Wilson Wonka

Progress Report #4 - Jan 28, 2022

Added 2022-01-28 17:50:57 +0000 UTC

Howdy folks,

It’s been an interesting week, so let’s begin by ripping the band-aid off this sucker.

In last week’s update I was telling you all about the tests I was setting up in the bar and how excited I was to get things rendered in there...

Well, apparently the environment is too much for one 3090. I tried optimizing the scene to reduce the textures. I switched the main characters from the 8.1s to 8s and tried only using optimized Gen 3s as background characters. All tests failed if more than two characters were loaded in the scene. The minimum amount of characters required in each render is 3-5. Later renders in this scene will require 15-20.

So what does this mean? I’m currently looking to find another 3090 so that I can render the bar as intended. I’ve taken some steps to hopefully make this easier, but I refuse to pay scalper prices for one. I’d rather pay a render farm, which is also on the table.

This also doesn’t mean we are behind schedule, as of yet. I’ve moved on to the next scene on the list and will just continue to work ahead until I get the second GPU. We’ve got until maybe mid-March before this becomes a delay-able issue. Even then, I may come up with some workarounds to get through the issue that I’ll have to go back and fix in the future. I’ll keep you informed more on the options as we get closer to having to actually be concerned.

I’m not a fan of giving you bad news if I think I can work through it without it becoming an issue. But, with the current way the market is... I felt like I should be as up front about this as possible. As you know, this isn’t a workflow issue where I can fess up to screwing up and tell you how I plan to fix it. It’s a supply issue and is a bit out of my hands. I’ll update you on my search as things progress.

This has also been a week of 10-12 hour days at work, so it’s one of the first times since working on the game that my workflow has been impacted by my day job. I’ve been using the time to render as much as possible, but have spent most of the time writing dialogue and coding. I plan on working extra hours this weekend to catch up on some of the lost time.

Finally, Puggy is still hard at work on animations. He’s working on a pretty big animation right now, and I’m excited to talk more about them as we get closer to release. He’s really going out of his way to make these much more than your standard 2 second pumping animations and I think the final results will speak for themselves.

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