Status Update, August 2024

Summary

• Shinmera: Recovered from SRS for the most part

• Shinmera: Published "Through to Myself"

• Shinmera: Improvements to various projects (machine-state, filesystem-utils, pathname-utils, promptfont, redist, deploy, multiposter, plaster, binary-structures, ...)

• Shinmera: Implemented a selftest suite for Trial's platform support

• Shinmera: Several fixes to the Trial/NX port

• Karlosz: Several fixes to the SBCL/NX port

• Domolutz: First finisher animation

• Domolutz: Aim and turn animations

Some Details

Well, recovery took quite a bit longer than anticipated. I had some complications that dragged things out, but the good news is that I'm now well enough again to sit for a long time, which in turn means I can return to the office again starting next week. Yay! If you want to read a detailed account of everything about the recovery, I wrote a long blog post about that.

I also worked some on my other writing and art, and bundled it all up into a book! It's the first time I've made a physical book, and I was quite surprised at how nice it turned out when the test print arrived some days ago. For those that know my yearly desktop calendars, I've finally started working on that now, too. It'll probably be done in a week or two.

As for programming stuff, I noodled around with a lot of different projects, mostly due to the SBCL port to the NX needing more fixes to the various operating system portability libraries I've made. I also completed the build system for SBCL/NX, which makes it a lot easier to deploy and test an application. The process is still very involved, though, requiring at least two different operating systems and machines, and takes a very long amount of time to run. Testing any changes thus incurs a very long change,compile,run cycle (about four minutes) that makes working on this an absolute chore, even if we disregard the absolutely abysmal debugging situation.

Anyway, the good news with that is that we were able to compile all of Trial and run an extensive test suite on the NX, including being able to draw some stuff to the screen!

The bad news is that there's still quite a bit of work left to be done. Callbacks are completely broken in the presence of elfination, and those are needed for audio to work. GC is also still broken in the presence of threads, since the safepoint mechanism was never ported to a system where you have no signals or traps at all like the NX. Charles is now busy with his own studies again and can't devote time to it, and even if he did have time, I don't know that I have the money to keep compensating him for his excellent work.

It feels like a real waste to stop here, but at the same time I'm already short on cash to fund the current game project, and there's no way in heck that even if I did get a Kandria release on the Switch going, it would pay back the development costs for it. I just don't have the clout or marketing chops to make that happen. I do still want very much to make that happen, but I don't know how soon that's going to be, unless I somehow stumble upon another funding source for it. I already tried to apply to ProHelvetia twice and was rejected both times, so that's out now. It's also very doubtful anyone else would be willing to pay for the costs, given how hard to estimate it is how much effort is left to be invested.

Anyway, I'll let you know if the situation changes.

On the game side, being on recovery I still haven't actually done much of any work on that myself, but Dominic has been hard at work polishing the existing animation and adding some new ones in, which I'm very excited to get going in-engine. Here's a preview render of a finisher move he completed recently:

It's so cool! I'm a bit worried about getting the camera transition to work well in-game since the player could have positioned it any which place before the animation starts, but I'm sure I can figure out some solution that'll work well.

Eileen also finished the various facial morphs for Weiss, so Dominic can now add in some expression work into the animations as well. You can actually see it a little in the above combat animation as well.

Dominic is now off-contract for a while, which is just as well, since he left me a huge pile of work that I need to catch up with. I'll be spending the next months working on integrating all of the animations and getting the combat system working properly. I really want to get a fun combat playground going before I move on to the next stage, so that's going to be the goal for the rest of the year.

This project in general has already stretched on wayyyy longer than I hoped it would, but I'm trying not to beat myself up over it or worry too much about the financial situation. It'll go how it goes. At the current moment this Patreon is my most viable source of revenue, and I should honestly figure out some way to get it more attention, maybe via the orange site, but I'm honestly so terrible at anything that involves intentionally putting myself in the spotlight.

ANYWAY. Thank you as always very much for your continued support, and I hope you're all doing a good job surviving in this horrible summer heat if you're on the upper hemisphere.

— Love, Shinmera ❤️