say it should be shorter than ch4 has turned out to be, more in the 2500 render range, but if I've learned anything from the first few years of developing NGB it's that I always underestimate chapter sizes, and you can really build up the render count with extra little scenes, branches etc. that might not have been factored in initially.
That being said, while we've still got about a month left of ch4, I am already getting excited to begin work on ch5. Being able to formally plan it out now really makes it all begin to feel more real, and there are some things in ch5 that I'm looking forward to making. The goal still will be to get two more releases out this year, ch4 in August and ch5 before the end of the year, but with how big ch4 has become perhaps ch5 will bleed back in to the new year more, we will see.
Regardless, as I say I'm very excited for the future. But I need to get to work finishing ch4 before all of that. Thank you all for the support as always! It's very much appreciated, I'm looking forward to rewarding your support soon enough with the next release!