Status Update, September 2023

Summary

• Shinmera: Released Clohost
• Shinmera: Released Fuzzy-Dates
• Shinmera: Released GLFW
• Shinmera: Released Multiposter
• Shinmera: Trial fixes, started work on a CPU particle system
• Karlosz: Various SBCL/NX fixes and stability improvements
• Scymtym: Finished milestone 1 for convex decomposition
• Domolutz: Finished model rigging and initial animation set

Some Details

I've also decided to include progress of other folks that I've hired in these updates, since your contributions directly go towards funding a part of that. So let's have a look at what they've done this month!

Karlosz and I have been working on porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch since early this year. We're now at a point where we can run a REPL!

(Side note: why can't I upload mp4s to Patreon posts, come on! My apologies for the huge gifs)

Scymtym has been hard at work implementing a paper for convex decomposition. I've talked about this in the last update, so go check that out if you want to get an idea of what's involved in that. For now, here's a quick gif of the algorithm at work:

There's still quite a bit of work left to do, especially in optimising it to run in a reasonable amount of time. That work in particular has hit a bit of a snag, as it turns out my existing kd-tree implementation is bugged. We'll get through it, it'll just take longer.

Finally, Domolutz has created a rig for the protagonist of the next game, and also done a base set of animations that I can use to get started with. I'm extremely excited to finally get the moving model into the working game, especially since his animations have turned out absolutely fabulous:

I haven't yet managed to do the actual import, as there's a bit of an impedance mismatch between how model files like glTF expect things to be driven, and how Trial historically expects things to be driven. I have an idea on how to resolve this, but haven't yet worked out the details, or had time to implement them. Next month though!

From my side I've released a variety of small libraries, and done some fixing and support for the other team members here and there. However, I've also spent this and the last week in Japan and have tried my utmost to not do any work. I have largely succeeded in that, too, which is somewhat surprising to me.  I tend to be really bad at just chilling out.

Since I'm in Japan I also can't do the monthly art stream on the first Sunday of the month, so it'll be delayed by a week. Speaking of the art, I got into a bad mood and stopped posting it to the social networks for a bit. That has resumed now, so if you get my art from Mastodon, Cohost, or Tumblr  you'll see it there again now. I've also started writing a script for a comic that I might realise. It's 15 pages long though, so it'll be a while before it is completed.

That'll about do it for the update this time. I hope you're all having a good start into Fall and are enjoying the declining temperatures. I sure know I would, if I were at home!!

— Love, Shinmera ❤️