patreon im BEGGING you please add a dark mode (Patreon)

i am on my hands and knees
orz'ing AND OTL'ing
i will be blind by thirty and it is patreon's fault

hi guys welcome to my let's play of what the fuck am i doing. it's 3 in the morning, actually it's only midnight but this is gonna be another one of them stream of consciousness posts that makes y'all question my mental wellbeing, which is fair, and it feels a lot more justified to do that after saying it's 3 am when i woke up at noon as opposed to saying it's midnight even though i woke up at 9
so just pretend, ok?

anyway look im not trying to leave y'all hanging but in trying this whole thing where i'm focusing on the journey not the destination i am finding that i have to try to not think about the destination
like i have this entire roadmap planned out that i've posted here and i could probably update y'all on that and say we are HERE (only the HERE dot exists in four dimensions at once) like i have been for the past uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
&#%$ ##### error: unit_of_time not found ###### $@#%
but i dont even want to mentally put myself in that space right now 

what i'm doing lately is just opening the game and deciding what to do based on what i see there
instead of opening a to-do list and deciding what to do based on what hasn't been checked off yet

i have a very strong preference for the former for a lot of reasons that i'm reconnecting with
part of me almost regrets bringing in the scoreboard as a progress tracker to the community

like honestly that was just something i started doing for fun. i don't know if they still do it but back in the hay-day of 2005 when forums were the coolest hottest thing on the internet, that was what a bunch of folks in the rpg maker community did-- you have your personal game and you just make up text-formatted percentage lines in your signature at the end of every post as if anybody cared about it. so at some point i remembered it and people were asking how development was a lot so i was like sure let's carry that forwar.

and i know i say that cynically, about people not caring about those signatures-- i'm sure there were some people who cared. but i was very active there back then and was pretty aware of the games that most people did care about... and from what i recall, it usually wasn't the ones from the people who had scoreboards in their signatures.

for a long time i didn't really think anything of it, but now i get the feeling that perhaps it's not a coincidence. maybe taking that kind of attitude just doesn't work.

anyway i don't know if i have a point here, this is just the next entry in the chapter of me rambling about trying to shift my attitude to something that's gonna be healthier in the long run and also probably better in every other way

hope y'all are enjoying the long scenic route we're taking

anyway welcome back to development, so lately my experience opening the game and dealing with what i see has involved trying to identify what i need to work on next, and then finding a bug instead, and then i try to test that bug i find two others in the process and it goes on and on and on until the break of dawn

^ this is about starlight but honestly it's been the same for the folks who are focusing more on reborn with all our changes lately. maybe that'll be a separate post, idk.

anyway my feeling is that basically every single thing that worked in the test map actually secretly breaks when i try and run it in the real map.
frustrating.

so, let's take this weekend's example. i try to play through a small segment of the battle, and i notice that uhh the first thing is critical hits are landing before i get a chance to dodge them. that's an issue. so i try and test that but in the process of testing that i notice that my attacks are occasionally not going through, and also that the enemies are attacking through parries too early, and so i try to test that and notice that the player can't actually parry anymore, and so i try to test that and notice that actually everything is crumbling to pieces around me forever

to skip forward to modern day, i found that ^ all of those issues are fake except for the last one, which was because of a change i made when adding information to the combat UI. that one was super easy to fix,
but the rest
took, what, three days?

at first i thought something was just wrong with the math that does its best to match up combat animations with the actual hit block players have to hit. so i spent an evening diddling around like that and there was a lot of frustration because no matter what i did nothing seemed to be adding up even though it had definitely worked at one point

but what i discovered was
actually nothing ever worked at any point

the combat system is built like this:
- stuff is happening on the game screen
- and then the game tells the combat animations to do something while it keeps doing stuff
- and then the combat animations tell the game when they're done doing the thing

the problem here is that it was built around the assumption that both the Stuff and the combat animations would be running at the same speed.
i had no reason to think they wouldn't. indeed, under normal circumstances, they would.
but then there is l a g. 

i've known for a while that the combat system just falls to pieces when it lags too much. what i didnt know was that it actually didn't fall to pieces as hard as i thought, because it turns out the combat system was actually secretly lagging all the time, and i just didnt know it because of a completely unrelated bug that made things actually work even despite the lag. that doesn't sound like much of a bug-- but the problem was that it made things not work when there was no lag.

basically, that bug and the lag were in a Secret Partnership to Do Evil Unto The Game all the while hiding each others' misdeeds.
(what was bug??? some information i expected to be reset between attacks wasn't being reset)

needless to say i was furious and did very little else besides stream and throw myself at this issue until it was fixed. 

there were three goals:
1- fix the lag.
2- fix the bug.
3- fix the combat system so that what transpired here can never transpire again.

the first was the reason it took so long at all. i have done stress tests which show the system is more than capable of running an approximate fuckload of armatures at once, so why do the armatures seem to be causing lag even when combat is paused???

if you have paid close attention for a long time-- firstly, ily-- you  may remember a long time ago i made a post about jimmying together rpg maker's animation system with this dragonbones plugin and an entirely unrelated third plugin that made animations work on pictures. 

turns out i did not do this very well-- or at least not well enough. cass and the gang have done a lot of optimization for reborn lately and so i've learned about a lot of that secondhand. fixing the bulk of the lag was super easy-- just add a conditional so this hacked plugin only updates when it's needed. 

that took the combat from ~35 fps to 60. e z gainz.

...until someone lands an attack. landing an attack then drops the FPS 12 points. and another 12 back down to the 35 if the other battler does it later too. 

so i bang my head against that for a day and a half until cass had a moment to sit down with me and take a look at it too.
from all her adventures through essentials' wasteland of jerry-rigged code, she is Strong. she is Too Powerful and Must Be Feared. i rubbed my face all over the code for a day and a half, having written most of it,
and this queen just comes in and within ten minutes identifies the problem and i've got it fixed in five minutes later.
we stan cass

(what was the lag problem?? turns out having no tint applied to the combatant is still something the game wanted to process as a color for a combatant, so it was doing a lot of work to produce no color at all)

60 fps combat. thank u. 

once it was smooth, fixing the bug was easy.

and once the bug was fixed, i proceeded to delete any chance of it ever happening again. 

instead of 

- stuff is happening on the game screen
- and then the game tells the combat animations to do something while it keeps doing stuff
- and then the combat animations tell the game when they're done doing the thing 

the game screen now manages everything itself.
this does mean that the combat animations will desync if the game is lagging-- and im sure it will be run on some potatoes out there. so although it may look visually funky, at least it won't actually break what actually happens in the sequence of events anymore. 

it has been a fuckfest, but it is much better now. 

i was gonna say some more stuff in closing else but i've been reminded i said i was gonna go make tacos after i made this post like an hour ago
taco 'bout a long post....................................

im outt.