Awesome Upgrade (But Crappy Stock Picture) (Patreon)

Yo,

On the twilight of 2021, I wanted to share my optimism as well as give somewhat of a more public devlog this time around. A few years ago, with the support of game donations, I was able to upgrade from my older PC to a more modern rig. As this project, and my lofty goals, have continued to evolve, the need for more hardware was slowly becoming apparent. This is most notably during the v0.20 episode and the current one that I'm working on. To put it in context, most renders take around 75 minutes for me to actually do. So when an update includes hundreds and hundreds of images, that's days and weeks of the computer just running wide open to create the visuals we see in game. 

I'll start off with some honesty, v0.20 (and the current v0.21 that I'm working on) both contained some pretty difficult shots, mostly surrounding the park. In contrast to most pictures taking about 75 minutes, my park images were taking around 6 hours per picture. Progress was stagnant and frustrating and this was beginning to bleed over into the writing and I'm not having that. Now don't get me wrong, a lot of these shots are beautiful and I'm really proud of them but I can only work so fast when I spend a few days working on a queue of 20 pictures and then have to wait 6 hours per shot for them to actually complete. 

This put me at a crossroads.

With game production being full time now, my aspirations are even higher. Plus, I typically spent a few hours per day just sitting in my chair doing nothing but waiting on a test render. That's wasted time and really cuts into my personal life or time away from the project to refresh myself. Sure, I could write during that time but that requires a lot of multitasking and my attention span isn't the greatest--particularly, as emotional as this ending update is going to be. 

Originally, I had been planning to build my next PC but the current market on video cards is ridiculous. The card I was looking at was probably going to cost around $3k by itself just because of the shortage. However, pre-built rigs appeared to be cheaper.

Enter: Black Friday.

I ended up getting a reasonable deal on a new rig (pictured above). I kept trying to take shots of my own computer but it was too reflective or included things that compromised my anonymity so I'm just posting the stock shot of what I got. I'm now running a GeForce 3090 (I had a 1070ti before) and this thing kicks like Ip Man. Also upgraded from 16 gigs of RAM to 64 and I have hella hard drive storage. It's a beast and has really made life a little easier lately.

To put this upgrade into perspective, my 6 hour park pics take 12 minutes to render now. 

(Pause for dramatic effect)

Anyway, things are back on track now and I'm finished the park scene fairly quickly. This is also allowing for quicker testing and just trying out some new stuff that should further enhance shots as the story comes to a close as well as really help to improve the game moving forward. Hell, I may be able to include animations now or at least try and seriously dive into that more in the remake.

But thank you all. Thank you for the support over the past few years. Hopefully, you see some of that going back into the project, which I think it rewarding.