[Rewards] an update about reborn that definitely just devolves into ame complaining (Patreon)

hello! it is december, which is a normal month! here, we will do normal month things for patrons pledging in the month of november:

• everyone has been added to the credit list but if you want to make sure you are added under a certain name or no name please let me know
• forum accounts have been updated where possible but if you find your account has not been updated where possible please also let me know 
• messages have been sent out for trainers but if you were missed or want to call in a higher tier reward please also also let me know
• patreon please fix the lag in your typing editor please im begging you

also!!! only a few people have actually submitted battle tower trainer names! friendly reminder that you can toss in another trainer for that even if you already submitted one before! the details for that are in last month's post if you have questions but, really truly, please, we need so many names. feed me.

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hey guys i've only been making starlight posts lately because that's where the world is at, but where is reborn?

as it turns out, still moving forward even though it's been quieter. let's talk direct progress. mapping for the regis' quest is done. mapping for the musketeer's quest is done, courtesy of kanaya. and cass has been out there getting a jump on the genie's quest... bless her soul. bc i sure didn't wanna touch those.

i've got a whole heap of eventing to catch up on and i'm not 100% sure when that's going to happen right now, but it will definitely be eventually. in the meantime, as far as i'm concerned there's no issue with all these maps just pressing on independently. those who have been around for older episodes will remember that i usually map everything in an episode before eventing any of it, so this is just a return to that--- and gosh to the golly is there so much to map in.

one of those things i will be streaming for you. i have small preparation to do before then but that should be sometime this month. 

what else has been done? as it turns out, a whole bunch of fruitless bullshit.

that probably sounds more venomous than it needs to but if you know nothing else about pokemon essentials, know how much we revile it. so, remember our good old friend, lag? you know the guy. so we have invested some effort into trying to cut it down on a wider scale, especially cass has, and we have learned some rather frustrating things.

for instance, we complained about this on the discord server, but we didn't realize before that running the game on a screensize that isn't "M" spikes up the lag quite so much. the reason for this is because it manually resizes each graphic individually using a script from the year 1803. now, one would think that in the almost 200 years since that time someone would have made a suitable replacement, and we looked, but no luck. our only promising lead turned out to be made based on the exact script we're trying to replace. this is probably because RMXP is actually from the stone age, but it still sucks that something that universal and low level makes the problem that much worse.

also, have you noticed how much the game lags when choosing a move in battle-- even though it does so at no other point of the command phase?
so i was looking into that, and to no one's surprise, the reason it lags there is because essentials is actually drawing the move name text on every single frame. it doesn't just draw it and leave it there.
every.
single.
frame.
as fast as it can.
now, i'm no tech expert, but i don't have to be to know that that's some dumb-ass shit.

we haven't fixed it yet, but i did some poking around, and i think we can probably fix that one. so at the least, battles should be a little smoother.

HP bar animation and EXP bar animation has also been sped up. as far as i'm concerned, lag injects enough artificial wait time without us needing to create more.

let's go back to the 'fruitless bullshit' hook, because actually lag was only half of it. 

the other half is the website. if you frequent the forum you may have noticed that we had not one, but two site maintenances this last month, basically back to back. i would love to report that they fixed anything, however i would, in fact, be lying. nothing is fixed and everything is awful.

so the enduring issue we're trying to fix is with the 'Pages' part of the site. now, you might be wondering what that means, which is fair, because 'Pages' is probably the worst possible name to name a web application. imagine trying to google for 'Pages' support. it's just not going to work.
fortunately, the application does have an alternative name. it's 'Content', which, for the same reasons, is the second worst possible name to name a web application.

anyway, Pages' pages' content includes all of the content on pages that aren't the forum. Content organizes content into pages that Pages uses to display content on pages like the forum but make no mistake-- they aren't actually part of the forum pages' content , but part of Pages/Content.

please understand my despair. 

basically it's stuff like the dev blog and the download page for the games. users randomly get logged out, comments and reactions are frequently broken there, and also i'm pretty sure there's a log-in issue even on the normal forums being caused by it... it's been broken for months if not years, and while none of it is unmanageable, it is a consistent headache. cass has finally inspired me to tackle it (which i regret, but will do).

the first site maintenance we had was to upgrade the forum to a version which changed nothing for the sole purpose of convincing support to tell us something besides 'go fuck yourself'. the second site maintenance we had was to try the thing that support told us to do instead of 'go fuck yourself', which didn't work and also broke the site horribly. when we put it back and then support that it broke the site horribly, we were, of course, told 'go fuck yourself.'

not actually... but basically.
listen, i'm just upset, ok?

basically, when we last switched servers, i heard about this cool new set-up called NGINX which i've recently been informed is unfortunately not pronounced "in geenks", and it was supposed to be more efficient and better than it's alternative, Apache, wow! "well, since we're building the thing from the ground up anyway, why not use this cool new set-up?" a young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Ame allegedly beamed, condemning herself forever.

and so, i got everything set up and as you know, it was mostly fine until i stuck my nose into it only to be informed that actually support does not know why the site is terribly broken and also they no longer care because we use NGINX instead of Apache and they don't support NGINX, and therefore they are under no obligation to try and figure out what is wrong.
while i understand their position, i'm just a little bit salty that that was at no point indicated to me as i was moving servers. and there is not a way to convert between the two. 

i have been using this forum software service since i was 12. i still believe they are one of the best competitors in the dying forum software market. but i am Very Displeased at the universe right now!! and at their part of it specifically!

so at some point i'll have to go build a whole-ass new server and move everything over and hope it doesn't break everything and be sad when it does, in fact, break everything, and just.
just grr.
is this worth it? probably not.
but you're  worth it. so we're doing it.

(please pretend that makes sense, okay? it's been a long post and i was just trying to be sweet and--
oh
stuff it
bye