We have decided to rename our company from Black Carbon to Bit-Shift! We have also scored a new domain bit-shift.io and website. This should be up and running in a few weeks as we fit around study and work.
Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects. As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had. The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/ Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored...
Well, the Kickstarter is finally over and the results have been abysmal. We only had a hand full of backers, so thank you to those people. The Stats Lets look at some stats: In the last month, we have had about 1,400 people come to our Kickstarter page with only 12 people following through - a conversion rate of 0.857%. Reddit indicates that 43,800 people viewed our adverts, with 507 clicks - a conversion rate of 1.158%. Youtube indicates that 29,000 people viewed our adverts with only 29 clicks - a conversion rate of 0.1%. Twitter failed to even launch the advertising campaign and our attempts to reach out to them fell on deaf ears. Also our attempts to reach out to the gaming press also mostly fell on deaf ears with the exception of gaming on linux . From my research a conversion rate of about 1-2% is normal. What now? We have taken the last month to reflect and pester the press and twitter (with no luck). We lack the funding to be able to complete Trains ...
The new master server code is up and running! In Dog Fight we used the Unreal 4 engine, which provides its own master server, which I assume is located at Epic HQ somewhere. But Godot has no such built in feature. I came up with the interesting idea of using IRC as my master server as I noticed many free IRC servers. I hobbled together a master server implementation based on IRC by implementing the IRC protocol in Godot. I found this took a long time to connect to the IRC servers as there was quite some handshaking going on. Sometime later, my brother stumbled across a great Godot plugin written by vurpo , which adds C++ support for the Matrix IM protocol. I then dropped this plugin into my project and have had only chat support for a long time, and this caused my IRC plugin (and hence the master server code) to become broken. Seeing that I have had some time recently, I decided I wanted to finally get this sucker working again so I don't have to keep joining my mult...