Developer's Journal 4:30

Hey everybody.

I have mentioned before that I've spent a lot of time over the last year helping to care for my mother. My mother has now passed away. She had been suffering for some time so we view her death as a mercy.

With that and a lot of family in town through next weekend obviously my game development has not been going full throttle. However I do have the animation machine going and I have also still been working on cleaning up Episode Four's existing content, including creating new renders to fill in alternate pathing. I'll do a timed playthrough this week to give you an estimate of how much content there is so far, but I don't think anyone is going to be disappointed with the amount of content in Episode Four. (Well, there are the guys on Steam and the Zone who use the ctrl button to skip through it and then rage about the game being too short.)

I have also taken some steps to speed up my development time. I picked up an annoying bug during development of Episode Two which causes all of my new .duf files to take approximately two minutes to save. As I am a computer idiot, I was never able to solve this bug and have just been living with it over the last year and a half. However, I finally figured out that the bug only affects the drive I use to store Leaving DNA and that I can get around it by saving the files on a different drive and then transferring them back to my main drive.

I have also been trying to reduce my scene load times, which are atrocious due to my having way too many Daz morphs and assets installed. If I were to make a new game today, I would organize it much differently than I did when I was new and inexperienced, using custom morphs and dedicated content directories, but I'm afraid that my customized Leaving DNA content is too integrated into my current mess to extricate it without losing track of necessary assets.

What I have done is gone through the .duf files for each character in the game and figured out which model assets I can uninstall from my drive without losing any elements of my existing characters. Because I am constantly saving and reloading scenes during my render posing sessions, I'm optimistic that between this step and cutting out the long save time bug I can significantly reduce the time it takes me to transition between scenes when I am creating and modifying them. This will in turn lead to my churning out renders more quickly.

That's all for this week. Thank you for your support!

--Monk