2023 September Update!

Greetings Everyone! 

We have funded Feature Bounty Milestone #2!

We raised $461.21 last month, resulting in $3585.25 in funds. This is above our $3500 milestone goal! 

I've already processed assigning your voting points to your account. I'll set up the caucusing page in the next couple of days, along with a news post. And you'll receive an email when voting begins. Milestone #2 will focus on our new vehicle designer. You'll vote on which new vehicle type we add to the game or which existing vehicle type we upgrade to the new system. Milestone funds will go to paying for the upgraded artwork. I will be doing the programming for the new designer for free.

The two biggest complaints with GearCity are the UI and the dated/poor graphics. I created the FBS primarily to upgrade both of these systems. The former takes much time to fix, and the latter costs money.

Knowing that many of you are hardcore users who do not care about the graphics (the primary objectives of the FBS), I've decided that Milestone #3 will have a $2000 milestone goal. This means it will only consist of new features because there won't be enough funds to purchase more car artwork. And we'll also be able to raise that amount faster. We will then alternate between artwork bounties on even milestones and features on odd milestones. Until then, we're raising enough money to justify doing both simultaneously as planned. If we kept features and artwork combined, as was the original plan, we would have fewer features and a longer time between updates.  

GearCity

I released a bug fix patch and several hotfixes last month. There are still a few remaining bugs, but these fixes will be in the v2.2.0.0 update. 

AeroMogul

Work on AeroMogul for August was sporadic. Both life and technical issues slowed down progress. Most of the work went into displaying route information and results in the game. However, this exposed some technical and logical problems with our route processing code, which meant a refactoring of that. With some additional formulas within this code, we've sadly dropped from ~5-second turn times to 21 seconds in worse-case testing. But I'll be doing more work to improve that.   

As always, I expect work on GearCity FBS to significantly slow down progress on AeroMogul over the next month or so.

Miscellaneous

As mentioned in the last GearCity: 2nd Gear release notes, I had a medical procedure done in the middle of August, along with the issues described above, which resulted in the cancelation of the AeroMogul progress report. More recently, Hurricane Idalia made land at the former VENT HQ. While this did not directly impact me, it did indirectly impact progress because now I have part of my extended family occupying my office room. Hence the slight delay for this post and the start of voting. 

Summary

Milestone #2 is funded. I will do a news post and a caucusing thread sometime in the next 72 hours. Voting will start toward the end of the week. I will send an email and make a notification post to announce it.