2020 - The Wrap Up

It's that time of the year again! The decorations are up, the gifts are wrapped and the fridge is full of good things waiting to be consumed in the course of the next few days. Oh my! Time is flying by, for sure. Not that anyone is likely going to miss 2020, but at this rate, one might just keep the tree standing and the lights up.

In any case, I wanted to wish you and your loved ones Happy Holidays (whichever version you're celebrating) and a Happy(er) New Year 2021. Thank you so much for your continued support, which - as I keep saying because it's true - is the thing that keeps DD and DCL going!

2020 was a strange year in many regards, but both DD and DCL saw new major versions with a lot of new features. More than I first thought I could make happen. Because at first, I struggled a bit with realigning changes that happened this year with working on these projects (try developing naughty software and home-schooling kids at the same time and see what I mean...). I had to adopt a few new approaches to make it happen. Like I am now writing most of my code blind instead of testing every new feature right away in game, and use automated testing suites to verify it's valid, to avoid younglings getting curious about what's on mom's screen. Things like this!

What next year will bring is hard to say. DD 5.1 will release somewhere in January. It will be a bugfix release, containing fixes for the "Use Bound Animations" toggle, which is currently not working (I have tracked down the issue already, it just needs getting implemented) and the prisoner chains, which sometimes glitch out. And of course, the animation filter, which will see an update preventing occasional SexLab glitches when it's replacing an animation. Overall, DD5 seems to be very stable given it's a new major version, and that part makes me happy. Some of you might or might not have observed the drama following the DD5 release. That part obviously made me less happy, and is largely the reason why DD 5.1 isn't released already. For whatever reason, new DD major versions have that tendency to cause drama as soon as a feature updates in ways that isn't 100% backwards-compatible, as if that ever could be avoided in software development. And sometimes these changes are made because they're the right thing to do. Oh well!

As for DCL, it's still in beta phase. I have a mile-long list of bugs still waiting for me to fix them. Yikes! I probably will see this done somewhere mid to end January too, so the Beta 2 version should release somewhere in that timeframe.

With this, I will leave you to your own holiday preparations. Stay safe and I hope you will find a lot of great new lockable toys in your gift boxes to spice up these long winter nights with! Or...more conventional gifts if you so choose, haha! See you all in 2021!