Status of the Project and Future Plans

Hello Everyone!

I felt it was right to give everyone an update on the status of this project. The ones who looked at the GitHub Repo or at the GitLab Repo probably noticed that updates are few and far in between.

I talked extensively about that in two updates on my personal blog:

• "2D Games Development: From Zero To Hero" - 2 Years Later
• "2DGD_F0TH": Poll results, analysis and thoughts

I will give a quick update of what's going on, both in content and form of the book, as well as my plans for the future.

Content Updates

There are no content updates between the latest version released (0.6.5) and the current "develop" branch in the repositories.

The fact is that there won't be "content updates" for a while, for two main reasons:

• I am a bit burned out
• The book is going through some important form changes

Form Updates

As stated above, the book is undergoing some heavy maintenance when it comes to "form", I'm trying really hard to reduce the amount of "inline LaTeX" in the documents, replacing them with Pandoc filters. This is done with two objectives in mind, in order of importance:

1. A future EPub release, that will allow people to enjoy this book on their favourite E-reader
2. General cleanliness and "lowering the bar" for new contributors.

This also means that I will have to update the whole building chain for the book, as well as the contribution documents, which will probably be a long task, considering my current job situation and energy levels.

Current Status

Surprisingly, I think I managed to find a way to get over the biggest hurdle for an EPub release: Math. It seems that using a LaTeX math renderer (Gladtex) as a "pandoc filter" renders some SVG images that work perfectly for the book.

I would say that all things considered, I went from 10% the way to an EPub release to at least a 40% of the way.

Future Updates

As I said, I foresee EPub releases in the future, along with the "classic" PDF releases. There are still some issues in the way, like some pure LaTeX I'm using for some tables, sandboxing problems for some images, page breaks, epigraphs, dynamic code blocks, colored boxes, etc...

After solving all the issues and restructuring the book to allow for a "raw" EPub format, I have to play a bit with CSS to make it work as I want.

New dynamic listings are in my future plans too, although with secondary priority, managing a Pseudocode, Python and C++ version on my own is already a harsh task and adding more doesn't seem a good idea for now. The languages I have in mind are the following:

1. Lua (I know some basics, just enough to make some simple Pandoc filters)
2. C# (I know the bare minimum to understand "this is C#")
3. Java (which I know "okay")

Conclusion

The conclusion is the following: the development will slow down considerably. I am trying a lot of stuff locally and pushing only what works on the book repositories, which is not a lot. Also as I said, I'm a bit burned out, so I need some "recovery time" too, the current situation doesn't really fare well and I'm trying to get to a place (both job-wise and mentally) that will allow me to do more for this little project.

Thanks

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to read this post, you rock!

I would also like to thank everyone who downloaded, or even just took a look at this project's page, as well as the ones who rated and added it to their own collection, as well as who commented or opened a topic. You support, both vocal and silent, is priceless and I hope to get to 1000 downloads by the end of the year.

Take care and stay safe, everyone.

Penaz.