News
New server plus some odds and ends 2018-02-04 06:58:52
I have finally purchased my own hosting and moved this site off MancuNET. MancuNET has been great for the last 5 years, but between having a full time job and all the sales of S3DNA I figured it was quite silly to be using someone elses resources. Plus I started using Matrix and due to some complexities in regards to SSL certs running things myself just proved to be easier. (For those who aren't aware of Matrix, it's a fully open and federated communication platform. Similar to Discord or Slack in feature set, just 100% open.)
While not really related, I also decided to move ECWolf's repositories over to a Bitbucket team. When I initially move ECWolf from SVN over to Merurial Bitbucket didn't have the teams feature so I had the repo under my name. While I'm still largely the sole contributor to ECWolf I still figured it's better to get the transition out of the way. The big benefit is that all the ECWolf related repos are more discoverable since they won't get buried under any other projects I may be working on. The downside is everyone needs to update their clones to point to the new location.
ECWolf also has a new logo/icon courtesy of NeuralStunner. The hope here is that the new icon still feels related to Wolfenstein while being freely licensable.
Suppose this is as good of time as any to formally talk about my plans for ECWolf 1.4. I think it's clear as day to anyone that I perhaps scoped too much into the 1.4 release. At least these days where I don't have quite as much time to work on hobby programming as I used to. In order to narrow the focus I have decided to drop Mac Wolfenstein support from the 1.4 goals. To be clear this means nothing long term as ECWolf will get Mac Wolf support, but I personally would rather focus on finishing the initial multiplayer code for 1.4.
On the topic of refocusing, I would like to formally say what everyone else has no doubt figured out before me: I no longer have time to actively participate in GZDoom/Zandronum development. I know, real shocker here but making this formal really does lift a lot mentally. I've definitely thought way too much about the shared code in ECWolf since at this point my contribution rate really is that of any other third party contributor. I will of course still be doing the builds that I have been doing so this really is just a statement for my own sake since as far as everyone else is concerned things are continuing as normal.
Now while things have been quite slow, things haven't been exactly dormant over the last year either. A few months ago I had a random epiphany that adding more Z height support would actually be quite easy to do, so now ECWolf can render things at varying heights. Admittedly it's not especially useful right now, but its a step in the right direction and it makes for more interesting screen shots than the feature actually is.
Sorry for the lack of content here in 2017. Last year has been the year of projects that get stopped just before their complete for one reason or another. I wanted to write about the video capture card I bought, but then I discovered my computer was bottlenecking its capabilities so it wouldn't be fair to the reader to speculate. I had hoped to write about my over the top retro computing build, but that still has a lot of small details to finish out. I finally purchased a new primary computer and the fun story I planned to write in regards to that got delayed by early adopter issues. For those wondering I'm now running a Threadripper 1950X. Quite an amazing system for development and brings my ECWolf compile times down to 2 seconds. Not that they were particularly long before, but even everything else I work on now has negligible compile times compared to the Lynnfield/Nehalem system I had before. So glad to finally be beyond quad core processors!
Oh and I also now own ecwolf.org which redirects to any page in the ecwolf section of this site. Don't have any immediate plans to host the site under the domain.