Greetings readers! I'm in the middle of overhauling YAB, the FOSS platform I use to publish these blogs, so please bare with me as I bring it back up to speed with my previous HUGO-based blog. Before today's meat and potatos I would like to pat myself on the back with getting Commit #7 out of the door for YAB. This improves a lot of core functionality and will make my future blogging easier. This week I will push an equally as impressive update mostly focusing on the internal posting system allowing for more modular coding and thinking. However, YAB isn't why you're here probably, you want to know about my future Resonite plans!
Nothing. Or close to nothing. I have had a project in the back of my head for the past few months most of my seasoned readers will know something about. In the background I have been working on a educational presentation all about the great American Space Race. You can see some of my progress here. Since Neos kicked the bucket progress has more or less stalled as I got myself busy with other projects.
However now that Resonite is out I had to start thinking about thawing out this project and getting back on track with what I wanted to get done. I spent the past few weeks thinking about this project as a whole and I feel as though I have kind of work myself into a corner. What Resonite as a platform offers is enough to build what I want, however I think the end product of my labor, even if done as efficiently as I could make it, would still suffer from major Resonite-specific issues. Resonite still has major issues like floating-point-errors that happen very, VERY early compared with other games or platforms. (It is seriously bad and considering how little has been done to address this serious issue), severe security vulnerabilities, and regrettably, a community that probably won't be as welcoming to normies who would come just to see my presentations.
It has gotten bad enough with Resonite that I had canceled my Patreon subscription to them entirely. It is at the point that the team's performance is underwhelming compared to what I would expect from dedicated and interested developers. Especially considering the horrible launch. If I alone got $30,000 a month I probably could have produced better results in that single month than what was given by a whole team. That's not to say that I am good or even better than them, by the way :^)
After consideration, and due to me being not as confident in Resonite as I once foolishly was in it's predecessor Neos, I have fully commited to branch out into other platforms as other mediums of presentation. Most of you will remember my post on Overte where I talked about my initial feel for the platform. I plan on creating a Resonite presentation, and porting it over to Overte (or vice versa, what ever I am feeling when it comes time for that part) to see which one I find more fitting for my work. I am currently leaning towards Resonite being a better place for building it and having it exist on, however Overte has the proper infrastructure that gives me confidence in the success of my project. There are so many pros and cons to each of these two platforms that I could not possibly find a way to be concretly happy with pursuing one over the other full time. Some of the key things I look for to host my project is reliability, performance, and efficiency. Resonite provides a lot of in game tools to build everything with, while Overte more requires keyboard and mouse currently to build big and complex projects. However, even with this small hit, I can work on my Overte projects on my Linux machine without having to log out onto Windows to use it. Resonite is very easy to build in and collaborate with, however the performance is borderline unacceptable even for me. Every little hitch with one platform is countered with a response from the other. Resonite is just as good as Overte, Overte is just as good as Resonite, each still has their own strengths over the other. Like I said, very weird position to be in. In order to make the final judgement call I find that the best way to proceeded would to do a full project for both so I can see how the workflow works for both. Hopefully this will be the tie breaker. I must say, while my hopes are not high after being spoiled with such user friendly creation tools in Resonite, I am wishing Overte will be an acceptable victor in this head to head face off. As I already know pretty much all there is to know about Resonite I won't really be needed any extra advanced help from the outside. However since I'm still brand new to Overte, their community support will have to keep up with me if there is any hope of me getting this project off of the ground. (ba-dump-ts)
I always come prepared. In the event that both Resonite and Overte fail to meet my needs and expectations, I have a backup plan. Prism. Prism is going to be what I wish Resonite was. It's currently in the earliest stage you can conceivably be in. It is barely even conceptualized. However with time, it should be everything Resonite is, but more and open. It's also made with GoDot 4! :D This will also depend on how my expeditions into other similar projects go. I very recently found out about BarkVR which is almost identical to what my set up would be. FOSS, built on GoDot, ect. ect. There are a few "Hmmm?"s with it though. They seem to be integrating a lot of third-party which itself isn't bad, they even look, dare I say, important, however this is something I am looking to avoid in my project. BarkVR seems to also have life in it, even if it doesn't move very fast. Looking at released media I don't feel too confident in its direction either. That is not to say BarkVR is bad. I think once it is in a good, solid state, it would already be well ahead of Resonite, it's just not there yet and progress seems to be slow. I will review BarkVR once again after I complete my presentation project on both platforms to see if it is in a better state. If it is not, and both Overte and Resonite fail to meet my expectations, I will be forced to intervene.
Prism is going to be yet-another-Resonite-clone that focuses on all of the qualities I find important. This means that it will be preformant, and efficient. It would also need to be very user friendly and easy to set up. When it comes time to I will write more about it, if it ever needs to be done. I already spend too much time on other projects as it is to also have time to write about hypothetical projects. However if and when it does come time to go all-hands-on-deck, I'll be sure to have a wiki ready. :^)