Hello everyone, long time no see.
In my personal life, it's been a fairly rough year. Recently I applied to (and obtained) a good job which has resolved a lot of my life stressors, and the resolution of more is in progress. I've been MIA for October largely because I was habituating myself to this new job and getting settled in.
With that habituation period out of the way, I have returned to bring you all more VP!
I'll begin with the elephant in the room that everyone is curious about: how the 4UC integration is going. In short, a substantial amount of work on the new functions is complete, but a substantial amount of work remains to be done. A lot of it is mine to do, so I'll be busy this next month.
My new target is to have all 4UC integration work done by the end of November, and a playable version for everyone at the start of December. December will be reserved for playtesting (and fixing the inevitable bugs), with VP Congress Session #9 following at the start of the new year.
Other stuff:
Development has partially been slowed down because @azum4roll (our 4UC Implementation Czar) has been doing the same garbage cleaning and file reorganization for the (1) Community Patch mod as he did for the (2) Vox Populi mod in the Complete Merge (version 4.0). This work replaces a patchwork system of organization where database code was found every which where with hidden bugs, not to mention higher barriers to entry for modders, with a clear and organized structure for all the changes that the Community Patch makes to VP.
I am exceedingly greatful to him for this, as it has been quite a time investment.
While fewer bugs will be fixed by this compared to the laundry list we fixed with 4.0, it will be very useful for compiling a master changelog later on, it makes it clear both to us and to new modders what the changes are, and crucially, it makes it easier to add in new code - such as many of the new tables and functions needed by 4UC.
This is nearly done for the (1) mod, which completes the work that @balparmak started with the Great Merge (version 2.0).
In addition to this, one cause of crashes in multiplayer (possibly with modpacks in general?) which is difficult to debug occurs when the database is initialized with blank entries. For instance, you might have all the VP resources, and then five NULL entries, and then Even More Resources. If the DLL tries to find information about a NULL entry, and there isn't a check to make sure it isn't NULL, the game will crash, but it's hard to reproduce.
However, it is possible to edit the database from within the DLL (which is initialized after all database entries), so going through the relevant tables and deleting all the NULL entries would make the game more stable and allow for simpler code elsewhere. We're looking at doing this as well.
There's also still bugs to fix. @azum4roll finally caught that one bug where the AI says "please accept my offer of fealty" without actually sending the offer, which makes me very happy.
Looking forward:
I will release a new version shortly. This will probably be the last release of 2UC. It will not include all of the 4UC functions, but it will hopefully include the major code reorganization that azum4roll did to the (1) mod, so that anyone who wants to continue from that point isn't working with a messy file structure.
After we finish the integration of 4UC, there will be another VP Congress session (probably a bulky one as the last session was dedicated to 4UC, and one session has been missed during the development period).
Either before or after that next session, I'm also going to shift my focus away from personally sponsoring a lot of proposals and instead focus on completing the roadmap and working on larger-scale changes to make the project more accessible, such as a master changelog, multiplayer compatibility and cleaning up the repository history.
Once the roadmap is complete, the direction of the project going forward will be more clear to everyone.
In my personal life, it's been a fairly rough year. Recently I applied to (and obtained) a good job which has resolved a lot of my life stressors, and the resolution of more is in progress. I've been MIA for October largely because I was habituating myself to this new job and getting settled in.
With that habituation period out of the way, I have returned to bring you all more VP!
I'll begin with the elephant in the room that everyone is curious about: how the 4UC integration is going. In short, a substantial amount of work on the new functions is complete, but a substantial amount of work remains to be done. A lot of it is mine to do, so I'll be busy this next month.
My new target is to have all 4UC integration work done by the end of November, and a playable version for everyone at the start of December. December will be reserved for playtesting (and fixing the inevitable bugs), with VP Congress Session #9 following at the start of the new year.
Other stuff:
Development has partially been slowed down because @azum4roll (our 4UC Implementation Czar) has been doing the same garbage cleaning and file reorganization for the (1) Community Patch mod as he did for the (2) Vox Populi mod in the Complete Merge (version 4.0). This work replaces a patchwork system of organization where database code was found every which where with hidden bugs, not to mention higher barriers to entry for modders, with a clear and organized structure for all the changes that the Community Patch makes to VP.
I am exceedingly greatful to him for this, as it has been quite a time investment.
While fewer bugs will be fixed by this compared to the laundry list we fixed with 4.0, it will be very useful for compiling a master changelog later on, it makes it clear both to us and to new modders what the changes are, and crucially, it makes it easier to add in new code - such as many of the new tables and functions needed by 4UC.
This is nearly done for the (1) mod, which completes the work that @balparmak started with the Great Merge (version 2.0).
In addition to this, one cause of crashes in multiplayer (possibly with modpacks in general?) which is difficult to debug occurs when the database is initialized with blank entries. For instance, you might have all the VP resources, and then five NULL entries, and then Even More Resources. If the DLL tries to find information about a NULL entry, and there isn't a check to make sure it isn't NULL, the game will crash, but it's hard to reproduce.
However, it is possible to edit the database from within the DLL (which is initialized after all database entries), so going through the relevant tables and deleting all the NULL entries would make the game more stable and allow for simpler code elsewhere. We're looking at doing this as well.
There's also still bugs to fix. @azum4roll finally caught that one bug where the AI says "please accept my offer of fealty" without actually sending the offer, which makes me very happy.
Looking forward:
I will release a new version shortly. This will probably be the last release of 2UC. It will not include all of the 4UC functions, but it will hopefully include the major code reorganization that azum4roll did to the (1) mod, so that anyone who wants to continue from that point isn't working with a messy file structure.
After we finish the integration of 4UC, there will be another VP Congress session (probably a bulky one as the last session was dedicated to 4UC, and one session has been missed during the development period).
Either before or after that next session, I'm also going to shift my focus away from personally sponsoring a lot of proposals and instead focus on completing the roadmap and working on larger-scale changes to make the project more accessible, such as a master changelog, multiplayer compatibility and cleaning up the repository history.
Once the roadmap is complete, the direction of the project going forward will be more clear to everyone.
