(04-04-2018, 10:02 PM)StripTheSoul Wrote: Great read as always!
Though I wish you had mentioned Tino (and Marcosvitali, I think); Asynchronous Shader Cache Generation may have had its flaws, but it was an ingenious idea at the time (without which I wouldn't have used Dolphin as much as I did)
That's not surprising as Ishiiruka is seen as a competitor, even though there isn't much reason to use it these days outside of material maps. I do agree it should have been mentioned for the reason that it had the async shader feature years before Dolphin, and Ishiiruka IS a part of Dolphin's history and user base no matter who wants to accept or deny that fact. But I can say I do know the feeling from experience. I was reluctant to ever say anything because I'm not one for drama and my perspectives are my own. But screw it. I don't really care anymore.
Remember duplicate paletted textures before the new custom texture format? I remember frozenwings and I dumping for 100s of hours, which served as the greatest example of how bad the situation was. We knew we could never realistically make a "complete" pack, but the hopes was that by offering a ridiculously large pack filled with redundancy, someone would be inspired to make a proper fix. Eventually the new custom texture format was introduced by degasus, which I tested heavily, and even offered the suggestion that gave us the mipmap flag in the name. The Xenoblade pack itself was mentioned, our dumping efforts never were. But a screenshot showing off our 1000s of dumps can be seen. To be fair, dumping textures did not really help Dolphin except to show how broken it was when it came to dumping paletted textures, testing is something anyone can do, and a minor suggestion is just that. So, fair enough. Probably not worth mentioning.
Then along came BC7 support. After realizing how much better it is, I opened up an issue report, and it didn't take Stenzek long to add it to Dolphin. I spent weeks learning more about the format and extending the functionality of my script. I wanted to give everyone a means to actually have an easy way to create textures in this format for use in Dolphin, because most image converters that actually support BC7 are cumbersome to use. And, none of them allow creating arbitrary mipmaps and this was a feature I really wanted. Along comes the progress report. Someone messaged me about the "beta" progress report (obfuscation and edits made purposely), which I agreed not to share a link to before it was made public. Boy was I excited to see my tool mentioned. But alas, on release of the report, any mention of me and my tool was completely removed for whatever reason at the last minute. But ironically enough, there's my screenshot displaying the differences in image quality from my tool's thread. But that's okay, I didn't mind that, I said it was fine to use the screenshot. I couldn't help but to be a bit disappointed that any mention of me and my tool was removed without any reason given. It's like waving a piece of meat in front of a dog's face then eating it in front of it. I shrugged it off, it's an "unofficial tool", its external to Dolphin, and anyone who would want to use it would find it anyway.
Then along comes the PR that allowed arbitrary mipmaps in Dolphin by Tomcc. Great stuff, so I thought why not have this for custom textures? After the long struggle of making screenshots, pleading the case for it, and actually learning just enough code to make a working example in a hacked up Dolphin (that didn't really work 100% correctly), eventually I must have been convincing enough (or at least annoying enough) that JosJuice took up the task of implementing it into Dolphin. This is not a groundbreaking change, it only benefits a few games with texture packs, but it certainly was enough to include in the January progress report. But would it have happened without my efforts? Would anyone have cared? Probably not, but again, I didn't write the "final code" so everything leading up to that point was foreshadowed by the result. This did irritate me a bit more than the other things, but I bit my tongue.
At this point I can only assume the only way to ever receive even a tiny mention in one of those reports is to actually make direct code contributions, be part of the inner clique, or be involved in something far more significant than "custom textures". I can't say that I'm that upset, I don't do anything I do for recognition or I would have made a fuss about it long before now. I accept that I am mediocre as an artist and every attempt at writing code is a struggle. The only conclusions that I can come to is that everything I've done that has impacted Dolphin in even the slightest way has been seen as negligible.