State of Piczel 2020

Hello all, this is a bit later than I wanted to do this post, but here goes.

2019 was a big year for piczel - lots of upgrades, feature improvements, and bugfixing.

2020 is shaping up to be even bigger, starting with the big dependency update we just did these past few weeks - we've restructured our code and gotten all our dependencies updated, instead of a few years old. This means it'll be easier going forward to upgrade and improve piczel, which means hopefully faster development.

We've also just switched from our previous streaming server software to our new streaming server software - here's a screenshot of memory usage before and after the changeover - we're now WAY less memory constrained. That means that everything should load faster and feel snappier, especially in combination with the updated frontend.

Currently, most bugs with all the new stuff should be fixed! Please let us know if you find any.

We also had a bit of a sprint to deploy some chat upgrades to help protect our streamers - voice-only chat and a still-WIP slow mode for chats. If anyone has trouble with spammers, please get in touch, but we have some pretty good tools for dealing with them now.

Coming up, we're planning to finish some backend refactoring, and start work on a brand new chat, both server and web client, which will integrate more naturally with our stream page, and hopefully be a bit more customizable, which will lead to some long-requested features (polls, better raffle UI, more admin tools, etc) and better performance on mobile.

I've got a poll for everyone that I will put up separately, so please check that, I'm going to try and do more polling of patrons this year, now that we've paid off our tech debt.

As always thank you for the support! We're happy to host you on piczel and hope you have fun streaming.