Hey everyone, I come bearing some insight on why I am so freaking late on the Jan/Feb update report. Sadly some real life issues have taken over and it does not get more real than the death of a family member. Understandably that event has destroyed a lot of my plans revolving around this game and my YouTube work and I am scrambling to catch up.
I have gotten a lot done so far this year though I want to state and I am going to change, just for the next two updates (this one and the next one) the duration of the development period from 2 months to 3. The reason for this is that this will allow me to keep the updates on the proper 2-month plan while staying confined to the current year for the Nov/Dec report. Also it will allow me to work on some neglected areas that I was planning to work on before this whole thing happened.
I will do a tiny update here, nothing fancy. I have done quite a bit of programming and have started to both clean up the code and implement more of the currently planned work as opposed to refactoring the existing code. I am also currently re-envisioning the modding system. You may recall that I was planning on using an ini file and loading that with Boost to import game options and various values. I am killing that idea off as it is very time consuming and having to files to update just to get new stuff into the game is stupid; Boost being so hard to work with was also a reason.
Instead I am going to a simple solution that I don't know how I over looked; all of it is going into the database. I am going to leverage the existing database we have to also store all of the ini file settings data. I have already re-written much of the gVars namespace to follow this plan of attack and created the code in the datasystem and database classes for this.
On the engine side of things I recently found out that UE4 is now completely free with just a 5% royalty on game sales to Epic. So I downloaded and installed UE4's development tools and bought some sci-fi/space related packs and have been messing around with them. I showed off some of this in the developer's vlog. Still a loooong ways away from making any part of the game in UE4 but I have some interesting demos of what can currently be done with just a few hours of tinkering.
For the audio I have started re-creating the trailer sound track with my new EastWest software. It was easier to create it this time around due to having videos I could scour for note placements as well as the old files which I could open for those as well even if the instruments used were no longer properly being read. I have also started on a new beta track called March of Legends. It is no where near even show-able yet as it was something I had planned to do in the last week of Feb before everything started going down.
No work on any graphics.
Yeah, that was a good wall of text but we will really get down into the weeds in April when I release the progress report. So to recap on the schedule: this progress report will be released on April 1st (or as near as possible) and then the next one will be released on July 1st (or as near as possible). After that we are back to the 2-month schedule for July-Aug/Sep-Oct/Nov-Dec.
Thanks for your understanding and thanks for following the project!
