Hey spessfolk! To keep interest in the project, ttmso and I decided to at least attempt to make bi-monthly progress devlogs about LS13. It's fun to document progress, and it also serves as a nice, readable history for even the common space dweller out there. We've done quite a bit leading up to this one!

Engine fixes!

One lesson I personally learned the hard way is that shoehorning random formats that I vaguely recall existing is kind of a bad idea. This came up when trying to include GPG inside RobustLÖVE, our underlying framework for LS13.

It worked... well-ish enough for me until I had to make it work under Windows... Yeah, it was a bit problematic. I did get it to work, don't get me wrong, but I really doubted that people would want to install vcpkg, then sacrifice 30 GiB of disk space and about 4 hours of their time just to compile a game engine that only one game uses.

That led me to ask whether we really needed game code signing to bypass the sandbox. Thinking about it now, that just sounds like a can of worms I'd never want to open, especially in case a sandbox bypass is found and someone ends up downloading and running malware on target machines via some rogue fork... Bleh! So the sandbox stays, and the only ways to disable it are --nosandbox or LOVE_NO_SANDBOX=1.

But now we have encryption/verification capabilities via libsodium, and it's nice and painless to compile on Windows. Yay!

A pacman repository..

I also took some time to set up a pacman repository to make development easier for contributors running any Arch based distro. Instead of downloading RL from the releases manually and setting it up yourself, you can just add the Moon Wizards pacman repository and install robust-love!

Although as of writing this, robust-love does conflict with love-git for the time being. A fix is coming soon!

Edit: that's now resolved! You can have love-git and robust-love installed on the same system.

What about LS13?

Of course, we're making a space station, so we also have to work on the actual game that people will play.

Viewport-onage

ttmso has implemented some much-needed features, such as viewport UI, viewport targeting, and that BYOND-like side panel.

Of course, none of the HUD is functional yet, as we're still adding the core systems for those. But it's nice to already have a UI ready to hook everything up to as we add things over time.

DebugBus

I spent some time reworking how debug tooling functions in LS13. I replaced the quite bad debugOverlay with a snazzy DebugBus that uses modules instead of a giant cacophony that does everything at once.

One of the cooler modules is called watcher. Its purpose is that you tell it where data is, and it keeps track of it and displays it in a nice box in the corner of your screen.

The present

Right now, we're on track to get rid of jgui which is a disaster of a UI framework, by the way. And replacing it with our own, currently dubbed Lunar.

Contributions welcome!

If any of this looks interesting to you, we'd really appreciate any kind of help. Whether it's code, ideas, it helps more than you might think!

LS13 is still very much in its early stages, which means there's a lot of room to shape how things turn out. If you've ever wanted to poke at complex Lua, mess with UI systems, or just contribute to a weird little space project.

Even if you're not sure where you'd fit, feel free to talk to us anyway. Worst case, you learn something new; best case, you end up helping build something pretty cool with us. LS13 is very much a free for all in terms of everything surrounding the project, so we probably can figure something out!

Every bit of help is insanely appreciated. 💜

I think I've written enough! We'll see how things look in April!

~ misname