Wow, it's been a while, huh? Like... a long while.
All I can really say is: I'm sorry. 2022's been a rollercoaster for me, and I haven't had the energy or focus to dedicate to BMSC at all, nor time to recharge. Seeing the 50-odd comments I haven't read in my Steam messages is... more than a little bit daunting at the moment.
So what's happening? Well, at the moment, not a lot, really. I started poking around at some cleanups to Unforeseen Consequences a while ago, but never really got around to finishing them. Same thing with Xen - I've got some progress on the first few maps done that I'm reasonably happy with, but the last few... not so much. And given how much of a pain working with displacements is, that's not something I'm really keen on returning to immediately.
So... I guess the bad news is that nothing much has really happened since LC's release, but the good news is that I haven't dropped this mod, I promise. I've still got a lot I want to do, both with BMSC and BM in general.
Which brings me to some more bad news and good news. Bad news - it seems like the Xort bug in Interloper that I've been harping on about since the 1.5 betas is not getting fixed, full stop. I have strong feelings about this, but for now, I'll just say I'm disappointed and leave it at that.
Good news - I've been playing around with trying to emulate the Xort-Xontroller mind control system, since it's the biggest thing that's missing between regular Earthbound Vorts and Xorts - and while it's not perfect and is going to take a fair amount of work to implement, initial results are pretty promising:
And how it looks behind the scenes, because why not:
It's mostly just a matter of implementing it in the existing maps, particularly A. So that's what I'm focused on for now. That might be a questionable thing to focus on, given that the bug appears to be limited to AMD processors (which make up roughly 30% of Steam users, last I checked) - and only a small, random subset thereof - but seeing as I'm an AMD user, well... Yeah.
It's not really relevant to BMSC (except that if this system proves functional, I'll be using it, of course), but the next post is likely to be related to this. Keep an eye out for it! Hopefully things start to calm down soon and I'll be able to get back to more regular posts.
Cheers!
Keep it up. I will wait.
It's a daunting task, take all the time you need c: