MirceaKitsune
patreon
January status update
🕑 Added 2019-01-17 14:02:18 +0000 UTCMy god the time has passed; I wanted to post a status update right after the new year, but found myself getting around to it halfway through the month. It's so late to say happy new year but I guess it will have to do.
I should first apologize for the lack of activity this month and potentially the next one. I'm still working on stuff but right now it hasn't been easy to spend time on posting updates as well. I'm aware some of you might have gotten tired of hearing this excuse, but at this stage my depression is worsening to the point where I struggle to want to work on anything any more, which I have to as that's my promise for Patreon plus I want to see stuff I've put months of my life into finished.
My recent attitude partly comes from an issue in Europe which I'm sure most of you heard of by now: An insane proposal known as the copyright directive, commonly referred to as ACTA2 and known for its disastrous Article 11 and Article 13. If passed in its current (near final) form, it would force websites to install Orwellian automated filters that monitor and block everything you upload in the name of stopping copyright infringement, which would be a disaster not only for users but also a gruesome case of government interfering into tech and ultimately a threat the very infrastructure of the web... even SOPA / PIPA were babies by comparison. The good news is that the proposal is so bad and unworkable, even its supporters are slowly turning on it now, but it remains to be seen how much of it can be stopped. In two days we have protests planned across Europe against the directive, and I'll be attending the one in Bucharest where I live. Rest assured, this rise of authoritarianism worldwide is literally making me feel threatened at every step... last night I actually had nightmares about governments proposing tyrannical laws to disconnect us from the internet, only calmed down after I fully woke up from it. Thank you humanity for being pure evil and all the unnecessary harm you've done to countless people out of sheer stupidity... except not and screw you and your whole stupid society.
On top of that I'm increasingly having to deal with nearly surreal levels of activity among groups and people I follow. It's gotten to the point where everything I do since I wake up at 3 PM and go to bed at 5 AM is work on things 60% of the time and address everything that's happening around me for 30%. It's like every day I run a marathon where I have to push buttons as fast as possible to get as much as I can done before the hours run out... I manage to get about two hours to breathe when I go AFK to eat and take a bath.
Regarding my projects, not much is new so far: Just working on a bit of everything every few weeks. The only specific update I can give is that I may be picking up Minetest again. That is an open-source engine very similar to Minecraft except written in C++ and with far greater modding capabilities: I've been a contributor long ago and am actually the person who implemented animated 3D models then designed the original player mesh in the project's early days. After one of its key developers died unexpectedly, along with someone else, it became associated with a lot of bad memories so I took a very long break from MT. Years before that I started working on two mods, implementing an advanced NPC system and procedural city generator, with the goal of going past anything that's been done with a voxel engine so far. I may be picking them up after 4 years of inactivity, and am currently in the process of making them more compatible with the updated engine API. If I do anything interesting with those mods, expect updates on my Patreon as with all other projects.
Other than Minetest I've been learning the upcoming Blender 2.80, which compared to 2.79 and prior is an almost entirely different product. The new interface was designed intuitively and by keeping existing users in mind, so I'm having an easy time adapting overall. The new version is highly improved in countless ways and makes the old ones feel ancient, thus I'm hoping it will improve my animation workflow in the future.
As far as Vore Tournament goes, a few bugs introduced by changes in core Xonotic are waiting to be fixed, once I get a hold of the developers on IRC to ask how I should address them. 2.0.1 is scheduled to be released after Xonotic 0.8.3 is, which unfortunately remains unclear as I've yet to ask what the exact date is.
