March 2023 FBS Update

Greetings Everyone!

We currently have a poll going to name the GearCity FBS "DLC" here:
https://www.ventdev.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=4403 Please vote if you haven't. Polling closes on the 21st, and I hope to have Milestone #1 done shortly after.

I've worked exclusively on the first milestone bounties for the unnamed GearCity FBS DLC for approximately 10 days. Unfortunately, I lost last weekend to family issues. So I couldn't get full-time hours in. I'm hoping to rectify that this week. As of this post, I've completed 4 bounties and have 13 remaining.

I've been bogged down by Bounty #49, "Move to ID System." I expected this bounty to be a doozy, but I discounted it anyway because it was a major flaw with the game engine's design. In some parts of the game, we use text to identify something. For example, When you select sub-components for an engine design, we're using the name of that sub-component to look up the sub-component attributes and values. This is fine when the game was in early development, with limited feature sets, and zero plans to translate the game to any other languages. But the game grew beyond those design parameters.

Anyway, I wasn't expecting how intertangled the Car Type text
identification was with the rest of the game. I just completed that
portion of this bounty last. Now I only have to move the sub-components
from text-based to number-based ID.

There are likely some uncaught bugs because of how intertwined
Car Type's text identification was. So we'll need to be on the eye out
for those and fix them.

Looking at the remaining bounties, unless Emissions or Auto Loan
Financing throws me a curve ball, I should be able to complete
everything by the end of the month or shortly thereafter. I should have the bulk of the bounties done before you all choose a DLC name.

That said, fundraising for milestone #2 continues. This month we raised
$257.81. Combined with our $7.19 carryover from milestone #1, we now
have $265 toward our $3500 goal.

In AeroMogul news, I only touched the code a little since the last
update. I planned on giving my Mondays to AeroMogul. But since I lost my
weekend, so I had to skip AeroMogul for GC FBS this week. I have some
stuff to report, but I will save it for the mid-month update.
Otherwise, it will be sparse on content because of the focus on the FBS
right now.