Weekly Standup 68 (and "Step 0" writeup)

("stand-up" is a term I borrowed from software dev circles - this is a short report on what I've been doing and what I'm planning, intended to keep my supporters aggressively up-to-date. This is not a typical dev blog post.)

(This one actually includes a short typical dev blog post this time, though.)

The Ukraine conflict is still ongoing. I'm still doing my best to help and I still urge you to help if you can. 🇺🇦

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TL;DR:

Things I got done over the last week: Some bugfixes, and a lot of work on forming a development plan.

Things I want to get done next week: All dev plan, all week.

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Monday - Still feeling a bit under the weather but I got a bit of bugfixing done.

Tuesday - Bugfixes, testing, released v.0.13.beta.3

Wednesday - Bugfixes, testing, released v.0.12.public.3

Thursday - Day off

Friday - Writing up the v.0.14 post, then getting started on what I described as step 0 in that plan - reorganizing the project.

Saturday - Day off

Sunday - I got everything I wanted to do for step 0 of the plan done quite quickly, and then did some work on a testing framework idea I have.

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So, since I got done with "Step 0" even quicker than I expected, I won't bother creating a separate overview post, and I'll just write up a description of what I did for this standup:

1. Swapping from Atom to Visual Studio Code: I've been using Atom as my primary editor, but Atom is now being sunsetted (this has happened very recently, and is sending waves through the Renpy community since Atom has been the recommended editor for a while). In addition, the Renpy VS code plugin seems to be more actively maintained than the Atom plugin (thanks to those in Discord that told me!) so I've made the decision to switch to VS code. There are also two very important features that I could never get properly working in Atom that I want in VS code: code completion (or at least less spotty code completion) and spellchecking dialogue in the editor.

2. Greatly increasing the space I have for the project & making use of that space: I've finally upgraded my dropbox to a paid account, increasing my available space from 2GB to 2000GB (for those worried about dropbox kind of screwing over user from time-to-time: I use it for backups, not primary storage; it's just that I want to back up the entire project directory). 

3. Changing the git setup of the project: Now that I'm not extremely limited on space, I can fix a lot of the issues I've had with the git repo. I implemented the git Large File Storage feature so I can track image files - not being able to do that was a major obstacle when swapping between branches and thus applying the same bugfixes for different versions. I also had some privacy boo-boos in the old repo, which I've fixed for the new repo.

4. Fundamentally changing how cross-version compatibility is implemented: Please don't look at the current versioning system in the game, it's a mess and I am very ashamed. I'm not even going to bother explaining how it works, but just trust me that it is a mess. Instead, I've now implemented a parallel system of feature updates (ie. moving from version v.0.n and v.0.n+1) and bugfix packages (ie. a named/numbered collection of changes that can be applied to both v.0.n and v.0.n+1, but which is not directly connected to either). The savegame also now track which versions it has gone through and which bugfix packages have been applied to it.

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See ya next week, I'm gonna get back to work now! :)