Progress Report

Greetings!

As mentioned in my previous progress report, I expected to lose development time this week due to the arrival of my new PC, which I would build myself. Obviously, that prediction came through. I could not do any work from Monday to Wednesday due to the highly involved building and setup processes. Once I did get things set up, I still had to contend with a fresh batch of Daz-related bugs. For all the good it has done for adult gaming (and this game), Daz Studio is notorious for some of its bugs that often go unfixed for months or even years. The result is that I'm currently forced to use a beta version of their software, something I'm incredibly wary of when developing a game. But there is no way of getting around it, so this is what it is for the time being. At least they fixed another massive bug I had in the beta software the day after I installed it, so that's good.

In any case, I've been up and running for a few days now, and progress since then has been good. I finished up the first animation for Nell for this update and moved on to the second. These are animations for the tower scenes that exist today, but the sex scenes will have their visuals and poses wholly overhauled. It makes a huge difference, and I can't wait to scrap the old versions once this update is out. 

One nifty new tool I recently got access to but didn't have a chance to use before now is something called LimbStick, which vastly improves the ability to have limbs "stick" to other limbs or surfaces. You might have noticed that animations made in Daz often have hands, feet, or even entire bodies drifting around awkwardly, not really staying in place when they are supposed to be utterly still. To take an example from the scene I'm working on right now, imagine the MC grabbing Nell by the waist during a sex scene. This is incredibly difficult in Daz Studio, usually taking a lot of effort with results that are hardly worth it. Well, LimbStick goes a long way towards solving that. It still has a few issues to deal with, but getting limbs to stay in place is now much more manageable, giving me greater freedom to have limbs interact during sex scenes. It goes a long way towards improving visual realism, which I'm taking advantage of in the new animations. 

Anyway, I hope to have a very productive week now that I'm back in the swing of things. Considering my ETA of April for version 0.40, I will need all the productivity I can get.

Until next time!