Hey everyone
I'm really glad to be feeling well enough again to be able to come back here and partake in what's left of the community. Once the announcement was made, I needed to step back from LT (in fact, from all things code) for a bit, so I hope you all can understand my hiatus. I think I went a full three months without coding, which, if you can believe it, must be the longest stretch in my life since I learned to code! Honestly, though, it was much-needed. I guess one never really comprehends how badly one needs to unwind until after the unwinding is complete.
Anywho, I wanted to say a few things:
Thank You.
Yes, it needs to be said. Thank you to everyone who expressed their understanding, either here or on Kickstarter. I know it wasn't all positive (nor could I possibly ask it to be), but the overwhelming kindness, compassion, genuine human goodness shown to me -- especially in the time immediately following the announcement -- made for what I can truly say was the most cathartic moment of my existence to date. I had failed, I had admitted to it on all levels, I felt absolutely wrecked by guilt and sadness, and yet, instead of the ground opening up beneath me and swallowing me straight into a burning underworld, I was greeted, on the whole, with compassion and understanding. I'm not afraid to admit that I had a good long cry when I saw the messages rolling in. Hundreds of them. I read every one of them, each time feeling the same disbelief that I wasn't being skewered or threatened with lawsuits.
Don't take this as a sign that I don't still feel guilt about not delivering what was promised. I do, and I imagine I'll live with it every day until I find a way to repay the debt somewhere down the road.
But seriously, I offer you all the most sincere thank you that I can muster, from the bottom of my heart.
LT Source Code Release - In Progress
Next, I'd like those who are interested in that code release to be aware that I am working on it, now that I've recovered sufficiently to code again! There are a lot of miscellaneous issues to cover before I'll make everything public. As I stated in the KS announcement, it's not a working game (and no, I'm not going to try to fix everything all of the sudden now that I'm in a better place...don't worry...). That being said, the engine is actually quite solid, and the way in which we use LuaJIT & the LuaJIT FFI to make zero-overhead calls for blazingly-fast gameplay logic is a pretty sweet technology, if you ask me. Indeed, through the years I think we've all learned that I'm more of a tech/tools/engine developer than a game developer. The good news is that the technologies I assembled over the years are, in my opinion, the right ones to have made LT possible. If only I could go back six years and enlighten myself...if only
My point with all this is that, although I don't think the source release is going to enable anyone to carry on with LT, I do actually think the engine could be used by those who are interested in playing with game development, visualization, etc. through the extremely convenient (and performant) LJ + C Engine paradigm. Maybe I'm getting too ambitious here, but it could be really neat to even see people making little games/demos/procedural things and sharing their scripts here I know we have an abnormally-high level of programmer & creative talent lurking around here! There really is quite a lot of fun stuff you can do easily with everything we've developed over the years.
So, my priority right now with respect to the LT source release is to focus on packaging up the engine, tying up loose ends (of which there honestly aren't many), making sure it's easy to build, and providing a few minimal examples of how to get something up-and-running with it. I will still, of course, be releasing "LT," which is really just a bunch of Lua scripts sitting atop the engine (and a few assets), but again, that code is likely only useful insofar as the curious can peek at how we approached various problems.
Oh, and I will try to include a simple, bare-bones nebula generator/viewer script example since that seems to be such a popular request
I don't have a timeline for this release just yet, but I'll keep you all posted here and on KS. I'll likely roll it out in parts, with the easiest-to-prepare pieces coming out first. I'm also not going to go back to working 12-hour days. But I did want to reassure those who are actually interested in it that I've not changed my plans regarding a full release. Releasing failed code is a wonderfully low-anxiety task compared to releasing ambitious space simulation games, so I think I can actually handle this one
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Thanks for reading, thanks again for being the wonderful community that you all are, and I'll report back as I make headway on the release!
Post
Fri Feb 22, 2019 6:22 pm
#241
Re: The End
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford