Another strange thing with the latest (1.2) daily builds and 1.2 release family. Again, no scene files unfortunately but maybe it will ring a bell for some people here.
I have a massive scene that worked absolutely fine before (prior to 1.2). Once I had worked on it with post 1.1 dailies and the final 1.2 I see strange things happening:
- the file opened and saved very slow sometimes
- rendering will always lead to a crash. The strange thing is, I can work with the file without problems, once I hit render, even if it's only one object, max will either crash upon render or shortly after I cancel the render.
- the file had no sun before and no sun was added (so it's not an issue with old sun/new sun conversion)
I wonder what kind of changes to Corona could leave to such instability? It is the second file I am seeing this on and the instability started after 1.1, at least for me.
I'm also beginning to question the pace of updates when it's clear that the dailies introduced problems and had performance issues. 1.2 has been a pain for me so far and I think 2 or 3 weeks of testing wouldn't have hurt. Be it the new sun, displacement, IR performance, this release seems to be worse in terms of stability and quality than any other before. Once people have adapted their scenes to 1.2 switching to an earlier version isn't so easy anymore as they need to strip any 1.2 related content (sun, displacement modifiers). It's doable, sure, but if you work for 2 or 3 weeks with 1.2 and realize it's better to go back, that's where you'll be facing a lot of work. I feel like this could have been avoided by testing 1.2 longer and ironing out the issues. The few hours spent in testing and figuring out what problems people see will multiply once a release has spread and people are facing problems and try to work around them or roll back in the worst case.
Please take this as constructive criticism. It's my honest observation from the 1.2 release and I really did wonder how three RCs were rushed out in two days (!) without being properly discussed here, for example. We really need this software to be rock stable.