Update 4

Yes the next update is finally here, a big gap between updates and unfortunately not a lot of work to report on. A lack of personal time but the intentions were always there and I'm excited to dip back into this project. It'll be a slow start but I'll try to stick to a monthly post regardless how much work was actually made. Enjoy!

Two major features have been worked on since the last update! I missed last month's update as there wasn't as much progress as hoped.

Programming Languages
Programming languages have been re-introduced, again with some improvements over their last implementation. Software's MERC values are impacted by the choice of language, so make sure you pick the appropriate language for the software and its features. Design that killer new language with high security and safety built in.

Fabrication Plants
Factories have been re-implemented again, much more fleshed out than the last refactor. To build a CPU production factory you need to set how many Clean Rooms it contains, each room supports a maximum number of CPU fabricators which also need to be designed and built.  You can upgrade the fabs in the rooms by suspending the factory, currently in the test mod they take a single turn to remove and install. Quite a few mod API end points were added to support this.

As a guide for new readers, these days my work is mostly focused on mod development. 90% of the work of adding in the Programming Languages and Factories has been done in a mod for the game. It's pretty rare for me to need to work on the game's code except to add in new API calls to support what I'm trying to achieve with a feature.

All the work is being done in a "test mod" too, which is used by automated unit tests I write to confirm everything is working as expected. Once I get the client up and running again, meaning I can actually sit down and play a game, I'll duplicate the work I've been doing on the test mod into the mod that'll actually ship with the game. The API is a little messy due to not being fully fleshed out in advance so I'm planning to have a full review and tidy up after the client/server support is re-introduced.

Upcoming goals

I'm up to working on the contracts system for the factories, trying to keep it fairly generic to be re-used easily. I'll re-introduce the binning logic that determines how many defects to produce in the CPU and allow the contracts to specify the priority of different CPU models. You won't always want to bin the top of the line model if there's a high demand for your mid-gen product. Down the line I'll investigate the possibility of storing this data to enable lucky owners the chance to unlock their CPU/GPU if they purchased an artificially downgraded one.

Next up is working on implementing workers to run the factory, as well as supporting fully automated factories with some fancy future technologies. This is fairly trivial code to implement, just a little time consuming but once included it'll be re-usable in any product that gets run automatically like server farms.

QA
Still next in line, the work done with factories and contracts should make this fairly easy to get implemented. Allow for automatically building a product every x turns which is used by the assigned QA team(s) to work on. Have them produce a report every turn to get an idea of the product's current quality.

The most difficult part will likely be having your dev team fix the bugs, I need to support assigning a focus area to teams so you can respond to the reports. If the reports are filled with bugs, assign the focus to reliability, or if performance has become a concern set the focus to efficiency so your team can re-write the slowest parts of your code.

Client
The Godot 4 beta releases seem to be going well (update: It's well past beta now!) and I'm excited to get to this stage and be able to actually play the game again. At the moment the game is just a series of automated unit tests to make sure the logic holds up, so it'll be exciting to actually have a playable version again and be able to provide some screenshots. A playable build for people to play will have to wait for at least some market simulation code, which will possibly be the next task after this.