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[Move The Chains] | S01E04 | Play Sheet #13

All right, so it’s been a bit crazy for the past couple months. For multiple reasons, but we’re back on track now. Not as far along as I’d like in development given how much money I’ve put in to speed everything up. But we’re still moving and will, in all likelihood, be speeding up quite a lot here soon.

So, for those not following along, I decided to invest in a NAS after the Steam release. Rather than overpaying for a Synology/UGreen/Qnap/etc., I decided to go the DIY route. Significantly cheaper, more performant, and just felt like a smarter move long-term. Supposed to be easy, and it was for the most part, just got unlucky with some things.

The NAS:

Bought a few 22TB drives, all came DOA. Returned without much issue and got a few 24TB new with a couple 20TB manufacturer recertified drives. NAS started working fine, but under any sustained load, the whole system would lockup/crash forcing a hard shutdown. Ended up being the CPU, which I’ve replaced. The 10GB NIC I bought first wasn’t working either, so I assumed also DOA, so I bought another (which worked.). But I threw the original one onto a test bench and it ended up working with driver installs. Not sure why Unraid wasn’t seeing it, but it was working. So, that was a bit of process (have since installed a cache drive), but definitely worth the trouble.

Second PC:

I also ended up biting the bullet on a refurbed 4090 PC. Too good of a price to pass on given the market.

Only issue is that it only had three intake fans and the three exhaust for the rad/AIO. So, I spend a day installing a bunch of loose PWM fans I had laying around. Also saw that whoever put the NVMe in forgot to remove the plastic from the thermal pad on the heatsink. Booting up brought me to a PXE page. Put simply, it was trying to boot over network. Easy fix, until I realized there was no installation of Windows. So, spent a good couple hours dealing with that. I did drop first 10gbe NIC into it and is working fine, though.

So, the idea here is that I can make renders on my main system > send to NAS (which the Daz library is on) > render on second PC. And while I’m away, I can render on both systems at once if needed.

Reinstalling Windows on a new boot drive and setting up everything as it was before took a bit longer than I wanted, but is done.

I’ve also set up Linux on an old laptop, so I can bugtest it prior to release. And yes, I’m still looking into my android options. Right now, it’s either paying someone to compress and make them or going the VPS route and having the data downloaded from said server. Which is a bit of hassle. If anyone can point me toward someone who does android versions of games, please do.

Anyways, onto the actual update part of the Play Sheet:

  • We’re a baker’s dozen under 700 renders right now. Once I finish this current scene, we’ll be over. On the bright side, thanks to the second PC going overnight, a bit over half of those 700 prepped renders are already rendered, so that’s going to shave a good bit of time off.

  • There’s currently 13 or so animations, half of which are rendered, ten or so are NSFW.

  • As I’ve written it, the lead up to the first game will end at Episode 4 and will start with Episode 5. The main reason for this is because there’s going to be some Blender segments (namely the Procedural Stadium addon) that I need to feel my way around with. Much of the game will likely be rendered in Blender, but everything else will still be Daz. I have no intention of making MTC in Blender. It started with Daz and will finish Daz, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be Blender elements in it. There’s already been a few, hopefully none of which stuck out.

  • As mentioned, much of the training elements will be done in a Rocky montage style with breaks for story elements. Later practices in Season 2 will be feature options to raise stats. Still deciding on minigames or not (will always be optional if included.), but definitely leaning toward not at the moment.

  • Eisley content. It’s going to be fairly light for the remainder of Season 1. In a vain attempt to remain as spoiler free as possible, those who caught the correct variables to see the scene at the end of Episode 3 will know what I’m referring to. There’s going to be some closure to it, but she’ll be seeing a lot of content in Season 2.

  • Some minor UI stuff still needs to be addressed. Music Room, etc. Will also be adding the Toggles menu to the preferences (will also leave it in Extras).

  • I’m trying to make environments feel a bit more alive in scenes. More people walking around and stuff of that nature. Expressions are still a work in progress, but I’m trying. Just one of those things that are hard for me to judge at times.

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I do have some news in the pipeline for WWJK’s spiritual successor. We have a title, a very short teaser, and a 120 or so renders to show for it. It’s all still very much a slow process as a background project, but we’ll have some news soon. Thanks for the patience toward that. I know we said we’d have something a while ago, but shit doesn’t always go how you want it to.

As always, preview images are not representative of the final product and are basically raw. Everything here is subject to change and all that good stuff.