Progress Report

Whew! Sorry about being silent so long, folks. I've been a bit crazy busy.

Part of that is in a good way, but even that good way might be leading to some unavoidable delays. Specifically, I finally was able to get some upgrades for my rendering machine without bankrupting myself. While the Nvidia 5080 and 5090 are still ruinously overpriced, the 5070ti has come down in time for Black Friday deals enough that I went ahead and bought what I needed to upgrade. That meant a new MB that supports PCI-E 5, along with the GPU itself, and a few more bits and pieces needed for the upgrade. I also bit the bullet and upgraded the rig to Windows 11 (ugh), since end-of-support back in October will likely mean some software (like Daz3D), will stop supporting Win 10 in the next year or two as well.

Unfortunately, the upgrade was much more time consuming and labor intensive than I expected it to be. Apparently, gone are the days where you can upgrade to a new rig in a few hours T-T. Seriously the new case I bought (I had constant heat issues with the last one) required me to actually (shudder) read the manual. Building the new PC ended up taking an entire day, another day has been spent on setting everything up again and restoring backups (I ended up having to format the OS m.2 drive, as my previous Windows installation wouldn't boot with the new components). Technically, I'm still restoring the Daz library to full working order even now. A lot of the third-party assets are still missing.

Thankfully, I'm not a complete idiot, and I finished rendering for the November chunk of the new game before doing the upgrades. That said, I wasn't expecting to lose the better part of three days to the upgrade process, so I'm sort of behind on everything, at the moment. I expect to have the Mixed Media Story out tomorrow, and will probably put a rush on the Short Story as well. That latter because I haven't gotten to the programming or writing for the game. Since I haven't touched TWINE in two years, I really wanted to be on top of that already, and I legitimately have no idea how long it will take to hash that part out. Since that might lead to a delay of the initial release for the game, I want everything else taken care of, at least.

A bit...worse than that, is that I haven't made nearly as much progress with the Sound Project as I'd hoped. So much so that, combined with me doing a very 'me' thing and getting a bit overly ambitious with the 'Modded' game, I'm seriously considering extending that game through January instead of just November and December. If next month was a normal month, I probably wouldn't, but I always take some time off for the holiday in December due to it being the major family gathering of the year for my family.

Still, I'll know more about that when I see how much I manage to squeeze out of the rest of this month. For now, it's just a nebulous possibility. The Upgrades might very well speed up my work enough in December to get farther faster, though admittedly the upgrades were really more needed for animations than still renders, so the impact on Modded won't be as great as it would have been on Left Hand Magic...