websites, like spines, are meant to be broken (Patreon)

why is the website broken
it tells me i have an unread message
i click my messages
i do not have an unread message
i get a message
i read the message
i respond to the message
it tells me i have two unread messages
i click my messages
i do not have any unread messages.
is this simply my fate
to stare longingly at my inbox notifications
which have themselves determined i am blind
ignorant of their treasures
i have four unread messages
they are lies and i have read every one of them
but now it is eight. soon, sixteen.
not one of them is real
by thirty two unread notifications i will resign
no longer will i waste the bandwidth of
myself, my ISP, and every patreon engineer,
to click upon my inbox in hapless expectation
only to be laughed upon by the electrostatic neurons of html uncaring
a paltry fool who does not believe her own eyes,
when two hundred and twenty seven notifications
are impolitely thrust upon my deskspace
tired printer papers flippering every which way
of whichonly a half dozen of them truly unread
real, heartfelt messages begging to reach me
me, who was defeated long ago
rent deaf to their voices, forever
ignorant of their treasures glowing within
why is the website broken, i will wonder
when it is i who was broken by it

...look i promise this was supposed to be a normal post but the notification is still there and what am i supposed to do about it other than bitch??? nothing

HI remember me i am DEVELOPMENT and DEVELOPMENT is HAPPEN. I wanted this post to be the nice responsible checkpoint where I remind you all what starlight is and why you should maybe continue to care about it please and thank you!!! but now i have spent six minutes crying over this website so it is no longer a clean essay which i could refer people to. so who cares! let's just have another post of jumping right into development bullshit without any context whatsoever. maybe i'll even post a big veivax chungus at the end of this for no reason. why not !!!!! 

last time we talked about spine and why the spine bone is important and also better than bones from a dragon.  
kringle christ on a cucumber that was 10 days ago already, fuck, i thought it was 4? no i had my chronomancy post i'm above this now-- i'm better than this--

since then, we have not just achieved legs, we have achieved entire bodies, multiple bodies, the bodies were crunchy and then they were not. i have made the call that we are 100% switching to spine, and told everyone on animations to please spend all of your time remaking all the models from the demo only to realize last night ago that actually we can just import them from the demo after all

so that sounds really bad in context and maybe it is but also i made the call to switch to spine a week ago under the pretense that even if we had to redo everything, it would still save us work in the long run. ...so now that we don't have to redo everything, we are suddenly in much better shape than i expected!!! this is very good thing! 

you might be wondering, why did i not think that we could import them? well it turns out that spine and dragonbones are both very functional programs, dragonbones has the moral highground in being able to export to a spine data format 3.3! very cool! but it is broken and if you pack the texture it breaks! and if you do not pack the texture, it breaks harder! fortunately, spine has a texture-unpacker so we pack the texture in order to directly unpack it but the unpacker doesn't exist exist in version 3.3, and also in order for it to work at all in game it has to be exactly version 3.8 data

• so what we have to do is 
• export to spine 3.3 packing the texture
• load up spine 4.1
• unpack the texture
• revert to spine 3.3 
• import the animation and save it
• switch back to spine 4.1
• load the saved animation to update to 4.1
• and then export it to the game in version 3.8. 

...but it works!!!!

here we have an arbitrary model running in-game through spine rather than dragonbones!

did you know that patreon redid their entire post editor and layout but didn't fix the thing where if you don't wait five seconds after posting an image to embed it instead just deletes the image entirely, shoots you to the top of the page, adds jank whitespace?
why is the website broken, i wonder?

so anyway we still have a lot of clean up to do from the migration, and some of that is not caused by the migration at all but some of these models are oldsville from when I was still first barely learning to use the program and desperately need patching up, plus some other fun stuff we will talk about in the near future! but we now have substantially less work to do there before we can happily jump to new content.

please enjoy this gif of star's model being mid-reconstruction by the ever-diligent smeargle 

five seconds.
that's a mood if i ever saw one.

as for code-side........... ah, let us not talk about the code-side work required to finish integrating spine :)
it is not real :)
just like my message notifications :)

let's talk about other code-side things instead!!! yes

so i dont remember at all if i talked about this near the tail end of the demo development, but one of the things that happened to us is we had to add a preload manager script to the game pretty late in the demo dev cycle. i don't remember why we had to do this, but there was definitely gunpoint involved.

anyway, our new preloader script is nice and all, but because we added it so late none of the rest of the game's system is built around it; it's built around the preloading method that I wrote. That method is Not Good™ ! in part because it was one of the first things written for the game, and in part because it was one of the first things I wrote for the game. those may sound the same, but there is an important distinction which i will not elaborate on!

so that is to say, we need to do some boring backend work to disconnect my stupid bad old preloading script from the game and replace it with the fancy manager plugin. we have a <Super Secret Special Person of Interest ™> now helping us out with that, but more on that in a future post! for now, instead of explaining games, team members and coding concepts responsibly, i am only here to post funny images. 

so what i'm trying to say is, please have this image from us working on making sure we could actually just arbitrarily load any image from the preloader.
specifically, we tried to load it a few hundred(?) times. 

(five seconds. sends you to the top even if you do wait, actually. i thought i just rushed it before.)

why did this happen?

i don't know.

but i do love it.

at this point i'd like to remind you all of this   h o t   m e m e   crim made back in the demo test era:

5s.

okay, that's all the braincells i have for this post, maybe next time i'll manage to write something intelligible. coming up-- what other backend revelations do we have to contend with?, who's design is it anyway?, and hey ame why don't you actually tell us anything about this punk-ass game you're making, huh bitch?

in the mean time, as always, thank you all so much for being here, stay cool, oh right, some of the cool folks on the server have set up a pixelmon server for y'all, if you want in maybe come drop a message and y'all can go make something cool and um oh by the way mods asleep post wide veivax