News on 0.70

Hi everyone,

as always, let's first welcome our new fellow supporters. Hope you're going to have a good time following Summer's adventures. Feel free to message me anytime if you have any questions and join our community on Discord. Thank you for your contribution, it helps a lot!

In the previous post I've promised to get into more detail regarding some problems I have with setting up my new workstation. I've managed to get everything to work properly by now, except for one little thing. And that one little thing is the sole reason why I decided to build a new workstation in the first place: a new powerful graphics card.

If you're not interested in my little anectode regarding my workstation, you may skip it by scrolling down to "GAME NEWS".

Sooo, I bought a new RTX 4090 from a tech shop via a well known, trustworthy online marketplace in my country right after Christmas. It got delivered on January 6th. I had to wait until all the other components arrived too, mainly the mainboard, before I finally could install and test it. On January 10th I got everything together and began building my new system right away. After having installed all the new components, I ran into some unexpected issues with the mainboard and the RAM sticks I've bought. There seemed to be some compability problem which caught me off guard since, according to the all knowing internet, the RAM should work just fine with this particular mainboard. I've been able to "fix" this issue with the help of some amazing tech savvy people, only to run into the next, much bigger problem.

My system didn't seem to recognize the 4090. No matter what I did, I just couldn't get it to work. First I thought I must have made a mistake somewhere, double and triple checked everything, every connection. Still no sign of life. That's when I got suspicious. Can it be? Is my new, expensive 4090 actually borked? I unfortunately didn't have the means to install it in another system in order to test it. I wanted to be 100% sure before sending it back. This particular card is quite hard to come by nowadays since the production got stopped by NVIDIA in favor of the new 50xx series.

So I decided to take it to a professional tech specialist and let him check the card thoroughly. A day later, he called me and confirmed my suspicion. The card is kaput! "But wait, there's more!" he said. He actually put it underneath a microscope to check it further. He came to the conclusion that it's a used card, second hand! All the tiny screws are busted, also some weird residue on the card itself as well as microscopic scratches on several surfaces, all of which isn't normal for a brand new card, according to the professional tech guy.

It was advertised as "New" in the online shop. I would never ever pay that kind of money for a used GPU. Time to get in touch with the trader I got the card from, a tech shop not too far from my hometown. Everything, licenses and so on, seemed to be in order with that shop, so I was hestitant to believe that I got scammed. He probably got scammed too before me, which doesn't really make it any better though.

Nothing could have prepared me for that phone call. After stating my case, he suddenly bursted into a fit of rage. Accusing me of not knowing how to work that card, he guarantees that it's working fine and I'm just an idiot, probably using a wrong power supply unit, using all kinds of expletives, even insinuating that I'm trying to scam him somehow. He even ignored the fact that the card has been tested by a professional. So I uttered the magic word "lawyer", which caused a nuclear meltdown within his synapses and made him end the call prematurely. I just sat there, dumbfounded. What the heck did just happen?

A few minutes later my phone rings. It's the raging guy again, now in a much more apologetic tone. "I'm so sorry! We won't have to involve any laywers." After telling me unwanted anectodes about his son, and how great the business is with these graphics cards, he offered to take it back and send it over to MSI, the manufacturer, in order to get me a brand new replacement. I agreed, since I'm not even remotely interested in getting into a legal battle right now. I asked him to document everything regarding his exchange with MSI. I sent the card back last week, still waiting for news as of now. There's still a lot to figure out of course and I'll let you know as soon as there are new developments.

So yeah, I feel a bit naive and stupid for having paid in advance. I don't really know what to expect from here on out, but in the worst case, I will have to get into a legal battle afterall. I'm faaar from being well off and can't even remotely afford to lose that kind of money right now. This whole situation puts me under a lot of stress as you can imagine, especially since part of the money comes from a generous small time investor who offered to help me fund my project. I will have to keep working with my old GPU for the time being, so I won't be able to offer any of the planned benefits that involve 8K renders until I finally can get my hands on a working new card. Wish me luck that everything turns out alright!

I hope this little story will provide help to anyone who's planning to spend a big buck on something on the internet. NEVER pay in advance via a regular bank transaction, no matter how trustworthy a shop might appear.

GAME NEWS

All this trouble regarding my new workstation put me behind schedule a bit, hence the delay to Febuary. Things are going well though. I've finished the unique renders for most scenes, still working on the remaining 3 scenes. I expect them to be finished by Febuary 1st at the very latest. That will leave me with a whole week putting it all together in engine, which should be enough time considering that I've been able to write pretty much all of the dialogue for update 0.70 by now. All that remains is putting it into code, which usually is the least time consuming part of the development.

Despite all the annoying stuff, it still is a blast to work on Summer's journey thanks to all of you enjoying her fun adventures! Thank you everybody for your support. Much love!

Flip