January '17 Review & February Plans
(
Feb
07
)
Text Summary:
Patreon
earning as of now $466 per month
got my first payment, real money from real people for doing something I love!!
obviously not enough to survive yet
but looks feasible to reach that soon if more people become Patrons!
THANK YOU
- small and big contributions: not only support but imply trust!
The Roads & Traffic Prototype
Well, it's just roads...
- Really liked your reactions
- Amazing to see what people already managed to build
- BSOleader’s hilarious & just slightly tipsy first release review captures really well how experimental this release is and actually contains a couple implicit bug reports
- People reported bugs really diligently, with helpful screenshots or even videos/GIFs
- Made it possible to address some of the most annoying bugs in the 0.1.1 and 0.1.2 releases
- If you had problems with the first release, I encourage you to check those out
Open Source
Scary decision, but blew my mind how much it already paid off in just January
Contributions both on
very concrete things like better camera controls (kingoflolz & Herbstein)
background architectural things like switching to the newest version of Rust and cleaning up rendering code (kingoflolz & martinrlilja)
getting a head-start on long-term strategical issues like: modding
- based on some very active discussions in our new developer chat
- martinrlilja took the initiative and started prototyping a mod architecture and programming its parts
Contributions prove that people already understand my code and are able to provide helpful work, which I didn't expect at this early stage at all
Working in Phases
I decided to work in two alternating phases:
- one month new features
- one month fixing, cleanup & improvements
Decided to use January as the first “cleanup” month
highly simplified the inner simulation core, it ended up more robust, understandable & even faster!
heavily cleaned up the hacked-together mess of road-planning code
- fixed a couple bugs in the process
- made it much easier to fix further bugs and add new features
documented in detail a lot of “building-block” code of Citybound
setup automatic release building, allowing me to quickly and frequently create new releases from the newest code for all three platforms
- will hopefully give you fast access to bugfixes and the latest features
- giving us quick development iteration & a quite large group of testers!
Feature Phase February
Will be about getting rudimentary economy and agents beyond cars going
Dubbed it the “Homes & Businesses Prototype”
Not much more than a Milestone
Actually want to do the initial planning for this Milestone with you
One of the next days I’ll do a planning livestream!
I actually want to try out YouTube Livestreaming for that
- even though it has a slightly higher chat-to-stream delay
- All existing subscribers get notified
- quality options for everyone
- automatically ends up as a video on YouTube for watching it later
I will announce the livestream on YouTube, Reddit, Email and Twitter
Thank you for the wild ride and let me know what you think!