February 2022 update

Hey folks,
Some updates to report.

I will be on a trip to America in March and April, so work and support may be infrequent. I'm planning to use the trip for several different areas, and only one of those is work, so it's not going to be my main focus there.

DarkEdif assembly update

The assembly coder has realized the project was taking way too long for the money he would get, despite all the project requirements being on the freelancer listing. At his request, we ended the contract for no money, despite the months he's spent on it. I double-checked he wanted that, he confirmed it.

So, I have some working assembly code from his work, though. ARM64, notably, which is used in most modern phones, seems to work on both Android and iOS. I think some other platforms and codes also work.

I'm hesitant about implementing ARM64, because of genius phones like the Samsung A10s, which have a 64-bit processor (ARM64) working constantly in 32-bit mode (ARMv7) and as a result, the assembly just crashes running the ASM. So if I reimplement, I'll do some careful testing on edge cases like that.

UC Tagging

Work on DarkEdif has added the UC tagging feature. Here's a breakdown on how it works:

Antiviruses generally use a hash or similar feature to see if a file exactly matches known viruses. The smallest difference in a file creates a different hash for it.

The update checker now generates a random code for computers to use, and this is embedded in the Data\Runtime MFX files, changing their hashes.

There's two catches with this:

First catch is because Fusion is generally installed to Program Files, the MFX files have read-only access for regular Windows users. So you need admin permissions to write to them, which means Fusion has to run as admin, or the folder needs to have write permissions for the Users role.
This is why the Manager button does an admin popup when it's installing/updating extensions.

Second catch is every update will have a Runtime MFX that needs its hash changed, so that admin run will need to happen every update.

The UC Fix Tool (download) fixes both of these; it allows UC tagging to work across updates by granting Windows Users role Modify perms to any Fusion folder's Data\Runtime it finds in the registry - whether they're Steam, standalone, Dev or Standard, Fusion 2.0 or Fusion 2.5.

Lacewing status

Over the last few months, several people have been testing Lacewing Blue, using it in their released products. Here's the current state of play:
• Rare crashes on frame switching in both Android/iOS (they both share Unix code)
• Rare crash in frame switch during logging in iOS - seems to be related to keeping track of how much code points to an object
• Multithreading server gets a detected fatal error during client disconnect in a rare scenario - single-threaded is fine

I will be porting it to HTML5 soon - several sponsors have stepped up. Browser IO games, online chat support, etc., will soon be possible!

Over my trip to America in March-April, I may make Lacewing HTML5 be my focus. I have a ton of JavaScript code for the HTML5 client, but the HTML5 server needs WebSockets to communicate with it.

I'm also halfway through a revamp of DarkSocket, adding Unicode support and removing all the "I didn't know what I was doing" practices that a much younger me did. As an example, younger me wrote code that expected Fusion runtime to pass both Unicode and ANSI text pointers. The new version allows UTF-16, UTF-8, ANSI, etc. messages, converted as appropriate. There's other fixes like 64-bit integers, but I'll update more when I'm releasing it.

Thanks as always for your support and patronage, folks!

Cheers,
~Phi