Status Update, July 2024
Added 2024-07-27 08:38:26 +0000 UTCOverview
Shinmera: Got SRS
Shinmera: Implemented Github Actions workflows for staple and cl-markless
Shinmera: Implemented animation effects triggers
Shinmera: Start work on a software rasteriser library
Shinmera: Several fixes to the Trial/NX port
Karlosz: Several fixes to the SBCL/NX port
Eileen: Start working on facial expressions for Weiss
Domolutz: Combat move polishing
Some Details
Well hecko. I got cut up this month and have been recovering from that for the most part. Though, obviously, if you stick bed rest onto a programmer, they're just gonna work in bed, so it's not like I didn't get anything done this month, either.
I'm still pondering about writing a lengthy article about my entire journey with SRS, so I'll keep things somewhat brief about that here. The most important part is that the surgery went well. I'm still recovering now and have a doctor's certificate for work disability until the 18th of August. Until then at least, and maybe longer depending on how well my recovery actually goes, I'll be staying mostly at home lying down.
I had to stay in the hospital for over a week and it was... well, not great! Lots of gross food, lots of medication, lots of pain, extremely annoying roommate, the works. But all the staff were incredibly nice, so thanks to all those lovely people!
I've been slowly getting better at home, though as of writing this I still can only really lie down comfortably. Standing, walking, and especially sitting are painful. Not terribly so, I go on a brief grocery trip every day at least, and it is getting better. This week I've been gradually reducing my pain medication, hopefully to zero today. Not that it isn't still painful, just not badly enough that I think I need to take meds.
ANYWAY, I'll write more about all that separately. Let's talk about funner things, which is all the stuff that got done despite my incapacitation!
Charles and I started working on the SBCL port to the NX (Nitendo Switch) again this week and we've made some fantastic progress! We're now able to build the entirety of Trial and its dependencies. We haven't quite yet actually tried to run it, and no doubt we'll get more issues when we do next week, but things looked a lot more hopeless just before, so this is pretty amazing. Hopefully I'll be able to share a video of something running on the Switch next month!
Before that I've been working on a variety of things, making small improvements here and there to Alloy, Framebuffers, cl-markless, Staple, Redist, and more. Particularly nice is the Github Actions support for cl-markless and Staple, which means you can now create a blog very easily with content-authoring using just Markless and a Github repo. For Staple this means you can now generate up-to-date docs whenever you push to your project, for instance.
I've also started work on a software rasteriser library, which I hope to use in combination with Framebuffers to create a cross-platform and fully native backend for Alloy. There's still a lot left to do for that though, especially with regards to text rendering and layouting.
Next I added the ability for pose markers in Blender's animation editor to be exported into a glTF file, and then interpreted by the engine as effects triggers, so that we can trigger sounds and other visual effects in animations. This means we don't need a separate authoring tool to designate when and how effects should happen. Pretty nifty!
You can see it in action in this short clip: https://mastodon.tymoon.eu/@shinmera/112841802637247045 (again Patreon does not allow embedding videos at all, so you'll have to click through. Sorry.)
Dominic's been on holidays for half of the month, so no new animations from him, but he did polish up some of the other attack animations that were only blocked out before. We should have a more impressive video to show for that next month!
Eileen's back to work now too. I really wanted Weiss to be a bit more expressive, so she's been working on some shape keys for the face, to allow us to vary her expressions in animations. It'll particularly be useful during dialogue pieces later on! She should be done by next month too, so we'll have plenty to show off then.
Anyway, that's it for now, I'm gonna go back to.... uh. Trying and failing to not work, I suppose!
— Love, Shinmera ❤️
