What I have been up to lately

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

I got kind of sick of WoW not long after my last post. The token price just started inflating more and more, and while I could probably earn it each month... it just seemed less and less fun. Dragonflight itself kind of very abruptly lost its fun.

After I stopped playing, I ended up getting back to my coding hobby more. Namely, working on CaVE. I have been keeping it up to date with each NSO update, but that's it. After my last post on the topic... well... you see that part at the end? About encouraging people to not just give me silence in return? That... did not happen. Silence is exactly what I got. I really felt  that SEGA Saturn support was going to be well received, breath some new life into CaVE, and make it a more broadly valuable tool.

Nope! No one cared! I waited about a month... and got very depressed with the project thanks to the lack of caring. For that month, I was ready and waiting to jump to fix any bugs reported, and looking forward to trying to expand the feature more. Here I find out... MONTHS later that some people were aware of bugs, but rather than report them... instead they chose to go to dead threads to bash CaVE and bitch and moan that "CaVE is crap" because it has those bugs.

Anyway... I resumed work on CaVE beyond just updating it for every new NSO release. Like a dumbass, I kind of completely forgot how uncaring and entitled the modern community can be... and just started working on major updates and changes to CaVE. I compiled a list of all sorts of changes I wanted to make, and in the end... it was to be a major revamp. I would call it a CaVE 2.0, but I was reserving that version number for another project. So it became CaVE v1.5.

A big part of what I wanted to do with v1.5 early on was... completely re-write some of the oldest code. And take my time to make it good. To that end, I started a completely new project file and was basically writing it from scratch. But really, I would copy over one piece of code at a time, and completely restructure it.

Eventually I got most of the code ported over, and started working on other things. Like... for a long time I have wanted to provide some save management. To allow users to backup and import saves without having to do it manually. And I have wanted for even longer to find a way to properly integrate and manage mods. So I added tabs for both of those.

I also wanted to try making CaVE easier to understand and user anyway I could. Eliminate as much of the FAQ as I can. And a big feature to help do that was to do a better job with the Export Database function that no one used. I want CaVE's primary, if not only intended way for databases to be put on SDCards to be by CaVE itself. This goes along with the Mod and Save stuff. Its all managed and Synced over to your card by CaVE, taking a lot of manual steps out of the equation

I made a ton of cosmetic improvements too. Like streamlining the NSO columns, colorizing them, better organizing and displaying the main menus, adding a Recent Database list for quick access, menu icons, etc. I even improved old options like the Update Database option now being a Change Database Version option, to better align with its purpose. And I have fixed the flawed and broken automatic update feature, but more than that... its improved! It can now download mods too!

Additionally, I added a compatibility rating feature that basically meant to replace the need for the compatibility google sheets. This rating feature uses a database of ratings that have to be premade, but will be displayed right in the app with a 0-5 star rating. At this time, 2 USA lists are completed, SNES and N64, and the other 4 USA lists are ready to be worked on by the community with all the hard stuff done. Simply... selecting a rating value if you know if/how a game runs. Maybe supplying a comment as needed. Heck! This compatibility rating feature also provided an avenue for me to add automatic DTZ downloading and installation for N64!

I went nuts, enhancing everything I could about CaVE! But... as I said... I am a dumbass. I completely forgot that the modern community sucks outside of my Discord. My Discord community itself was/is kind of dead even compared to the low expectations I have of it. But... I tried publically releasing the beta for this insanely revamped new build, and you know what the response was? If you guessed "mostly silence", then you are paying attention.

It took that to remember that... I don't make CaVE for the public community anymore. I make it for the Discord community... and if its no extra effort, I simply don't mind updating the public release. Well, thats how it WAS. Now... I don't even think I care to update the public release even THAT much. I have since repealed the public beta, and gone back to the discord only beta. And with that... CaVE is virtually publicly dead. I am not updating v1.4.6 anymore. And seeing that 1 NSO update has come out since then already, not supported in v1.4.6... its only going to get more and more out of date. I just do not care about placating to people that are so entitled as to not even provide basic feedback anymore. The type that want EVERYTHING, want it immediately, want it to be extremely easy, and don't want to lift a finger for it.

So that's where CaVE is at now. A huge revamp with nice new features. I even fixed the ZebraEngine support issues now that I am actually made aware of them. But its all for the people who show they care the most.

I will probably take a couple steps back now. I will continue to fix bugs in the beta as I am made aware. And I will continue to update the databases with every NSO release. But... I'm thinking that I need to look for a new project of some sort. What? I'm not sure yet.