the october devlog

hi! as promised, here's some monthly insight on the progress of veado and its tube.

so how's the Unity situation?

the people at Unity seemed to backtrack on whatever they were coming up with, and the current situation is a lot more... ok? like, a lot more in line with what engines like Unreal were already doing, and it won't impact anything made in Unity using the currently available versions. this is more of a future thing, apparently.

in any case, whatever trust i still had in Unity is completely lost at this point <3 and by the time they backtracked, i was already working on the backup plan, which ended up actually being a whole new engine!!!

during my engine studies, i came to the conclusion that veado is far from a normal game, and most of the code i was writing in Unity was an attempt at blocking whatever the engine wanted me to do and instead writing local platform code (as in, a looot of native win32 code in Windows, also a lot of Swift code in macOS, etc). this meant that porting veado to another pre-existing engine like Godot would result in me spending months learning its internal quirks in order to change them to what i needed.

so it just made sense for me to really invest in writing my own custom thing! which is obviously a terrible idea for most projects, but turns out that... i finished it in like a month? AHSDFHA

some technical points on that:

• the veado core library was already in C#, so it made sense to port it to a .NET project. particularly .NET 8, as it features a more complete Native AOT (similar to Unity's IL2CPP) with full desktop support and experimental mobile support!
• the only things i was using Unity for was the window+input+rendering part of it. so anything other than that could just be copied over the new project from the core library, with minor adjustments.
• on Windows i started testing SDL2 for window+input, but i realised there are things it does that i'm not satisfied with, and that i unfortunately learned a lot of win32 in the past few years. so i ended up doing all that by myself also!
• i know rendering! i've done a lot of stuff in OpenGL before. porting the veado rendering pipeline (just a bunch of quads being rendered to screen tbh) to pure OpenGL was a breeze, actually.
• on macOS i also ended up ditching SDL2 as i know my way around Apple APIs, although the rendering part got a bit more complicated, as macOS hates OpenGL nowadays. the plan is to port the OpenGL code to Metal when it gets more stable, which isn't too complicated, just more work!
• i'll be honest i haven't tested anything with Linux yet. HAHSDA but i'm pretty confident that SDL2 will save my life when i do.
• the hypothetical mobile version of veado got delayed a little bit because of all that, since now porting to mobile isn't just pressing an export button. but it's still being considered!

right now i'm copying over the rest of the core library (image loading code, the node system i was working on, UI code that i was also working on, the stream deck integration that's almost ready) to the new project, which shouldn't take too long. so yeah! things are going great without Unity, actually. they just happened to delay things a little bit, but at this point i'm used to delaying veado stuff i suppose.

the engine's internal name is Casco (hoof in portuguese) btw, because it's what Veados (deer in portuguese) run on :] (credits to bella for the name)

Casco should be open source in the future, also. it's like 100% tailored to making veadotube, so it shouldn't be really useful to other people as it is, but i'm sure it'll be useful as a reference.

how does that impact veadotube labs?

oh it only delays it a little bit more once again. but now more than ever we'll need help testing this thing!!! because while Unity is tried-and-true, Casco is not. consdering the delays i'm aiming to get the lab going by early january because i'll need to take a break during december because oh god HGLKSDFJG

cool! how's everything else?

i'm a bit busy with a new contract job <3 because we needed the money really badly and because it's a cool project i think. the good news is that we're really close from getting over that debt, so i'm hopeful that we'll be minimally financially OK next year. hopefully. in the meantime your donations have been saving our asses, and we're forever thankful for them <3