[Announcement] Future plans for July, 2023 and beyond.

[Dracaeryz]

I know it's been a while since I last updated the character roster, but I've been experimenting with how I want to release characters moving forward. I've considered releasing them one by one as they are made, releasing them in "packs" or "sets" and even releasing them based on monthly polls to determine what people want to see. However, I've encountered a slight problem with my plans.

So, what's taking so long to create characters?

You see, I want to release characters, world information books and even release character specific LORAs and trained LLMs. To accomplish this, I actually need to build a new PC capable of training large language models. This is why it's taking so long to release characters. I could release them in a half-baked manner, but for those who were here for several of the early commits, I did that with some of the characters and regretted it later when I was inspired to rebuild them with a better definition.

As such, I'll be focusing on building my rig first, but I'll still release smaller characters that don't rely on character books and world information.

So how many characters have you built that relies on custom data?

At the moment, I've built roughly 20 characters ranging from modern day and dating sim steriotypes to sci-fi and fantasy characters from my own unique universe. Additionally, some of these characters are being portrayed by some of my cosplay obsessed Japanese friends, which has greatly improved the Stable Diffusion avatar quality.

I plan to run them through the custom Stable Diffusion model I've been using, so that the characters are modelled after them, without using their exact likeness.

Anyway, that's about it for now, but hopefully things will speed up once I build a computer capable of quickly training models. Until then, I'll continue releasing patches for existing characters and building new ones. I hope you all are enjoying my bots as much as I've enjoyed making them!