Hey folks, hopping in keeping it quick. Said when I came in next time I'd have a release date for you gonna drop that. Additional stuff but if you're here for that TLDR:
Release will be Monday Feb 9th, probably around 3pm Pacific. Have the standard staggered release of a couple of days ect. After this post goes live, billing will be paused again until the release is literally uploaded and in your hands. Then it will be unpaused make sure it doesn't interfere with people getting the release. Just informing you so you can make plans with your time and finances.
For those who will allow me to ramble, I've been struggling with how to format this post, so I guess I'll start with the technical nonsense and then move to whinging. So I've already said before my big creative struggle has been with this one particular scene. Normally I'd either suck it up or move it to a different update, but as I've mentioned before it's kind of the emotional tie together for the fucking update. Finally got it where I was mildly happy with it early December and then got a bit of a wrench in things. It came to my attention that a new release had essentially the exact same scene, almost beat for beat. Not accusing anybody of anything, in fact the devs are friends, just an unfortunately timed case of same think. Now if you recall The Author days, you might remember a similar scenario occurred, but only after the work was done did I find out. So call me sensitive to the situation.That was when I discussed the possibility of the half release. I figured it would give me the week or so I figured needed to make the changes I could to the scene without losing the soul of it. But I vastly overestimated myself. Working on everything else and that at the same time just ended up putting me further behind. Anyway not pity party time, just telling you whats up. Here's some cold hard numbers to give you an idea of where I stand at the moment I'm typing this. Scene redo has six variations, one of those can use mostly recycled renders from another so we can knock it to five variations in practice. Now knocked out the first of those variations, it comes to about 75 renders. Again a few can be recycled so lets drop an even 60 per for the next four variants. Add 15ish for the mostly recycled one and we end up with about 330 renders. The test renders I did took about 56 minutes to render so let's just round it up to an hour per. So 330 hours of just rendering to complete. I do have two render capable PCs at the moment though so 165 per so let's say that comes to about a week of just renders if I render 24/7. Now of course when the PC is rendering I can't do much else on it so time will vary a bit on if both are rendering the whole time. Now on a pretty good day of actual posing I can get about 6-10 renders posed per hour, depending on complexity of the scene. So at that rate assuming I pose for about 10-11 hours I can probably finish all the redone scene this weekend, give or take a day in case I have a slower day in there. So assuming average render and pose times apply I would presumably have everything needed to be done by the 30th or so. Now I also have a few animation fix/rerenders. Those are smaller probably a day of work at most to pose. Then about 6-7 hours each to render. So lets add another day there. That probably puts us around the 2nd or 3rd of Feb. And out of an abundance of caution for unforeseen circumstances I add some more days for cushion. So a release on the 9th seems most practical. Anyway I'm going to stop talking about this, it's not meant to come across as a "look how hard I work guys!" But just to give you a more concrete look at some numbers so you can understand a little more of how the timing works out.
Now I don't want to ramble much longer, but just take a moment. There's something of a stereotype in this community of devs who constantly miss deadlines and just keep getting paid for it. Unfortunately for me I think it's perfectly valid to consider me in that camp at the moment. I've certainly tried to be better about pausing payments then some, but that's only half of the equation, the other half is delivering when I say I will and I haven't been. You guys are absolutely an amazing community, and you've been far more patient with me than I probably deserve. I just want to come in here and again say no excuses the buck stops at me this isn't some horrible secret struggle it's my bullshit. So when the update is out I'm going to be looking at ways to earn a little trust back with my community. Until then I can only pause payments so I ain't getting paid while shit ain't getting done.
That's it from me today, I'll probably check in Friday the 30th, just let you know where we are at. Excuse any delays on DM replies, things get lost in the daily grind.
Appreciate your time, and I hope you guys have a safe week.
Also excuse any typos I didn't proofread this.