July 2025 Update

Greetings everyone,

FBS Fundraising

The first month of Milestone #6 Fund Raising is complete. We've raised $773.67 in June and the few months before on unintentional payments. We also had a carry-over balance of $17.61, putting us at $791.28 toward our $2500 Milestone #6 goal.

I'm expecting to hit our goal in about 3-4 months.

GearCity: 2nd Gear

Game Update

I spent all of June working on the version 2.5.0.2 bugfix patch for 2.5.0.1. There were a lot of issues. But I got nearly everything fixed that I could. I hope this will hold everyone over until 2.6.0.0 is finished. In the meantime, if you all could submit bugs and long plays here on the forums, with save games (compressed in zip, 7z, rar, etc), that will be helpful for any bug fixing and balancing I need to do in the next update.

Engine Issues

Windows Renderers

To resolve Video RAM memory leaks in the OpenGL2 renderer, I downgraded our Windows rendering library, Ogre3D, to version 1.12.13. I did this to resolve our Video Ram memory leaks in the OpenGL2 renderer. An update to Windows 10+ has caused additional issues to our DirectX9 renderer which I am unsure will be resolved or get better. If/when newer APIs are funded, I will revert Windows back to Ogre3D 1.14. (I may keep the 1.12 build around as a "Legacy" option.) In the meantime I am working on a cut-down demo of the game's engine that I can submit upstream along with a bounty to entice folks more familiar with the code bases to fix it. Progress on this engine demo is slow as I am trying to slot it in time I set aside for GC. But only when I don't have any bugs or bigger ticket items to work on. Linux and MacOS remain on Ogre3D 14.

MacOS Woes

Apple recently announced the discontinuance of X86_64 (Intel) Macs. The last MacOS with X86_64 (Intel) support will be MacOS 26. Additionally they plan to discontinue Rosetta 2 which translates X86_64 (Intel) to ARM. Thus Macs will be losing support for most X86_64 (Intel) software. GearCity and GearCity: 2nd Gear currently only support X86 and X86_64 processors on MacOS. We do have a bounty to port GearCity: 2nd Gear to ARM. But GearCity will likely remain unported. Apple has stated that they will keep a cut-down version of Rosetta 2 for old software, like games. However, there is belief that Apple will check the age of the software before letting the translation layer run. If that is the case, GearCity and GearCity: 2nd Gear will likely be version frozen until the game is ported to ARM.

Additionally, Apple deprecated OpenGL a few years back. While they haven't removed it just yet, it's only a matter of time before they will. We do have a bounty to add Apple's vendor locked API (welcome back to the 90s) Metal to 2nd Gear's engine. However, I have been following progress of the Metal renderer in Ogre3D's github over the last several years, and it's going nowhere. I am unsure if we'll be able to use it. There is a chance I could use a shim, but I have not found any for pure OpenGL2 yet. Maybe when the official death date comes around someone will make one.

All that said, Linux keeps chucking along fine. Hooray for vendorless open-source software I guess.

Art

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get in touch with Serhey about resuming artwork in June. My plans aren't entirely dashed, there is still some hope for July.

AeroMogul

Not much work on AeroMogul in June. Most of my time was devoted to getting 2.5.0.2 shipped. I resume working on AeroMogul starting today (a few hours after this post.)

Besides data entry and profile photos, I have started writing a rudimentary scripting language which will be used to check if a pre-scripted aircraft should be made. To use a real-world example, Douglas made the original DC-9. However, they merged with McDonald and created the MD-80. If Douglas didn't merge and was still healthy, they'd probably make the same version just with a different name... Boeing eventually buys McDonald Douglas and change the MD-95 to Boeing 717. They can't do this unless they own Douglas. The script checks for situations like that.