Welcome back to this monthly report. It took me some time to sit and write this, but since there were some critical issues that I had to take care of. Now that this is off of my list, I'm going to give you a peek at my metaphorical book.

.NET 6 and MAUI

For those who don't know, I am using .NET to build a good chunk of my tools and Immortal Sins' launcher (that's Northbridge). With the upcoming release of .NET 6, it will arrive with an update that got my interest: MAUI (the Multiplatform Application UI) will support Windows, in addition to Mac, Android, and iOS. This is pretty interesting for me since I could easily scale my tools to other platforms as well.

So... what would it mean for the stuff I make? For Immortal Sins, nothing much. It would require a bit of an overhaul to transition it to the new framework, but the tools I do make and use will. I want to transition my Cook Tool to MAUI (or the Uno Framework, which is based on the same tech as MAUI) and I'll be able to release the tool to other platforms as well.

In the near future, I'll move my tools over to .NET 6 once it reaches a go-live status (which will be some time in summer, if my guess is correct). There aren't as many improvements as .NET 5 and .NET Core 3.1 for me, but since it's the next LTS release and the performance improvements that are there do make it a worthwhile work for me (although I just need to change a line in the project file and I'm ready).

Continued Overhauls

Recently, I uploaded version D0.32 Update 1. This update brought the re-writes in the main story (since I received feedback about how messy was the original story script). Looking at the recent feedback about the recent builds, it seems to me that the re-writes vastly improved the story. That's great news to me. I do have to do some edits to polish it up, but the majority is pretty positive.

Now that this overhaul is done, what's next? Well... re-working the battle system. At least a good chunk of it. What I want to achieve with this overhaul is to give more variety and add a bit of a challenge. I have a bit of a basic setup for some of the characters, but I do need to get them all set up before I start changing their kits (skills, equipment, and the elemental affinity). Hopefully, this (and a few other tweaks I'm planning will make the battles more interesting.

Other than that, I want to give some polish passes to the maps and do some tweaks to fix that bug. The one where the engine just discards images that should be loaded in memory but it derps out. That, and add a robust Autosave system. I had to remove the old system due to be temperamental but the new one is coming along nicely.

That is all for now. See you in the next post.