Update - Rio re-render

tl;dr - I've been beta testing PAL 2.0.

This week's image

Another re-render here, since I'm finishing up the PAL testing and that involves re-rendering some pictures that just weren't that great in previous versions thanks to poor lighting and textures. Lighting Rio's skin in particular requires a different emphasis of lighting, because her skin being so dark means pictures of her often lose detail, so she needs a strong natural shine to her skin to come out and pick up her features.

PAL 2.0 coming soon!

I think I'll keep this week's update short. It's not that I haven't done anything - actually, I've been working pretty hard - but I don't think it's all that interesting to talk about this week. I've mostly just been doing testing of PAL and in any case I'm trying to move these updates to less of a 'report' and more of a discussion of one or two topics that occur to me during the week's work. Anyway, I expect to release PAL 2.0 pretty soon, although I've still got more testing to do.

There have been a number of bugs I've encountered, particularly in the stuff that tends to happen late in the game. I suspect that the late-game gets away with being a little buggy at this point because it's hard even for me to know exactly what should be happening at any given moment, since there's just so many things that can happen at this point, particularly if you're pursuing as many different sub-plots as you can at any given time.

I think that's meant that maybe players haven't been all that aware that some things aren't working exactly as intended, but then there's also the possibility that most patrons by now are mostly seeing new content by going straight to the victory suite and trying it there. I'm not sure which is true, but regardless, I want the game to be as functional as possible for the 2.0 release.

I've opted not to try to recruit a proper external beta testing group for this release, too, since the game has been through a lot of testing before and the early-access model it's been under for a long time now has meant that it's been played extensively by average players, so I think it's well established that it works well enough. Added to that is that it's such a huge game to test at this point that I don't think it'd be all that fair on the volunteers!

Have you noticed the game being buggy? Or have you been holding off from playing the game until the 2.0 release is done? Let me know in the comments!