Progress Report - February 14, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

Once again, I forgot to make a Progress Report post last week. I apologize for that. I won't lie, the weeks are all just blurring together for me. Even more so than usual, anyways.

Anyways! Progress Report!

Auto-Releaser

The asset auto-releaser is coming along swimmingly. There is a very real possibility I can get a functional build of it up by the end of the week. The creator end of it is more or less done, I just need to fetch the packaging code from DMX Packager 2016 and the uploading code from the Wheel of Indecision and make them kiss in a weird steamy programming threesome with the Auto-Releaser, and I think all the boxes on that end will be checked.

More significantly, I finally got to the point where the browser end of it could actually be made! This isn't final, and I'm not a web developer besides, so the UX is a little quirky. But this is more or less how the final version is going to look!

My original plans of implementing content management in the browser (EG the website telling you what all updates are available based on assets you've downloaded) look like they probably won't be viable, due to Javascript's extremely strict sandbox.

In a nutshell, even though Javascript only runs on the local client (no communication with an outside server), it isn't allowed to access the local filesystem without explicit permission. That explicit permission being a "choose file" pop-up, where the user navigates to and selects the exact files the browser can open.

Seeing how I am planning on having each asset have its own metadata file that will be hidden within the user's SFM install, having the user manually find and select each metadata file, just so the site can tell them what's out of date, is a bit too clunky for me.

That's not the end of the world though, since that was always a nice-to-have feature for the browser end of things. The actual content management was always meant to be be on the client end of things, anyways.

I haven't started on the client end, which will be a separate program you can download and run on your computer that will basically automatically manage new releases and updates for you. Its back-end will be extremely simple, especially compared to the creator end - it'll literally just download the same data file that the browser does (it basically just opens the web-page in the background).

From there, it will automatically grab all of the metadata files for assets you've already downloaded (since it's a local program, it has full access to the local filesystem, unlike Javascript in the browser), and tell you which ones are out of date. It will also keep track of the last time you launched the client program, and will highlight all of the assets that have been released since the last time you looked.

The goal of the browser end is to make it easy for anyone to grab assets, no strings attached. The goal of the client end is to make it easy for people to manage and update their assets, if they're interested enough in my work to download and run a lightweight program.

Primordium

Primordium is coming along swimmingly! The two streams since the last progress report saw us install and lip-sync all of the voiced audio for Episode 1, and I have officially pushed it off to my sound designer to do his magic. We also finished up the Primordium title sequence, which I have also pushed off to my sound designer.

He originally looked at the sequence and was like "neat I'll do that after Claire/Jill". But then he remembered he actually has several of the more traditional instruments that made the Witcher 3 soundtrack so iconic, and has since has fallen down the rabbit-hole of composing his own Witcher 3-inspired soundtrack for the piece.

He confided in me that he felt bad for pushing Claire/Jill off to focus on it, but he's just having too much fun writing the soundtrack. I told him that it's perfectly okay, since I've pushed off Claire/Jill to focus on other, more immediate things too.

He's shared with me a few small snippets of what he's cooking up for the sequence, and I suspect there will be at least one person who watches the sequence and asks in earnest what track off the Witcher 3 OST was used for it. He really is doing a bang-up job of recreating the feel of the game's OST.

Honestly, I don't deserve him. He's too good for me and my work.

Raven and Starfire

If you've been following my Twitter (which you really should, even if the platform is currently recreating the Hindenburg in slow motion) then you may have seen me make an occasional Tweet about working on Raven and later Starfire, from Teen Titans, over the past few months.

Obviously this week's report poster kinda lets the cat out of the bag, but I've finally got them built and in Source.

Their outfits aren't complete, with no bodygroups or bodymorph support yet. But they do have full flexes, blush, and phoneme support. The face meshes themselves are originally by Skuddbutt, who overall did a pretty damn respectable job of translating their animated designs to 3D (a damn sight better than I could do, anyways). That being said, I did find myself making a lot of small- and medium-sized tweaks to his mesh and texture-work, to bring them up to the point you see them here. The most interesting challenge was definitely getting them under the 64k poly limit that Source soft-enforces on single-mesh character models. I'm not sure if Skudd himself made their faces so damn high-poly, or if someone somewhere along the pipe between Skudd's creation and my downloading subdivided their faces. But I managed it, even if it did result in some... technical difficulties when it came to Starfire's faceposing.

I've been wanting decent Starfire and Raven models for over ten years now. I grew up with the animated show, and I am not afraid to say that I - like many other young boys who grew up with that show - had quite the crush on Raven. And many years later, a crush on Raven smashing Starfire.

Needless to say, I have had a project sitting on my mind since before I started working on these two. And now that I have them, I am intending to put a fair bit of time and effort into writing and storyboarding that project for them.

I hope it's not too much a spoiler, but the project will involve eighteen inches of pierced futa action, and Raven being torn between putting to the test Starfire's claims that she considers herself to be extremely breedive and submissable ("you mean 'submissive and breedable'?"), and making it her personal mission to fill all nine of Starfire's stomachs to overflowing with her cum. Which way will she end up going? You'll have to wait to find out!

Finding time for this project is going to be rough. And I hate to push projects around more than I already have. But I'm not lying when I say that I've been sitting on some iteration of this idea since literally before I graduated high school. I'm 30 now.

So, forgive me if this idea ends up taking precedent over some other projects, like Overbreed or Blue Star.

Conclusion

I think that's really about it for this Progress Report. Most of my past two weeks have been focusing on the auto-releaser. I've worked on a few other things, a few DOAFantasy outfits here, some writing there, a few projects tinkered with and promptly smothered in the crib.

But overall, nothing really of note, in the face of these three major things.

So yeah! That's all for now! Until next time, everyone!