Status update Episode 12 (Patreon)

This week started well and ended weird. Let's start with the good stuff.

I've been using two PCs to render static renders, and they've depleted the static render queue I had built up; now, they are back to rendering animations.

The cutscene animations are expected to finish rendering sometime during the next week. I will soon need to pose animations again, but for now, I will continue to push out static renders, as I have a good workflow going on.

I've mostly been working on static renders for canon scenes lately, which are spread throughout the episode. I plan on writing more dialogue in the near future.

I played some of the scenes that finished rendering for the first time this week. It's always nice to take a moment to enjoy what's being created throughout development like that. What strikes me the most is that there's a lot of content in a low number of scenes. I've been working on several long scenes so far during development, and it shows. I've yet to watch a single animation in-game, but over 100 animations have been completely rendered.

Polls

A cosmetic poll for Jill went live this week. Sign up as a +$10 patron to participate in it here. It will end next Friday.

Other news

There is some slightly bad news this week, as well as some technical talk that may not interest you. You can just read the TL;DR below and have a nice weekend if you're not interested in what follows.

TL;DR: One render station was damaged, and I will start upgrading my PCs and software soon. There are some challenges associated with this that will take some time to resolve, but hopefully won't impact development times too much.

The full version and my thoughts on what followed...

One of my PCs caught on fire two days ago. Specifically, my "Josy PC" caught on fire while rendering a Bella animation - now that's some development lore. In hindsight, I should have named that PC Leah.

I noticed that my "Josy PC" didn't respond when I tried to pull renders from it, so I went to check on it. It was unresponsive but sounded as if the GPUs were working as normal. The monitor didn't get a signal when plugged in, and with no way to control it, I had to force restart it by pressing the power button.

As I did that, a cloud of dust and smoke puffed up from the CPU fans. The smell of burnt electrical components filled the room. I quickly pulled all the cables and got the extinguisher ready. Things went well, and I didn't have to use the extinguisher.

After inspecting the PC and all its components, it became apparent that the GPUs had overheated, emitting an intense, gunpowder-like smell. Most of the other components in the PC smell fine. I thought that the GPU connectors had melted, but they were intact. The malfunction must have been due to something else. I won't be restarting the PC, nor will I reuse any parts of that render station aside from the storage devices and possibly the RAM.

Needless to say, that was a shit start to the day. And the entire Wednesday was spent on trying to fix this in the best way that I could. I have a backup PC for these types of emergencies, and I spent half of the day updating it to match the rest of the PCs. Comparatively, it's not a very good PC, and it only has a single 4090, but it will do for now.

My PCs are basically 24/7 ovens, and the PC that fried has been rendering non-stop for 2-3 years using dual 3090 GPUs and then upgraded to dual 4090 GPUs. I'm thankful the incident didn't happen when I was asleep. During my career as a developer, similar events have now occurred three times (iirc) - the other two times weren't as bad, as they just triggered the circuit breaker.

As I mentioned in my recent Q&A, my plan has always been to upgrade hardware and software continually, and I am now exploring this option and planning accordingly.

I spent time investigating how the new DAZ Studio 2025 alpha build works and what I need to do to incorporate it into my workflow. I need to use that alpha build because the 5090 GPUs, which I plan to upgrade to, will only be compatible with that DAZ build and newer ones.

Slow and steady, I will upgrade my systems and ensure that everything is viable, making any necessary adjustments.

This is a big leap, introducing challenges primarily related to the lack of portable scripts. When I work with DAZ, I use a bunch of various scripts to make life easier. Some of which are essential for the game and used in like 99% of the renders and animations I make. But no scripts compiled for earlier DAZ versions will work with this new alpha build until the developers can update them. This process may take some time, as there is a lack of documentation on how to update the scripts.

To work with the new DAZ alpha version, I will need to adopt an approach where I use an older DAZ version with working scripts to pose the scenes and animations, and then utilize the new DAZ alpha build to render everything with 5090 GPUs. It's a clunky way of working, as it requires extra effort and afterthought, but I believe it's doable until DAZ and all scripts are further updated.

The new DAZ alpha build wasn't all bad, though. I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of the features and improvements. This is how Jill looks in the new DAZ alpha build when I work with her. It's a lot brighter and has a higher quality texture shading than I'm used to when working. The clothes clipping issue is a result of the broken scripts, but I have already found a workaround for this.

The renders look almost identical when rendered in new and old DAZ, which is great because I want consistency in the art. I found the render times to be almost identical as well, so there wasn't any significant gain to using the new build compared to an older one.

I will figure out the new workflow process as I go. I feel it's a challenging, but not impossible task.

To continue creating this game, I must future-proof my development by making this switch. It will eat up some development time here and there, but eventually it will be for the better.

For the better part of the upcoming weeks and months, I plan to work as usual on the development of episode 12. However, as soon as possible, I will set up new render stations and initiate the transition.

I hope this brought you some insight into what I will be doing when I mention that I'm upgrading software and hardware. I'm so thankful, because it wouldn't have been possible to make this hardware upgrade without your support. As always, I'll keep you updated on everything.

Have a nice and fire-free weekend

Love

Dr PinkCake