Status Update, December 2023

Summary

• Shinmera: Released Kandria v1.1.9
• Shinmera: Released Ocelot v0.6
• Shinmera: Released ExLichat v0.2.3
• Shinmera: Extended various portability libraries in anticipation of NX support
• Shinmera: Fixed various collision and physics issues in Trial
• Shinmera: Implemented some more minor mechanics in Weiss
• Shinmera: Implemented an automated build system for SBCL/NX
• Karlosz: Backported some upstream SBCL changes to SBCL/NX

Some Details

I got the forward kinematic entities working, meaning I can now walk around in the demo scene and push around stairs, which is pretty good fun! But... it turns out that physics //wasn't// entirely fixed like I thought it was last month. There's still a very, very annoying issue going on that I have not managed to find the energy to fully debug. Sometimes GJK will return a wrong collision point, causing objects to just jump a large distance in a single frame. This looks really jarring and is really hard to get to the bottom of.

So instead of bashing my head against that I tried to distract myself by implementing forward kinematic animations. What is that? Well, we design the animations of the characters in Blender, and when an animation moves the whole character, I would like that to be translated to actual physical movement in-engine, such that the character properly collides with stuff. I thought that doing this would be easy, since I'd just have to cancel out the root bone's movement and translate it into velocity instead. But it turns out that that just turns the mesh into a distorted horror. I'm not entirely sure why, but my best guess is that Blender mushes motion onto leaf bones during export, rather than keeping it all on the root bone. If that's the case I have no idea how to work around this problem.

And then when I decided to return to the collision issue I was immediately hit by an even more incomprehensible bug, where the OpenGL driver on Linux would report an "invalid operation" upon rendering the sword, but only if it was drawn in a specific order after a number of other meshes. I still have no darn clue why that happens or what to do about it other than arbitrarily changing the order, so that's what I did for now.

Either way, encountering so many ??? problems after another thoroughly burned me out, so I took some time off and worked on some other projects for a while, such as the ExLichat server and the Ocelot android app. I also took some time to fix some critical bugs in Kandria.

Charles did work quite a bit on the SBCL port to the Nintendo Swich this month, but unfortunately we didn't even manage to get back to where we were before. There's been quite a bit of churn in the upstream SBCL, and backporting all the changes is a huge chore. And at this point I'm not sure about my finances, so I don't know when I'll have enough cash left over to get Charles working on SBCL again. A really frustrating situation, to say the least. I hate leaving projects up in air like that.

Anyway, aside all of that I've been wasting away reading a bunch of comics. Not really much of a recuperation, but uh. Well. It's what happened. My only wish for 2024 is that I can find this darn collision bug quickly, though I have a feeling I won't.

I hope you've been having some good chrimbus days and are looking forward to the new year!

— Love, Shinmera ❤️