Development Update - July 2024 (in which Jacq begins to lose his mind)

Hey all!

Time for another monthly update on Origin Story's progress. Bang on a month since the last one. Go me!

I wish I could give you some kind of percentage update like a lot of other developers do, but honestly, I don’t understand how they come up with these figures.

Sure, you’re 40% of the way through your rendering process, but how do you know that? How do you know exactly how many renders you’re going to do for that release to be able to work that percentage out? Am I doing things wrong? Are they guessing? Should I be deciding “ok I’m going to have 800 renders in this next chapter” and just go from there and hope for the best?

I just work along the script I have written then pose and render what I feel appropriate. Sometimes, a scene that I feel may have 30 renders ends up having 50. Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes I come up with ideas while I’m posing that were never in my script and suddenly the estimated render count would increase by 100.  

And then there’s the sex scene problem. As I’ve previously mentioned, when it comes to my sex scenes, I work the opposite way.

Here’s an example of what my script would look like for such a scene:

Moonsong: Oh Amber, I’m so glad you’re visible now but I’m not sure how [mc_name] will take you really being a six-foot-tall hairy guy.
Moonsong: Nor Invisovsky.
Amber: I don’t care what they think Moonsong, let’s fuck.
Moonsong: You’re not the main character and it will make so many guys angry!
Moonsong: But I need you! Let’s do this!

##sex scene##

Moonsong: That was a really bad idea, I can already sense the comments coming in.

Where #sex scene# sits, I will essentially just pose away, and write the script & code around what positions I've been able to pose. What I’m saying is, it’s impossible to predict the amount of renders I will include in a sex scene too.

I totally digressed, but that was a roundabout way of saying that I don’t want to give you an inaccurate representation of how far I am along, so I hope you’ll simply take my word for it.

And that word is… not much progress on Chapter 5 since last time. I’ve now coded almost all of the music and sound in but there’s a little more I need to do on that front. I have one particularly lengthy sex scene that has 3 tracks playing through it. When I played through the scene at a regular pace earlier without skipping any options, I heard those same 3 songs loop 5 times each. Yes it's that long (and so is the sex scene). that's way too many times to hear the same song during a scene. So, I need to find some more suitable tracks to place here to make it less repetitive. But let me tell you, choosing music for sex scenes is the worst.

Other than that, Chapter 5 is good to go to the testers and proof-readers for them to point out the litany of typos and grammar errors that somehow my brain overlooks in the dozens of times I play through this.

Meanwhile, work on Chapter 6 progresses.... as much as FUCKING DAZ will allow me.

I’m currently working on one scene right now in an environment I have cobbled together with re-textured elements of various assets. It features two characters… that’s it. Just two. I did twenty renders in this environment with zero problem… it was relatively quick, and it looks great… in fact I will include one of them as the image that will go with this update.

Suddenly, Daz has thrown a tantrum and decided that its no longer going to play nice and take almost 10 times longer rendering. One render, absolutely fine. The next render from the same camera angle, same lighting, same characters… literally everything exactly the same except mouths moving… renders to the max time limit and finishes up super grainy. Honestly, I’d be concerned it was my graphics card dying if I wasn’t able to just load up another scene and have it render perfectly and quickly.

So, my advice to you, if you’re planning to use Daz to develop your own VN or whatever it may be, is be prepared for it to drive you insane with the stupid shit it does at times. Honestly there’s so many well-known bugs and issues that have been a thing for years it boggles the mind to think how these things haven’t been fixed yet. “Disappearing mouse cursor” which was, as far as I can see, first reported in 2018 is my favorite! But alas, it produces good results when it plays nice, so I must persevere.

Man, I’m full of digressions today. Sorry! It’s just because I’ve nothing better to do than ramble while I load up the aforementioned problematic scenes to try and fix them.

Anyway, 230 renders in Chapter 6 now! That’ll be 266 once I can get this to play nice. This scene is really nice too. And hot! I wonder if other developer's own work makes them horny? TMI?

In other news this weekend I'm off to take my son to a bug zoo, then off to see Deadpool & Wolverine (not with him, he's only 5) and then off to see Spirited Away in the theatre. I excite!

Real time update! I deleted an object I thought might be causing the problem AND NOW DAZ IS REFUSING TO RENDER THE FUCKING SCENE AT ALL. FML!

Right, I’ll shup up. I'll try and be saner next time. Laters!