Disclaimer: These are beta-quality builds. Our AI artist is still in learning.  Do not expect visual quality.

How our system works

This week's changes include:

• Visual asset updates (using HD model)
• Voice asset updates (new AI voice framework/model)
• New AI voice for Elena (powered by @EmpressBlueVA)
• 2 new scenes
• Minor dialogue changes in first few scenes
• Additional narration to help with flow in first scenes
• Minor character changes (Elena now has "brown_eyes")
• Add credits screen to main menu
• Replaced some poses in Tess' classroom scene
• Switch to webp image format with lossless compression

Statistics:

• ~148 images
• 15+ PetaFlop-hours of training
• 36k training images

Warning: Old saves may not work.  As many of the graphics and all voices have changed, it is recommended to start the game from the beginning.

We are excited to have 0.3 finally published.  This version contains one of the most complicated scenes we've had to "shoot" to date: The Ceres + Elena pool scene.  This scene not only contains multi-actor shots (something our AI model has had difficulty with), but is in an entirely new set being outside, at night, with pool and other elements.  We've had to add hundreds of new images to our dataset to teach our AI artist how to draw them.  That puts our dataset at 36k images.

Another highlight of this version is the new voices.  We are using a new AI voice network and have added voice for Elena, derived from the amazing talents of EmpressBlue.

Upcoming Schedule

• Dec 23: Update 0.4 training dataset
• Dec 24: Train 0.4 AI model on new dataset
• Dec 28: 0.5 Development starts
• Jan 29: 0.4 Release

Housekeeping

We are working on some quality improvement efforts for Catching Heat 0.5.  It will likely not have any new scenes.  Instead, existing scenes should see an improvement in quality.  This likely involves adding hundreds more images to our AI training dataset and possibly a new AI network architecture.