[Housekeeping] one more existence log for the road (Patreon)

as ever, the usual, for patrons pledging during august:

• everyone's been added to the credit list, pleas Tell Me if you want a certain name or don't wanna be on there
• supporter accounts hooked up where i could be found, if you're missed, pleas Tell Me
• higher level rewards to call in also please Do Me A Tell, i know one of you is still pending-- i have not forgotten, i promz

--

the existence log continues because this format is still working for me.

8/27

• suffered in music
• more NPC character sprites

8/28

• more suffering in music
• finished NPC character sprites and exported a bunch of GUYS
  (*guys here is a gender neutral term)
• fixed a bug where units would move in the exact opposite direction of where they were told to go, even through walls
  this was a result of the backwards-passability bug i mentioned at the end of the previous post... but... uh.. lol.
• fixed a bug where units would try to attack the furthest-away unit target of the closest
• fixed a bug where units thought the distance between themselves and other units was always 1 even when it was distinctly not 1
• new bug:
• 
• 
• did a lot of bullshit with the above that i frankly don't entirely understand but i fixed it so yay............
• died.

8/29:

• site staff meeting; still dead.
• lookked into switching over from dragonbones to spine; decided everything is stupid.

8/30:

• playtest!
• wrote down a lot of bugs, including some concerns about RAM usage. starlight's engine basically runs in a glorified chrome window, and we all know how chrome is......
• 
• 
• 
• fixed an AI pathfinding bug caused by player units blocking the only path to the unit that the AI really wanted to kill
• fixed a bug where the AI would forget to control reinforcements that spawned in the middle of their turn, thus softlocking the game
• fixed some dumb event stuff from the playtest

8/31:

• made some fixes to our last WIP combat model
• fixed NPC graphics switching back to the placeholder during movement......
• added a system to track and maintain up to 26 in-combat dialogues per character so they dont repeat and stuff
  why yes that is way more than we will ever need
• fixed a bug with Tooth and Buckle where glasya would get an extra turn when joining with Lynnoe
• fixed layering issue in combat where block glows would show above or below certain things incorrectly
• track blocks now consider trailing parries when limiting themselves to a max length
• fixed a bug where attacks wouldn't animate every other time
• additionally, marcello has finalized a system to skip through event movement with a button tap.

9/1:

• finished demo chapter song premaster
• finished expressions for nova and sephany

9/2:

• finished expressions for glasya, veivax and the alcnemintx class
• also, marcello added a feature to pause enemy turns and such, since we found it was sorely missing.

9/3:

• exported a bunch of message models to size them relatively to each other and generally look a bit better proportional to the game screen 
• died

9/4:

• finished mastering the main demo chapter music 
• tested adding expressions into the game to see if i needed to write a character preloader
• needed to write a character preloader 
• looked at our existing preloader plugin to see how to write a character preloader
• found that the preloader plugin was preloading the same graphic 500 times.
• found a newer, better version of the plugin that is actually in english instead of japanese
• plugin broken by new version of RMMV.
• found an even newer, betterer updateder version of the plugin
• plugin unfinished cuz creator dropped off the face of the planet, nonfunctional
• found bandaid for plugin
• discovered that this is an option and was outraged because why would anyone ever want to do that 
• 
• tested preloader
• found it did this to our save screen:
• 
• it also crashed the game in multiple places by hijacking the base level bitmap loading function
• fixed crashes by adjusting for case-sensitivity
• discovered that the reason the above images weren't loading
  is because the preloader hijacked the bitmap method
  which means it's slower when not preloaded
  meaning the above doesn't work because the preloader
  wasn't
  actually
  preloading them
  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
• realized it also broke our map:
• 
• ...but it still kinda looks cool:
• 
• fixed it
• added per-map character preloader to new preload plugin

9/5:

• added all currently-finished expressions into game
• fixed a bug where attack animations were not playing from counter attacks
• fixed a bug where counterattacks would break the game
• realized that the preloader actually significantly sped up transitions out of combat!!!!
• but it broke blitting.
• started a blitting shaming counter. currently at a very generous and respectful 3. but it feels more like 300.
• fixed the blitting crash
• realized that, once not crashing, the preloader fixed the blitting issues we were having before !!!!!!!!!!
• 
• offended cass by the above sequence of emojis and insisting that it was, in fact, "poggers, bro"
• she then proceeded to renact the Life Alert commercials by falling on the floor and being unable to get up
• asked if we could just please get "one little pog?"
• did not receive one little pog :[
• realized the fog was broken too, and fixed it, but its ok cuz i expected that one 
• started working on some heaven-side tiles
• another playtest
• much better this time, but still a lot of errors, fixed the smaller ones already

so, for that final playtest i noted the in-game playtime clocked in at about 50 minutes. there are still some scenes i need to add to the end of the demo, so it'll be a little bit longer, but an hour is about what i've been shooting for, so i feel like i am close enough to target to be happy with that.

what i am not happy with is the crashes.
most crashes i got during the test were just missing files from dropping expressions in. easy fix.
some of them were crash-to-desktops.
that is ultra-concerning to me because it crashes my debugger too, and i have not been able to replicate them despite getting them a couple times which means i have very little information.
basically, i am full of Dread.
we will need to work that out somehow, and it will suck. 

once we can do that, we might be in really good shape.
there is one combat model unfinished. we're missing some overworld sprites + animations. i'd like to do a few more songs. i've got tiles to make for end-of-chapter scenes. and there's a lot of polish and programming and fixing still to do.
but fuck, we have a game. 

meanwhile in reborn, our latest recruit, toothpastefairy, has just completely a n i h i l a t e d  our bug list. you know the list of known bugs that's been hanging around since like, E17? and stacking up more and more? yeah?? fuckin' dead.
like, not 100%  but
everything that matters is dead and then some
perry is crazy, everyone appreciate him ok? thx
so anyway i'm stealing him for starlight too.
stealing him from myself.
still stealing? whatever.
its nyoomtime y'all 

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so streams lately have been really quiet so in this next month rather than doing twitch-like set ups scheduled in advance, i'm just gonna see about hanging out in the discord server calls more and streaming spontaneously when i'm able to. we'll see how that works. probably won't have camera on for it all the time, but it might work out better to just hang and let people pop in and out as we please.

and maybe we'll try the other way again in the future, but for now let's see how this goes...
thinkin' bout anime club too.........

as always, thank you all so much for hanging around through this looooooooooong downtime and being patient with me <3