Progress Report - March 17, 2025

Hello, everyone!

Last week, I noted how my goals for this week was to build the new Barbara model, and have her fully faceposed and in Source - with a stretch goal of getting her outfit made as well. I managed to complete that, and more.

In the end, I managed to get Barbara built and faceposed, with two different hairstyles, and her sweats outfit for the project. I also completely rebuilt the old strapon model (from 2013! My god!) she will be using from scratch, and I managed to build Selina's apartment outfit as well.

Unfortunately, I can't show off the new Selina outfit due to technical problems. Problems that may or may not have wide-reaching effects for this video production.

Those who followed me closely on Twitter and now on Bluesky may be aware of the fact that I have been long suffering PC stability problems. As far back as mid-November 2024, my PC would fall into cycles of constant lock-ups. At one point, I had locked up 17 times in a single day. In the past, I'd have a day of constant lock-ups, but then it'd be fine for weeks or even months at a time before the next bout.

But over the past few weeks, it's only gotten worse. The lockups have started actively corrupting data on my PC. In the past 10 days alone, I have had lockups irretrievably corrupt three separate SFM projects. Luckily, those projects were just minor things - testing models in SFM, exploring micro-video ideas, things like that. I only lost at most an hour's worth of work with these recent corruptions.

But data corruption is never a good thing. It needs to be resolved, especially before I start working on a serious project. It's one thing to lose an hour's worth of work in a random model-testing SFM session. It's something else entirely to lose a month's worth of work in the upcoming Batcat project files. That is obviously something that I can't tolerate.

I've been meaning to reinstall Windows to resolve the problem, but I have been pushing it off because reinstalling Windows just sucks - and more importantly, Autodesk are assholes when it comes to downloading older versions of 3dsmax. The Source model exporter I use is third-party, and it doesn't work on newer versions of 3dsmax, so the possibility of not being able to download older versions has been a real point of concern for me.

As of today, though, that is no longer a concern. I had a run of 13 lockups in an hour today, with the single longest session between lockups being a whopping 15 minutes. Each one of these lockups has progressively corrupted and degraded my 3dsmax install, first wiping out the Recent Files list and most recently making the entire interface unusable:

Every UI element is now just pure black. This includes all of the drop-down lists for applying Modifiers, and even just navigating applied Modifiers. This makes it effectively impossible for me to operate 3dsMax. I can't even load up the Selina outfit, because the file loader menu is just pure black. I quite literally can't see what I am doing.

And so, the only real justification I had for delaying reinstalling Windows--using 3dsMax to finish the model-work for Batcat--has gone. And so, once I finish making this post, I am going to start unplugging all of my non-boot hard-drives, and proceed to reformat the boot drive and reinstall Windows.

Will the Windows activation key I salvaged from my install work? Will I have to call Microsoft to reactivate Windows? Will I have issues reconnecting the other drives to a fresh Windows install? Did I forget something important in backing up my boot drive contents?

These are all questions I will learn the answers to in the coming hours and days, and you all will learn next week.

And speaking of backing things up, you all may be wondering - if my PC is so unstable that it staying online for 15 minutes is cause for celebration, how did I manage to make this post? And that leads to the most amusing element of this whole fiasco - and what convinces me it is a Windows problem, and not a hardware problem:

Of the literal hundreds of lock-ups I have had since November 2024, my PC has never once locked up while playing a game.

Whatever is causing the lockups, it seems to not be triggered if I have a Direct-X game playing. For months now, I have been joking on my Discord whenever my PC starts locking up, that my PC is craving the Zone (Stalker 2) or Jimbo (Balatro) or the Grimdark Future of the Forty-First Millennium (Rogue Trader). Because I can play these games for hours without locking up once. But as soon as I close out of the games, it's fair game.

Just today, I managed to play 3 hours of Balatro without locking up. I closed out of the game, and proceeded to lock-up midway through typing about how my PC is a Balatro addict in Discord. Some months prior, I managed to play a whopping 7-hour Stalker 2 session without locking up.

So how did I manage to spend over an hour creating a Windows installation thumb-drive, back up things off my C-drive, and write up this post, without playing any games? That's my secret, Captain.

I've been playing Rogue Trader this whole time.

Or, more specifically, I've had Rogue Trader alt-tabbed in the background as I did all of this.

 There's Rogue Trader running in the background, nestled in between this Patreon page in Google Chrome, and the LibreOffice Writer document I keep dumping this post into and saving out of paranoia.

This is what my PC's instability has reduced me to. In one breath I find myself laughing at how silly the Adeptus Mechanicus in Rogue Trader are for believing that machines have spirits and performing rituals to appease them. In the next breath, I am alt-tabbing Rogue Trader and running it in the background while I get work done, in a ritual too appease my own PC's machine spirit and prevent it locking up.

Hopefully this Windows reinstall will go without issue. I'll be able to reactivate Windows without fuss, I'll be able to get 3dsMax downloaded and installed and working with its Source tools, I'll be able to reconnect all of my drives and everything works, and I'll be able to just immediately jump back into getting work done.

Hopefully next Progress Report will be making a significant in-road into Batcat, with Selina's outfit compiled and working in Source, the lewd animation cores fully built, and the skeleton of the rest of the animation blocked out.

Hopefully.

We'll find out next week. Until then, everyone.