The sentence you are currently reading is a funny joke that leads into the regularly scheduled 3 month status/technical announcement post.

New Architects (Follow up by Wald Deliglide)

Last status post, we announced that we were seeking new Architects and that we would reach out in a short time span following the announcement. Unfortunately, I (Wald) failed to reach out to our applicants. That is entirely on me, and for that, I apologize.

One of my worries with interviewing and bringing on new applicants is making sure they can successfully contribute to the project in a meaningful way, both for them self and for the project. The balance though is to make sure they wont be stepped on or overwritten by the work that other developers are doing. In small personal projects, there is only ever one developer working on it, which leads to freedom to work on what ever is desired. In larger projects (think 100+ developers working on say Unreal Engine), there are clearer divisions between teams and ownership areas, leading to teams with smaller focuses that can lead to tight working groups between developers. We lie somewhere in the awkward middle, where we have some things that are very easy to split between multiple developers and lead to individual freedom, but some critical areas are too intertwined, making parallelization of development time difficult.

This has been an ongoing area of learning for our team, and we have a lot of room for improvement. In the next coming weeks, we plan to evaluate all existing applicants and any new applicants for a position on the team. The positions will be focused on areas that are independent of other existing work, such as UI and 2D Minigames.

Focus Areas

Last status post, we talked about our current focus areas and what they were holding up. Here is what has changed.

Importing Worlds

Since the last post, we have finished our work on modifying an existing world import tool to work the way we need. This now enables us up to import these worlds and get the lighting and shadow settings setup and corrected. We have already done a sizeable portion of the experimentation and testing required to figure out what exactly we need to do. Attached are some screen shots of the results, and we plan to make a proper comparison demo sometime before or along side the next scheduled announcement.

Jedi Temple

Ryloth Combat Zone

Characters

Characters, and everything related to them, is a key area we need to get right. From movement and animation, to gear equips and everything else, there are a lot of different things the user (you) interacts with. This high interactivity and visibility to the user mandates a lot of effort into getting this right, both for the user's sake and for the development team's sake. And so far, our efforts are paying off. We have made great strides and will continue to work this and improve.

UI Uplift Initiative

Like we mentioned last update, this has been temporarily de-prioritized to focus on other higher priority areas. However, we plan to dedicate some of any new Architects the team accepts to working on this effort. If you are interested in Flash to Unity conversion, or working with the team in any way, see the previous "New Architects" section.

Final Thoughts

Since last update we have definitely made progress in our efforts, though it has not entirely been to the timeline we want. However, on a brighter note, we are at a point where the blockers to parallelization of development are shrinking. The team expects 2025 to be a good year for the Emulator.

January 12, 2025 by Wald Deliglide