SandStorm - Status : News of the week #23 [v0.6]

Hello everyone. I hope you had a nice week.

The next update is getting closer. I'm pretty happy about that one from a technical point of view.

Not everything is perfect, but I recently understood a few things about skins, lights, and coding which will help a lot in the future. When I see my renders now, and when I look back to the first renders that were in the v0.1, I'm about to faint. Makes me want to redo them, but I don't have time and I'd rather advance/finish SandStorm and concentrate on making a good first release for SnowStorm with my improved skills.

I also learned a few things outside of Daz3D.

- I changed my technique of animation, I coded the animations in Renpy this time, and I believe it integrates them in a smooth way with the rest of the game, without that kind of "lag" that sometimes happened with the old technique (which was using videos)

- Due to the game getting heavier each day (more than 5go), I decided to purchase an image compressor. It works quite well, next update will be around 1go only (note that half of the weight is music and videos), however with a slight loss of quality. I often saw that transforming from .png to .jpg makes the image a bit darker as well, which is not good as my images (especially in the first updates) were a bit dark already. So I need to readjust the contrast and the luminosity of most earlier renders, and then it will be almost like before. However, if you request it, I can release a HQ version in Patreon only that will weigh 5-6go with the original quality of renders. The resolution remains the same of course.

- I integrated the live stats into the game, so you will be able to follow the evolution of the relationship with girls at any moment, by clicking on that icon in the top right. If you do not wish to know, just don't click there, and it will be like before.

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I almost finished most scenes, renders, animations for this release. I believe Maddie got a really good one in that update, but others girls have cool scenes too, don't worry. Even foxy is starting to show her nose again.

 I still have some transitions left to do, and mainly the script to write, I wrote nothing this week. Just code and renders. So, the incoming week will be dedicated to writing the story, and we can expect a release next weekend hopefully. :)

Advancement for next update:

Renders 90%

Script 50%

Coding 70%

Animations 80%