19.5 (Patreon)

Let me start by reiterating: No, there is no new content. 

If you are unfamiliar with development or programming, you might wonder why I am pushing a release with no real content for testing. Let's consider:

Say we have a game, such as this one. We know it works, and then we add Feature X to it.
We can then test and see if the game broke.
If the game did break, we know it was because of the addition of Feature X. 

Now say, instead, we add Feature X, and also Feature Y, and also Feature Z all before testing again.
We then test and see that the game broke.
We now do not know if it is because of X, Y, or Z, or a crossover of X and Y, or X and Z, Y and Z, or all three at once.

Although it is not reflected on the surface, the hard-working folks behind the scenes have crammed in a whole alphabet since e19 released. It is not going to be reflected in the content, but they've done approximately a fucktonne. The changes they've made are to make it much easier for games like Rejuv and Deso to continue making progress, as well as making handling scripts easier and more flexible. 

One example is the removal of PBS files. Those experienced with modding may know that PBS files are what holds all the 'data' of moves, mons, and so on. The team has taken these, tossed them in the garbage bin, and reworked all of that to be in scripts directly. This decreases load times in-game, and is easier for us to work with development-side. That data will be somewhat less accessible to people who are unfamiliar with programming (which is why Essentials made these files), but we deemed the trade off worth it.

Because of that change, old save files will need to be converted. This will happen automatically on load. If you are familiar with some of the jank that happened with Rejuv 13.5's save conversion, know that we do NOT expect similar turbulence here; that was Rejuv-specific.

Anyway, the goal of this version is just to get a stable pipeline of version updates out to you all so that we can, with your help, test the addition of features and changes in perpetuity. This is both a nice treat for you all to be able to play early updates when they do come, and it will also be helpful to us. 

We are going to start today with just the upper tiers of patrons. Depending on traffic and how borked things are, we'll extend this all the way down to the Level 3 tier. It'll be easiest if everyone on the Discord has access to this. Conversely, you will need Discord to access it.

I am considering, in the near future, something like a Quest Board on the server-- there are often cats that we could use help replicating. I don't know if I have a good reward to those sidequests for you all... but I'm open to ideas. We'll see what shakes out.

For today, here is as much of a changelog as we have:

• The behind-the-scenes scripts have been overhauled
• stardust's NewGame++ mod has been integrated. Thanks, stardust!
• Added some preliminary JoiPlay support
• Added a built-in updater. You can now update from the load menu in-game.
• Improved controller support
• Reorganized the bag and added a Favorite Items feature
• No small amount of bug fixes
• The randomizer is NOT real and can NOT hurt us.

Frankly, if you all want to collect and organize notable changes on the server, that could be helpful to us too! Consider it a starting quest.

I'll make another post when this is fully available to all Discord tier patrons.

This update and process has been largely enabled by Enumag! Big shout out to him for all the work he's done in cross-platform support, bugfixing, automating testing and releases, and many other things. We are going to have a blog post from him in the near future explaining some of his role in that.

In the mean time, I hope you will take this opportunity to play through Reborn again when the testing versions are available to you. I'm excited to offer some small improvements in the future. Thank you all for being here for it <3