Another Chapter

     Hello again, it's been a while! A few years actually. I took a break from regularly updating this blog during my time working at Studio369. It was an overall amazing experience and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity; I learned a lot and got to work with a bunch of really talented people. But sadly it seems my time there may in fact be coming to a close. 


    I've picked up Mini Solar System again and have resumed development. In the last two weeks I have upgraded the project to the latest version of the Unreal Engine (5.8.1) and setup a proper fork of the engine with the local changes needed for MSS. It was quite a slow process as I was using a hard drive for the project (I'm running out of storage and the RAM shortage has made new SSDs too expensive right now ;-;), but after shuffling some projects around and getting it on an NVMe development is now faster than ever! 

    I'm resuming development by correcting old mistakes, taking care of TODOs, and updating the codebase with best practices. I've been reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" recently and that has inspired me to take this approach. One of the most egregious mistakes was my flagrant use of GetAllActorsOfClass to find all planets or the like. It was never really a problem in the past as there were never that many objects in the scene, but it still irks me to see it be used unless there is a good reason. I simply fixed these by caching references to the planets (or other objects) when they are created which is something the game mode was already set up to do. There are quite a few instances of such problems and so I'm trying to take care of all that first.


    Between applying for new positions, getting all my ducks in a row, and taking care of myself, development has been rather slow. There's a lot of upkeep work and tech debt as I had mentioned so there will be lots of menial tasks to take care of before I can get around to actively developing the game again. In the future I want to make more gameplay systems for MSS rather than focusing on the simulator aspect. I have some ideas in mind, but I will ruminate on them some more while I tidy up the project before I put those ideas out into the world. 

    I want to continue to update this blog with the development progress and my own learnings as I had in years past. Though I don't know if I can promise the same timely updates as I did before I will try for quality over quantity, while trying to not go too long without an update. :)




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