CaVE v1.5 Beta Progress, and a Public Statement

Saturday, August 03, 2024

I know its been a while since I have posted much of substance here. And it's been a while since the public build has been updated. I never intended the Beta to remain private and in development this long, but yet it is.

Why? 

Why did I abandon support for v1.4.6? Why is v1.5 STILL in private development?

I have stated it before, but may as well do so again so people remain up to speed. The original intention was to stop support for v1.4 when v1.5 was publicly released (maintaining 2 separate builds is too much work for me). And that did happen. Some may not have realized, but I did release v1.5 as a PUBLIC beta for a couple days. It was a lot of work, and a massive change... and the reception was absolutely terrible. Utter silence. A issue that has plagued development of CaVE for a while.

It was in response to that that... I wanted to quit work on the project altogether, but came up with a compromise. I decided to pull things back and JUST work on CaVE for those in the community that I feel support me and the project. That being my Discord community.

I made the Beta for the Discord community for some time until I figured out just how absurdly many people I call "leeches" came there just to download CaVE and not contribute in any way to the community. It was the same issue as posting on my site and forums. I was catering to people who actively hurt the project with their actions, or in-actions. So I had to do something. I added a question form to help reduce the leeches. That didn't work enough.

I ended setting up a private access setup. Only people who I gave what I called "Level 1 Access" could download the beta. Those people would largely just be the social community in my Discord, but I also included people who supported me on Paypal.

There were people who wanted to show support with donations, but Paypal was not a option. Patreon was specifically requested, so I opened up one. That slowly grew until I found leeches exploiting loopholes in that too. Thankfully it was addressed soon after.

Patreon soon became the primary method to show me and my projects support. I was overwhelmed with happiness at the amount of support I was seeing, to the point that I felt bad just offering CaVE. So I made the DisplayEx mods. Advanced mods that enhance the features and options of NSO. Something that takes a LOT of extra work to develop and maintain. But for my supporters, I felt it was worth it. I have even been working on a companion tool for DisplayEx, to help make background borders for use with it.

I'm getting a little off topic here, but this is important to preface the answer to the second of those original questions. "Why is v1.5 STILL in private development?". The answer is because... Through Patreon and the private Discord community... my happiness and willingness to work on the project has grown. It has been the best thing to happen to the project in a while, as it shows to me that people care. It's not just a bunch of entitled leeches. It's for these people that I continue to make CaVE at all. My motivation lies with them. How that relates to the question is... I do not have motivation to push for a public release. Who am I making that for, if all the people who show their support are doing so otherwise? I'm sure its not all just entitled leeches... but you should be able to see my perspective that more than plenty are going to be of that group.

This isn't to say that development of CaVE towards a public release is dead. That is definitely not the case. The goal is and has always been to get CaVE to a public release again. It's just the steps needed to get there keep evolving. So I'll go over that now.

The primary focus for me to consider CaVE v1.5 public release worthy is, how stable I think it is. I changed and introduced a LOT in this branch. I took risks on features using types of code I have never done before, as I chased making a better application in the end. Along with that... problems occur. Major ones. A couple I can think of are recent ones I have fixed or at least tried to address. A issue with the process of updating Mods not being intuitive, and a random freeze on the loading screen of NSO. These were/are major issues that I do not want a vast majority of people having to deal with. Another I have not been able to address yet is a issue with migrating databases made with v1.4, over to v1.5. Files and names get desynced and mismatched. xtx.z images simply get renamed to .png, but are not png format, path references to the files use the wrong named, etc. This of course is a major issue too as I expect when v1.5 is release publicly... people will be migrating their v1.4 made databases over.

I have a Issue Tracker with all the known issues. The intention there is to make me aware of an issue, help me to be able to reproduce it, I try to address the issue with a new build, then users report back that the issue is indeed resolved. This process... does not always go like that. Often its just "make DarkAkuma aware of the issue", occasionally "give him a gist on how to reproduce it" that often enough does not help me do so. When I do address a issue with a new build, I am often waiting weeks and months to get a couple confirmations that the fix helped. So much so that I had to make a page tracking such issues waiting for confirmations.

Anyway... As much as I love the support shown with Patreon... there is a issue with it. People just sign up to be able to download the files. That's it. They don't contribute issue reports and help move the beta along towards that public release goal. So even with things in general being more positive with Patreon, its not perfect. Old issues still remain.

Finally... I can't work on this 24/7. I often need to take breaks for a bit. I took a break for several months around the change of the year, but have been working on it as I can the past few months. Lately, CaVE has taken a back seat as I worked very hard on it for over a month strait... and now I am enjoying taking a break from it to work on that new companion tool for DisplayEx.

...

So to sum up... CaVE v1.4 support had to be dropped. I tried replacing it with v1.5, but that didn't work out, and in an effort to save the project from cancellation I decided to focus on the supportive side of the community... with various attempts, now currently landing on Patreon.

CaVE v1.5 is still in development, and it most certainly does still have a goal of being publicly released. Just various issues keep delaying that. Issues being related to bugs, or just my lack of motivation to do so.

I will take this chance to inform you though... When CaVE v1.5 is out of beta and publicly released... It wont be handled the same as it was before. I still plan to put my primary focus on the supportive side of the community. By this I mean... CaVE updates will be released to Patreon supporters first, exclusively. Then publicly after a undetermined delay. In the past I rushed out updates ASAP for the public community, and that often resulted in disappointment. I have no reason to continue that approach anymore. The delay could be as low as 1 week, or as high as one month. I have no idea what it will be yet. I just know that I need something to encourage supportiveness.

If you want to support me on Patreon, the link is available on the left side bar. I encourage you to do so, not because you want to download my projects asap. But because you want for me to continue to work on my projects. THAT is the purpose with all this.

I'll post links here to help be clearer too.

Posted by DarkAkuma
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