Development Update #23 (Patreon)

Planning, writing and rendering for v0.14 is already in full swing, but here's a development update already.

Next month's release will likely be later than normal as I'll be away for a week, without access to a computer. I'll probably have the new release nearly finished before I leave, so the finishing up and testing phase will happen after I return from my trip.

With the release of v0.12 and v0.13 some new feedback has also started to come in. First, there are some complaints about grainy renders in the latest releases. To combat the grain, I'm changing up my rendering settings for v0.14. Up until now I rendered all my images for a fixed duration, which generally works fine for simple scenes, but when you have lots of objects and reflective surfaces, the GPU will be struggling. I'm going to experiment with rendering without a fixed time limit and stop at a certain amount of render iterations. This will mean longer render times per batch, but hopefully eliminates the noisy images.

The other thing is the Android release, which has been a bit of a headache from the start. The panning images, introduced on Day 15 and onwards, are causing issues for quite a number of users. I think it's related to underpowered hardware (GPU) and I've fruitlessly scoured the Ren'Py forums to find a fix. I could disable the panning images for the Android release all together, but that might leave a majority of happy Android users out in the cold. Anyway, I'll post a public poll about the issue somewhere this week.