Status Update, September 2024
Added 2024-09-28 16:12:56 +0000 UTCOverview
Shinmera: released open-with
Shinmera: published "Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch"
Shinmera: various fixes to Alloy and Trial's integration thereof
Shinmera: fix regressions in Trial's examples and add some new ones
Shinmera: implement a generic 2D wave simulation
Shinmera: implement a settings menu for Weiss
Shinmera: add some sounds to Weiss
Shinmera: start implementing some more base game mechanics in Weiss
3b: fix the gjk-raycast implementation in Trial
scymtym: improvements to convex-decomposition, alloy
karlosz: fix some hairy GC bugs on ARM64/static-space
Some Details
Well, this month I was mostly on my own again, though Charles did spend quite a bit more time on the NX port, and especially now getting into the really hairy and hard to debug GC issues that plague our particular configuration of rare features (ARM64 + static space + immobile code + elfination + safe points). Some of those were squashed, but unfortunately there's still more remaining. As of right now there's no ETA on when they'll be fixed, I'm afraid.
Whatever the case, I did publish a summary of the work we've done so far, so if you're interested and haven't read that yet, you can do so on my public blog: https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/437
Other than that, Dominic had to work on other projects this month, so I was mostly on my own for game development tasks. I did manage to get 3b and scymtym to help fix some bugs I was hitting, which I'm very thankful for. I also finally made some more progress working on actual game related mechanics and features. What with the surgery and everything it sure feels like forever since that last happened!
Adding in sounds and some simple particle effects has definitely helped the game feel quite a bit already, though there's still some basic physics interactions that I need to improve to make the combat feel less.... weird. Doing that is really tedious and frustrating though, so to be honest I've been procrastinating on that with other things.
I also made some improvements to Alloy and started hammering out my own look and feel for the game's UI. To test that out I added in the settings menu, since that makes use of all the UI elements I'll need.
Quite pleased with what I've come up with so far, I have to say. Still, I should hold off on making more UI for the time being. After all, UI is the fastest way by which to make a game look like it's much farther ahead than it actually is.
There's a few more gameplay elements I want to add now like interactables, doors, and switches, but once those are in I should have everything to build a proper first demo level.... which is another thing I've been putting off for ages. Using Blender feels like such a chore, but there's no getting around it, really. I'll cave eventually, just no promises on when exactly that'll be.
For now there's still so many things to do everywhere that I'm not too worried about it, but I sure would like to have something demo-able soon, too...
Well, that's about it for now. I didn't even notice that I worked a lot more days than I should have this month. Whoops. I'll try to take it easier again next month.
— Love, Shinmera ❤️
