Heyo. I wanted to make this post a long, long time ago but it got delayed a bunch and, well... better late than never, right?
I know I'm not a pivotal member in any hacking scene and I don't even consider myself a proper dev (in fact, I mostly call myself a "sunday coder") but there's been a bit of radio silence on my part and at least a couple of people already asked myself the status of something I had in the works, plus I also posted something about another project a while back while not giving any further updates on it, so that's why I'm making this post here. Hopefully it'll explain a bit what's going on and what to expect!
I'm going to start with Snickerstream because it's by far my most popular project I've ever done. Truth be told... I kinda wanted to get a long break, work on something else and then come back to it. I know it may be a bit disappointing if you were expecting an update but if that's so then let me ask you to step into my shoes for a bit here: while it's true I usually take a break between updates and all, I've been maintaining Snickerstream for more than year now – even longer if you consider its PoC days (Jan 2017!) - and at some point maintaining it became more of a chore rather than something fun to do in my free time. Not just that, but honestly its NTR back end is feature complete now (except for a few old pieces of code that make me shudder when I look back at them but they don't really impact performance) and the HzMod one does have a few quirks but it's usually fine for general usage (for example it has no TARGA support, but while you could say "some FPS is better than no FPS", games requiring it won't go over 5-8 FPS even on a n3DS anyways, so not only it's a bit of a pain to get it working fine but it probably won't be used for any serious streaming unless it's your only choice). So I really wanted to do something else for a change then eventually come back to it later on.
...Aaand that something I ended up doing is the LovePotion Mode 7-like renderer I had briefly shown some months ago in a short YouTube video (link here if you haven't seen it). I hoped to use it for a game I had in mind for the Homebrew Bounty, an F-Zero clone of some sort, but the truth is a lot has happened in the past few months for me, both IRL and not. Most of it has been positive, mind you, for example I'm a Contributor here now and I'm trying to do my best to write homebrew news for the 'temp which is nothing short of awesome, but in a nutshell I don't have as much free time as before. There's simply no way I'll be able to complete the game in time for the bounty. I really liked the idea behind it tho and I still want to at least try making it but progress has been really, really slow... and that's why I haven't posted anything about it since.
Anyways, considering the renderer is in a near-usable stage but I won't be able to enter the competition, I thought it'd be a shame to keep it to myself when somebody else could make something good out of it, so I want to try and release it together with a small demo showcasing its capabilities soon™. Some parts of it may not be too polished due to the time constraints I've explained above but I've done the best I could to make it run at 60 FPS with full RAM access on a Switch – which is easier said than done considering it had to be done "the hard way" (no shaders, no 3D effects, a few workarounds for some partially broken functions) due to LovePotion's interpreter limitations. Still, I hope someone will find it cool, or even better, use it for his own project and make something great!
And that's about it for now. TL;DR – It's due to time constraints as well was me wanting to focus on something different than Snickerstream. Anyways, yeah, I hope you understand and I haven't bored you enough with the wall of text! ^^"
I know I'm not a pivotal member in any hacking scene and I don't even consider myself a proper dev (in fact, I mostly call myself a "sunday coder") but there's been a bit of radio silence on my part and at least a couple of people already asked myself the status of something I had in the works, plus I also posted something about another project a while back while not giving any further updates on it, so that's why I'm making this post here. Hopefully it'll explain a bit what's going on and what to expect!
I'm going to start with Snickerstream because it's by far my most popular project I've ever done. Truth be told... I kinda wanted to get a long break, work on something else and then come back to it. I know it may be a bit disappointing if you were expecting an update but if that's so then let me ask you to step into my shoes for a bit here: while it's true I usually take a break between updates and all, I've been maintaining Snickerstream for more than year now – even longer if you consider its PoC days (Jan 2017!) - and at some point maintaining it became more of a chore rather than something fun to do in my free time. Not just that, but honestly its NTR back end is feature complete now (except for a few old pieces of code that make me shudder when I look back at them but they don't really impact performance) and the HzMod one does have a few quirks but it's usually fine for general usage (for example it has no TARGA support, but while you could say "some FPS is better than no FPS", games requiring it won't go over 5-8 FPS even on a n3DS anyways, so not only it's a bit of a pain to get it working fine but it probably won't be used for any serious streaming unless it's your only choice). So I really wanted to do something else for a change then eventually come back to it later on.
...Aaand that something I ended up doing is the LovePotion Mode 7-like renderer I had briefly shown some months ago in a short YouTube video (link here if you haven't seen it). I hoped to use it for a game I had in mind for the Homebrew Bounty, an F-Zero clone of some sort, but the truth is a lot has happened in the past few months for me, both IRL and not. Most of it has been positive, mind you, for example I'm a Contributor here now and I'm trying to do my best to write homebrew news for the 'temp which is nothing short of awesome, but in a nutshell I don't have as much free time as before. There's simply no way I'll be able to complete the game in time for the bounty. I really liked the idea behind it tho and I still want to at least try making it but progress has been really, really slow... and that's why I haven't posted anything about it since.
Anyways, considering the renderer is in a near-usable stage but I won't be able to enter the competition, I thought it'd be a shame to keep it to myself when somebody else could make something good out of it, so I want to try and release it together with a small demo showcasing its capabilities soon™. Some parts of it may not be too polished due to the time constraints I've explained above but I've done the best I could to make it run at 60 FPS with full RAM access on a Switch – which is easier said than done considering it had to be done "the hard way" (no shaders, no 3D effects, a few workarounds for some partially broken functions) due to LovePotion's interpreter limitations. Still, I hope someone will find it cool, or even better, use it for his own project and make something great!
And that's about it for now. TL;DR – It's due to time constraints as well was me wanting to focus on something different than Snickerstream. Anyways, yeah, I hope you understand and I haven't bored you enough with the wall of text! ^^"
