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Hey everyone, time for another CPE progress update! Just like last week, this will be a quick overview of what we've been doing - we've already talked at length about everything that's going to be in v0.46, so all I really have to update you guys on is how far along we are.
My goal at the moment is just to get this update out before the year ends, and I'm still hopeful we can pull that off, but in the interest of transparency I am getting a little worried about the time crunch. All of the things we're working on for this update are all-or-nothing, so if they aren't done there's nothing I can do to really push the update out faster. I just want to warn you all of that ahead of time so you're aware of it; we're going to continue doing 3-4 streams every week until the update is done, and I'll keep you all updated every step of the way, but it's possible the update might end up being pushed a week or two into 2023. I'm confident we'll have it done very soon, so don't worry about there being a big delay or anything like that, I just don't want to rush out a crappy update with lots of issues if we end up needing just a little bit more time.
With that out of the way, here's the progress report on the 4 major parts of this update:
- The 360 aiming update is around ~85% complete. Mouse support is pretty much functionally complete at this point, with only a handful of animation-related things left, and I started gamepad testing recently. The added complexity of supporting both gamepad AND mouse is making things more difficult than I expected, since the two control schemes work VERY differently (as opposed to keyboard and gamepad, which are both just 'buttons' so they're nearly identical code-wise), but progress is going very well nonetheless.
- The lighting update is basically finished at this point, probably 98%. I didn't work on it too much the last two weeks because there's not much left to do, and because this is the only part of the update that doesn't cause huge issues if it's slightly unfinished; all of the important light sources have been updated, and now it's more a matter of adding NEW light sources and taking advantage of the new features, so this part is close enough to call it pretty much complete.
- The screen size update is at around ~95%. I've done a playtest of the full game, and there are only two major things left to fix: first is some visual issues with fullscreen mode, and second is that some cutscenes have animation problems - mostly, NPCs that are supposed to walk in from offscreen (or walk offscreen) are now spawning/despawning in view of the camera, since there's a lot more horizontal screen space now. None of that will be hard to fix, thankfully, and aside from them, the only other thing is that the menus are all completely broken - but I'm not going to bother fixing that, because..
- The UI rework. This is my next major project, and I'll be starting on it during tomorrow's stream. This is the biggest question mark left for me right now, and the only thing making me uncertain if the update will be done in time; everything else is nearing completion, and would certainly be done by our next biweekly update, but since I haven't started on the UI rework yet it's hard to say how much work this is going to take.
I did consider just fixing the old UI temporarily to get this update out in time, but because of how broken the screen size update made it, it would still be a LOT of work to make the old UI functional again - and it would look like crap with the extra screen space going unused - so it's not really worth fixing that up instead of just biting the bullet and doing the whole rework.
If it was just a simple job of replacing the UI, it might not be too difficult, but this is also an opportunity for me to address some of the serious technical issues the game's menus have. I won't get into the details, it'd be rather boring, but here's one quick example: the Options menu from the Main Menu, and the Options menu accessed from the pause screen while ingame, only share
some code despite being functionally identical - they each have a lot of unique code, purely because there were issues I couldn't figure out a more elegant solution for at the time, so whenever the Options menu is updated or changed, there's a good chance I'll have to do testing and fixes on each version of the menu separately. Suffice it to say that there's a lot of old code from my early days that have been causing problems for a long time, due to my inexperience as a programmer back when I started CPE, so there's a lot of underlying tech debt that needs to be addressed and now is the most logical time to do it.
So, all that is to say that I'm really not sure when this update is coming out. It will depend ENTIRELY on how difficult this UI rework ends up being. I still have almost a full month to get it done, so I think there's still a very good chance v0.46 will be out by the end of the year, but I should have a better idea of our chances by the next biweekly update.
And that's it for me today! Seriously,
thank you so much for how patient you've all been. I know v0.46 is a lot later than anyone was expecting, but thanks to all the work I've done on myself this year, I'm in a healthier mental place than I've EVER been before, I'm genuinely enjoying working on CPE again for the first time in a long time, and I am beyond excited to finally get this update in your hands. This is the single biggest gameplay update CPE has ever had, and during my playtests I'm having so much more fun playing it than ever before, so I can't wait to see what you all think of it!
Thank you for reading! If you want to follow our progress on v0.46 more closely, don't forget to come hang out at the streams (
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and we'll see you again in another two weeks for the next biweekly update!
