Hey everyone!

It’s Friday! I’m running 4 days behind but lots of cool stuff to show for it, at least <3

New keys are up in the usual places!

Keys are in your “Library” up at the top, and they have also been emailed to you.

Keys are on their own posts visible on the front page for Skunkfrakker on Subscribestar, and they’re also on the Discord server in the downloads channel that should show up if the bot assigned your role properly. Ask a moderator for help if you’re not automatically assigned a role so they can get me to hit my spreadsheet and set you properly in there.

There’s new stuff on the server, too! New build of Besti 9 now with updated credits, and there are new builds of Equigon for both PC and Oculus Quest on the server, too, with the new credits shooter game.

Under the hood on the credits I wrote new data interpreters that read the spreadsheets I can get from Subscribestar and Gumroad, extract the data needed for the credits, process that data to change people’s names who have requested it, and use that processed data to type names or to make flying targets in the shooter mini-game on Besti X and Equigon. Nifty! All automatic and it takes about 5 minutes to generate a new credits list.

If you want to be hidden or show up as a different name in the credits, send an email to [email protected] with the following info and I’ll fix it up for you! I need:

Some inside-baseball on the Besti X credits system: The shooting aspect is 100% Besti SDK drag-and-drop, but the way I’m generating the characters is pretty neat. I wrote a pixel font interpreter that takes a string, turns it into a bunch of cubes, and makes simplified collision for the cubes. It then uploads the whole thing to the GPU which then processes all of the little pixels. Unity doesn’t really like having thousands of little objects with their own physics, but by making it run inside the GPU instead of on the CPU, there’s hardly any processing at all. Maxed out FPS on the Oculus Quest means it should run at your VSYNC framerate on just about anything. It’s one of the many tiny optimizations that you need to do when making a game, but I’m pretty pleased with how elegantly that’s handled from a technical perspective.

Anyway! New stuff’s up and next week I’m going to do two things:

It’s tax time in the USA and I have to make my stupid packet of data and send it to the government so they don’t feed me to a lion or something. This is a pain in the butt for everyone but I’ve put it off as much as I could so I must do it this week. I guess technically there’s a COVID related extension I could do but I want it over with. It’s been hanging over my head for weeks and it needs to be done.

It will be good though because it will tell me if I can afford to go to Everfree Northwest in a few months. Anyone going? If you are hit me up via email and if there are a few people going we can set up a meetup. I will probably be weirder than normal, because like most people my IRL social interaction has been virtually zero for a year now. I probably won’t be the only one!

That’s it for now thanks for being awesome and go check out the new stuff. More new stuff as soon as I’m done with taxes!

--Skunk <3