August 2017 Summary

Highlights

First render tests of the “Aquarium Room” set and the “Press Conference” blocking.
Site construction, installing permanent electrical lines to replace the temporary lines installed after the 2013 fire (also outdoor plumbing and additional spigots).
Software mock-ups by Katrina Niolet for “KitCAT” — the proposed client for interacting with creative production software and TACTIC.
Data & database replication and disk storage concept for a large TACTIC system shared between the physical studio and the virtual studio server.
Formalizing our local top-level storage volume scheme. We have some extra folders we use for shared volumes and so on, beyond the “Linux Standard Base” schema.
My family took a road trip to Nebraska to catch the total solar eclipse.
Fielded some follow-up questions about our experience with ArlingCon 2017. I noted the scheduling issues and resulting low attendance. Also mentioned that the options for vendor tables were kind of hard to understand. But it was basically a good experience, if a bit low-key.

Updated Patreon Project Page

Aug 11, 2017

I’ve made several small edits to our Patreon Project page — mainly to fix broken links that I recently found.

Perhaps most important to patrons: I’ve removed the mention of “monthly newsletters” from the rewards descriptions. I maintained these from 2013 to 2015, but fell behind and then stopped maintaining them in 2016 as we moved onto infrastructure. The time required for writing and editing them was such that it was cutting into me making progress on the production itself. I’ve finally decided to simply eliminate these as a perk. Instead, I will be trying to stay more current with the Production Blogs, which are linked here on Patreon as well as being readable from our website.

Of course, we have still never actually charged any patrons on this project, as I’ve set the site up to charge when we release episodes (it’s not monthly — I did have one patron surprised to realize this, so perhaps it bears repeating).

If you do wish to help us out with our expenses prior to our first episode release, we have simple one-time donation and subscription PayPal links on our main website.

TACTIC Replication & Backup

Aug 10, 2017

TACTIC Replication & Backup

I’ve been considering how we want to set up our virtual-studio asset-management system. There are a number of problems I’ve wanted to solve to plan for the future: The source archive is already around 15 GB. This is the original art, Blender models, sound effects, and some rendered video.

This is a technical post about our IT infrastructure, as we’re planning to roll-out TACTIC for management of our production assets. We need to have both efficient access for rendering and local site access as well as online access for remote collaborators. And we need to keep permanent archival backups to preserve assets for future production.

Technical infrastructure has been my project focus for about a year as it became clear in 2016 that our relative lack of structure was a road-block for us in terms of getting production going.