I was intending to post this announcement much earlier, but this month's development of the game and its engine have taken a lot more time than I originally anticipated. This is just a quick update to explain a few things about what's changing under-the-hood this month, as there are some significant changes.
This month I've been working largely on Freefall's game engine. Several things in the engine have been bothering me for a while, and up until now, it's been too big of a task to try and fix them, but I decided this month to do them all at once. These won't be relevant to you, the player, but it will have a huge impact on future development of Freefall.
I started by redoing my entire build system, so instead of managing separate projects for Windows and macOS, I now manage a single, cross-platform, build project, which makes it a lot easier to unify things, keep them tidy, and also begin to add Linux support to the game. After this, I reorganized every code file across the engine. Previously, all the code files were split arbitrarily across 4 different directories, but now they're all in one place, organized into a neat hierarchy too.
Once this was done, I took up the task of renaming everything in the engine code to make it a lot more consistent and easier to understand. This has been the biggest task of the whole month, and it involved modifying every file across the entire engine, changing thousands of lines of code, as well as splitting sections out into new files to take advantage of the new hierarchical structure.
At this point, I began to split Freefall out of the game engine entirely. Up until now, the game has been sort of intertwined with the engine, and so the "engine" has really just a portion of the game. However, after tireless nights, I've finally managed to move all the game-related code out of the engine, meaning the engine is now entirely separate. Again, this isn't going to affect players at all - at least, hopefully not - but the advantages it'll bring for the future development of the game are very important.
There are still other engine changes that I'm hoping to complete before the end of the month. I'm hoping to get some game-related things into the update, but unfortunately the engine changes may end up taking all of the time. I gave a teaser about an upcoming feature in the Technical Update 2 announcement, but this won't make it by the end of this month.
I hope this gives some clarity, in advance, about what was actually accomplished this month, and why there are no new game features. I've still got a ton of things planned, and this is just one step on the road to adding those things to the game. But for now, see you at the end of the month for Technical Update 3!