Do not worry, guys, I ain't no dead and I'm not forgetting you.
I will be updating the MF and EMF patches as soon as I can. But it's taking much longer than expected for a few different reasons.
First, I needed to make some time to catch up with the content.
My schedule has been pretty awful lately, with too many tasks to tackle and too little respite. And one of the first thing I had to trim is the time spent on games in general and eroge in particular.
I barely read the forums, and spent months without checking new mods nor even playing Honey Select. So I had to catch up, grab the new expansion pack, check the new content and updated mods, install everything and verify cross-compatibility... while only having a couple hours of spare time per week to do so.
But holidays are around the corner and I have a bit more leeway, now. I reinstalled the game and I'm almost done testing all the content provided by Illusion and our awesome modding community.
I also needed to wait for all the components to be stable and mature.
Since the release of the "Party" expansion pack, Illusion has been continually pushing updates and new content. With a lot of support issues : broken translations, incompatible mods, buggy features that need to be hotfixed... Trying to work with those incompatibilities is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, only to discover three days later that someone released a rounder peg that would have been a better fit.
Sadly, I don't have enough time to fiddle with the content and work around issues to deliver bug-free patches. Waiting for Illusion to finally stop updating their game so that every modders (and myself) can work with final, stable content that don't need to be modified and re-tweaked every week was necessary.
And on top of that, I need to extend the scope of the patches.
Up until now, those patches only had really basic features and only supported a single, simple configuration : only one game with one expansion pack, only one uncensor, only one translation. When I made the first versions, I started from the source code of the HF Patch for SBPR that Inquisitor provided (cheers to our good ol' pal) and I stripped down MASSIVE amounts of features. I wanted to
keep it simple and straightforward, so I got rid of all the code that I couldn't make use of, as well as everything I couldn't perfectly make sense of.
But with the release of the new "Party" expansion pack and the "Battle Arena" DLC, those patches now need to detect and support various configurations, depending on the content you installed. Eventually, I will also need to bring back some of the quality-of-life features that I removed, like .NET framework detection (needed by the launchers), alerts on low available disk space, on-demand registry fixes, shortcut creation, fail-safe file overwriting, automated patching of the executables...
It has become a necessity to transition the MF/EMF Patches into a more robust system, with room for extension and customisation. Having a solid framework will allow me to provide much better software in the future : the upcoming versions are going to bring huge improvements over the patches that have been released until now.
And to do that, I needed to learn how to properly handle the most advanced features of InnoSetup (the tool used to make the installers). I'm a developer by trade, and InnoSetup is nothing really difficult to understand, but the documentation is pretty lacking so I needed time to gather enough material to understand all the subtleties of the toolset, to architecture a framework that would suit its philosophy, to integrate it in my own pipeline and find a productive workflow, to design a few mock installers to test everything out...
That's a lot of preliminary work that should have been done sooner. But now it's almost finished, and I'm ready to deliver some really
really nice shit.
So, hang in there, people. It's coming up soon.
![[Dyo-Anima] Surfing Venus outfit](data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mP8Xw8AAoMBgDTD2qgAAAAASUVORK5CYII=)
shine