SBQ going forwards

Hopefully this is the last week of 2.8 being stuck getting bugfixed and everything, it feels very stable, and the stuff that was reported today was so much more minor than last week

2.7 is then going to be released to the public for free after receiving a few small bugfixes of its own

So, I'm sure many of you are aware of the Starbound source code being leaked a while ago, and *that* means big things. But it also means that, I likely will not be holding any feature poll until I get a handle on things, I do want to do a feature poll of some sort, since that hasn't happened in months due to the winner of last one being the NPC hunting, which took months to get working, and another few months to debug, I think its been around half a year now.

Next version is going to be 3.0 if you understand why number versioning is like that, its because the mod is going to undergo another major rewrite, the main reason being that we have the source code, and will finally be able to do shit that the game has denied us for so long, and I'll be able to get rid of many of the jank workarounds I've had to do to achieve some things but end up killing performance, because theres just no better way to do it, main example of this is anim overrides having to work as it does with the weapons then animating all janky and such.

So, the roadmap going forwards, since no modloader of any sort load stuff that can override engine functions has popped up at all, I'm going to have to figure that out myself, after I make such a thing, the better modloader patch for SB will be distributed open source and for free, because thats just something everyone on the whole is going to need. Said loader I am going to try and make a version for all three major operating systems if I can, otherwise I am going to target the windows version, I currently own a Mac, and thanks to all the new patrons this month, particularly those that subbed annually, I got enough extra funds saved up to finish buying the rest of the components I needed to build my PC, wouldn't be able to do this all without you!

After the new loader is done, I'm going to first start with making Anim Overrides not be a stupid workaround via a status effect that redraws everything after making the normal sprites invisible, and just, actually replace the existing engine functions that are used to draw a humanoid entity like the players and NPCs, this will reduce a lot of the lag by a HUGE amount since the game won't be wasting time doing stuff the first time using fast compiled C++ code, and then me having my status effect do it again but with my extra anims in slower lua code, as well as adding some functions to actually let a humanoid change their species or customization data after they exist, it will still mainly just be a library that the actual SBQ mod uses, so it'll be distributed for free too

And then the last part of the roadmap, is doing a major rewrite of SBQ itself to take advantage of the prospective new loader and anim overrides and being able to overwrite stuff in the engine, for those unaware of how SBQ currently functions, its a lot of workaround bullshit, the transformations, those are vehicles, eating people while you're in your normal player state, thats an invisible vehicle that is constantly following its respective player. Having to do it that way, is honestly stupid, I don't want it to work like that, so once I can actually modify the engine code handling humanoid entities, I can just make everything I needed from the vehicles just be an inherent part of the humanoid entity itself, and then also, lag will be reduced by a HUGE degree because I won't have be be having entities sending messages back and forth with clumps of data telling each other what to do since, its just all going to be part of the same entity, with different states of being, and then I also won't have as much lag because the main update loop of the entity, as it isn't going to have to constantly check if a setting changed or anything, it'll all be self contained in the same entity, so I'll be able to just have the stuff that needs to run when a setting changes run when it changes

I could go on and on about all the things I'll be able to do when I'll be able to overwrite stuff in the engine that currently doesn't work as I want it to, but the main thing is, there won't be any more lag inducing workaround bullshit, I'll just be able to change parts of the game that don't work as I want to

After everything I need to rewrite for 3.0 is finished, thats when feature polls are going to be held again

Hm