Production Update (Nathan):
Let me just say – it is REALLY NICE having a whole batch of episodes pre-recorded to work through – also, recording people in groups and in-person makes it significantly faster to get all of the dialogue spaced and placed appropriately – which is by far one of the most time-consuming parts of the episode editing process (and also my least-favorite.) This week I’ve been working with the writing team on getting the next batch of episodes ready, developing some fancy systems and processes for the project going forward, holding a bunch of strategy meetings, monitoring council channels and preparing for our first council Q&A session, and recording/editing our first TableTalk video! We’re super stoked for all of the things we’ve got lined up going forward.
Research this week has been in historiography, source selection, ideological power, open-world narrative design structure, authored encounter modules, and organizational management. As heard in my meetings: “engineers are like soup – you only have them around for meals when something else is horribly wrong.”
Animation Update (Brianne):
This week has been a bit more relaxed than last week. Most of my time on Celestial Horizons has been spent writing automated tests for the render farm. The project is becoming too big to test manually after code changes and guarantee that new bugs haven’t been introduced. So now I have a whole set of tests that check the whole job creation and completion process, and even that race conditions aren’t occurring when multiple workers are connected to the server. I was able to take those tests and create a gitlab pipeline as well, so I’ll have a long-term view of where certain bugs appear and tests will get run really often. I’m excited for all the work off my plate now so I can focus more on new features like a front end, or deeper docker support.