Amethyst

you know for a while my todo list got up to like 5000 lines. but that's what i get, i suppose my side of the function code crawl is done, which is basically just writing out the logic for our 120 function codes that we've selected as this episode's lucky winners. for the most part these are common moves like status, set up, recover, etc... plus certain things i know gym leaders use. so i'm hoping for high mileage with these. they've all been written out and now marcello is just finishing up putting them into the script properly. meanwhile it's up to me to tie up loose ends in the misc update category, which is nearly entirely limited to bug fixing by now. historically that does not take very long, but i also have not gone through the forum for bugs basically all episode, so i will be doing that over the next week. we'll then start testing. we're doing it a bit different than we have in the past, so i'll go over how it's structured this time to inform newcomers and illustrate changes. in the past our test sequence has been ...where the supervised test is one where one person (hi ikaru) plays through the episode and all with me watching so i can closely see any problems with how it plays or things that need to be tweaked. this has just been called alpha in the past. the beta has been done by ace members, community is a release available to all forum members, and the public release is open to everyone finally. unfortunately many bugs have still passed to the community and public releases despite this. that's because we would find bugs in beta or community, and then take a pass at fixing them, but sometimes that fix fails or breaks something else, and we dont find out until the public release because all the testers had already played the originally broken version. for this reason starting this time, we'll have more waves than before: i just mentioned the supervised testing was considered alpha before, but we're now calling it that. instead the alpha testing will be done by the supporter group here on the forums privately. internal testing likewise will be done by the dev team as a whole amongst ourselves. we didnt do this before due to having a smaller, more inconsistent group, although it somewhat happened less formally anyway. my hope is that taking it through these different waves will give us plenty of time to fix as many bugs as possible. of course there are some things that just won't statistically present themselves until swarmed with a certain number of new players, so it's not as if we can promise a bug-free release. i ask for your understanding as always. in order to compensate for the increased number of waves, i'll be shortening the time of each one as well. in the past the beta and community tests have not had a fixed timeframe, but usually ended up being around two weeks each. with more waves now, i'll be limiting each one to a single week so that we can move through it in a similar amount of time. the supervised test should not require a week anyway... anyway, this all means that if there are no especially time-consuming problems, the episode will publicly release four weeks after the internal testing begins. since we are reaching this stage, it also means this will be my final post here for this episode. from here on out, i hope you can wait for it patiently. although the story content of the episode will be somewhat light, there is plenty to explore, and especially with 7th gen being added there are many new pokemon to catch too. in fact, as of the end of E17 only six non-legendary lines are still unavailable. and as for legendaries... maybe you'll even get some action with them too. until next time ≮̕3҉