2019 has been a quite busy year, at least compared to the snail's-pace of my normal releases. There have been two Mesmerizer version updates, the Communications Hub has finally gone out in release product form, and I've even updated the Stasis Tube.
Looking forward to next year, I have yet another Mesmerizer update in the works, as well as the product release of the Enforcer (which luckily is already copiable, so I won't have to go through the rigmarole with gift-cards that I was forced to for the Mesmerizer and the Communications Hubs to convert them to copiable).
The next version of the Mesmerizer will fully support the RLVa "overlay" feature, which allows the drawing of an image directly on the viewer screen. This can be used either to simply show images (in a way that doesn't interfere with the mouse), or to create a decorative "frame" around the screen, which can be particularly useful in a trance context. A future post will describe this feature in more detail, and discuss possible uses.
The other major things I want to address are the wait and continue commands. The current implementation of these is pretty simplistic, and doesn't work well if there are multiple "wait"s outstanding. I intend to rewrite wait so that it uses the Mesmerizer's scheduler, which will solve a number of issues. This will be a significant change, and I suspect it will be in a later release than the overlay support, which is already pretty much done.
There will likely be at least two version updates of The Enforcer in the coming year - the first will be mostly the stability update that I've mentioned in a previous post, while the second will introduce some new features, in particular events generated within The Enforcer to allow for things like centrally-programmed random trances or "devotions", and some related enhancements to the scripting language. I expect to release the stability update early in the year, but the functional release will be somewhat later due to the testing involved.
Once both Enforcer releases are out, I want to re-write the Communications Hub's web interface. While the current code works, the interface is far from elegant, and doesn't inspire user confidence. Now that the Communications Hub is copiable, I will be able to do in-place updates in future, which will make them much less painful for situations where a Hub serves a lot of subs.
As I've said before, posting my plans here makes it more likely that those plans will actually come to fruition. So in this post I'm wishing farewell to 2019, and looking forward to some incremental but significant new features in 2020.
