How is the pandemic affecting you and the JapeTrans/patch progress habisain?
That's a good question, and one which I don't necessarily have a complete answer to just yet. Most of the answer will be "the current outbreak of Covid-19 has not affected progress much", mostly because I'm primarily a computer science researcher and it turns out that thinking about things / logging into experimental servers is something you can totally do from home. Given that I'm a pretty strong introvert and don't go out much anyway, being in lockdown hasn't really changed things for me too much.
There is a slight question mark about whether or not Covid-19
already caused me problems however. While I did not go into complete details in my previous post, as the diagnostic criteria for Covid-19 have been refined, I'm realising that my second bout of illness which took me out for three weeks matches those symptoms pretty much perfectly (i.e. dry cough, fever, shortness of breath, loss of senses of taste and smell, etc). There is still an oddity on the timeline though, as this bout of illness was in late December/early January, raising the question of how the hell could I have contracted it. It's certainly not impossible (Covid-19 was extant in November, and I was exposed to people who had travelled to Wuhan in December), but it still seems unlikely. I await the availability of antibody tests so science can figure this out properly.
Anyway, I'll do a quick progress report: I've been sticking all of the bits of JapeTrans together and bug finding/fixing. For those who know the technology, in addition to testing I've been using MyPy (on strict mode) to find lots and lots of bugs. Some of these would have been found regardless, but a lot of these were subtle bugs that would be difficult to find otherwise, and I'm pretty sure they would have caused it to blow up for someone. I'm not necessarily confident JapeTrans won't crash for people at this point, as it has a huge user facing surface which definitely lets users do things that will necessarily crash it (users can always crash a state machine they control), but if it does crash it should do so in an intelligible way. Or at least, intelligible for me - I'm skipping the bit where I make the error experience pleasant for users for the first release, at least.
I think all of the features I need for VPM are present and correct at this point. I've yet to write the JapeTrans config which would let me do this though, so we'll see how that goes. JapeTrans configs are... kind-of involved as this stage (another bit I'm skipping for the first release is a nicer way of specifying the configuration). I also need to do some tests on RPGMaker VXAce itself to see exactly how Font.outline works. I'm hoping it's a plain wrapper around SDL's font outline, as that'll let me get rid of my always-slightly-wonky graphical text in the name display. So on a technical side there's still a little way to go, but it's now very nearly there, and soon I'll be able to start on the much more fun side of editing and finishing up the patch.
One other thing that's worth mentioning: I may release JapeTrans under another name. This is just due to the Habisain name not being something I'd want to link to on a CV, and JapeTrans becoming a CV-worthy project. So don't be surprised if that happens.
And thanks to all the people who left a message of support. They're always appreciated, even if I'm tardy with clicking like buttons.
Slightly random aside: Does anyone here know any good user interface kits for Python? I had originally planned to use Qt (via PySide2), but there seems to be some question marks around if using Qt for open source is a good idea at the moment. I'm tempted to give Kivy a go, but it doesn't appear to have integration with accessibility features which is a big demerit in my book.
How long did it take to write that post? You certainly appear to believe in keeping people informed.
