Biweekly Update - 11-20-2022 (Progress report, streeeeeams)

Hey everyone, welcome to another biweekly CPE update! I don't have much to talk about this week; like I mentioned in the last update, I've talked about pretty much all of the new stuff that's coming in v0.46 already, so there won't be much fun stuff to show in these last few updates for the year, it's all about getting things done so I can get you guys a playable update before the clock strikes 2023.

The biggest thing to talk about is streams. Those of you who have been around for a while might remember our streams back in the day, where we would usually go for 4 hours, give or take. Well, our first day back to streaming (last Wednesday) ended up going for about 8.5 hours! That was by far the longest one, but our other streams have gone for around 5.5 hours too, so the streams have been REALLY kicking ass since we started again. We also threw in a Tuesday stream last week on top of the existing two, and honestly, it just feels awesome to be back to streaming again.

I get a lot more done on stream than I do working alone for the same time period, so not including biweekly update days like today, I plan on streaming every day I work until v0.46 is done, which means 3-4 streams a week - every other Sunday, and then every Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday. Since I won't have much to talk about for weekly updates, hopefully streaming will be able to fill in that void a little bit! At the very least you'll get to watch the progress we're making towards the release of v0.46. After that comes out, I'll probably have to stream a bit less - not all of the work I do is conducive to streaming, like working on audio and writing, but for the time being everything I have left to do for v0.46 is pretty stream-friendly, so we're going all in.

At any rate, while I may not have much to show, at the very least I'll give you a quick report on what's left to do. The four major things that need to be completed are the 360 aiming update, the screen size update, the lighting engine update, and the UI update. Since the last biweekly update, we made a TON of progress on those first three things. Percentages are fun, so I'll give you a rough completion percentage and a small bit about what I did and what's still left.

-360 aiming is progressing very well, I'd guess it's around ~65% complete. There's still some animations we could improve (which Orex is working on as we speak), and there's LOTS of things we can add to it to make it better, but not all of it needs to be done in time for the update, so I'm focusing on the most important functionality now. I haven't started controller/gamepad testing yet, but it should be nearly identical to mouse aiming in functionality, so I don't expect any issues there.

-The screen size update is nearly finished now, probably around 85%. All the visual bugs I've found so far have been fixed during the streams, the main things remaining are altering enemy AI and doing thorough testing to find any other issues.

-The lighting engine is even closer to being done, I'd guess 90%. This one is just a matter of making sure all the light sources are migrated to the new system properly, so it's by far the easiest of my tasks - the only reason it's not done yet is that I've been using it when I need a break from more complex things.

The UI is the biggest task remaining at the moment; Puffernutter has gotten it to a point where I can work on implementing it, I've just been too focused on the other 3 tasks and haven't even started implementing the new UI yet. I'll probably save it for last, once all the other things are pretty much finished - ripping out the old UI and injecting the new one will take quite some time, to bring things back up to their current functionality, and I want to make sure it's programmed better this time so small tweaks aren't hard to implement.

Long story short, though, we're well on our way to getting this update out before the year ends! If you have any interest in checking out our streams, but you've missed the last few posts, me and Orex both stream on Picarto: https://picarto.tv/Anon42

And that's it for today! Expect the next few biweekly updates to be like this one, all our focus will be on those 4 things until we get v0.46 out for all of you to enjoy, so there won't be much to show. I'll give you an updated % with every update though, and you can always come by the streams to see how it's going! Thanks for reading, everyone, and I hope you're as excited for v0.46 as I am to get it in your hands!