Progress Report

Time for a new report again.

"I got good news and bad news, which do you want to hear first?"

Jokes aside, that is definitely how it felt the last month.
Progress has been anything but steady. There have been some good productive days/weeks, but I had one major (and one smaller) problem. The major one, is unfortunately, hs2 itself. Few reports ago I mentioned trying new plugins, and going back to my usual after losing time and testing. And that was/is true! I didn't go and update afterwards really.

However, during work on a Levy section, I closed studio, had lunch, and then relaunched studio and... Scene didn't work. Okay, maybe it corrupted the scene, happens. Older scenes of it? Nope. Still crashes studio. Then I went back and forth, and by mistake loaded the "crashing" scene, but now it loaded?
Yeah. It's very difficult to explain without going super in depth, I wrote my discord about it more during the troubleshooting of it. To keep it short, seems the graphics related plugin has a high chance of breaking my scenes IF I use certain items. And you'd rightfully ask, okay, why not just go back to the previous version of the plugin?
And I did. It still broke. Turns out, the "issue" has been going for multiple versions, and it affected (if I used certain items) any of my 1000+ scenes I did in last 2-3 months. I didn't notice till now because, well, it breaks only when you try to re-load the scene, not when you're working on it initially. Hell, sometimes it even manages to load without a crash, altho only 10-20% chance.
That unfortunately ended up dragging me into a rabbit hole where I genuinely felt like just yeeting it all. Here is the "damage" of it:

Yeah... the list is much longer. From a total of only 6 (!) crashes from summer till January, to now 92 new reports since start of February. Hell, worst part, I only figured one part of it, there is still one more that I'm trying to find out (and actually doing right now before I typed this report).
Yeah... The time spent is astronomical and constant fear of working on something I might not load the next morning just didn't let me work in peace.

That was the bad part. Genuinely, a full week or more wiped out just on this. Fuck hs2.
Now onto the good news (there are some?). Besides those massive hurdles, there has been some progress, altho slow obviously. Another 310 renders added to the tally, which is obviously much less than I needed, but something. I'm now one big section away from being done with all new new content (technically, one two very small ones at the end of episode left). And after, finally some smoother sailing with reworking Avis bar segment, Raiko cinema. With how it's been going lately, I won't even predict any timeframes till I am at, idk, post Koko section and done with animations. Rather than making myself fall intro depresso loops for missing checkpoints, I'll just shut it till I see the end of the tunnel. Regardless of my speed, definitely DON'T expect any alpha testing till at the VERY LEAST start of May.
I've also had some great talks and progress with Scooter (proofreader) with regards with my script, and we finally ironed out some bits like how to express sounds (I was literally typing them as I felt without a clear rule, RIP scooter proofreading my script 3 times last month), and we also fully agreed and made a timeline of certain important events and when they happened for flashbacks. Sure, game is relatively simple, but there were multiple points where I'd just wing it date wise and say "a few years/months ago" without remotely thinking of actual number and issues it might cause. So that's fixed, and fits well with how I'm now much more keeping time ingame, sometimes even showing on renders 😎

That's all for now. Quite the stinker for what really started super promising rendering wise, and then hs2 said no. I was debating fully rolling back to much older version, but... I do like some of the new features newer versions provide. It's difficult to tell myself to make worse renders intentionally.

As always, love you all
Kat <3