11 days to go!

Back in February I nominated the 1st of July to be the release-date for L3DT 2.4, which is eleven days from now. It looks like the release version is ready to go now, but I'm going to keep to that date anyway, just so that I can say I was exactly on-schedule (it doesn't happen often).

Sooo…not much to do now, except maybe indulge in some navel-gazing¹⁾. Selling software. Selling my hobby. It's a bit of an eerie feeling. When I started this project, way back when, L3DT was just a little program to make a map for an RTS game I was developing (or rather, thinking about developing). At that point I didn't consider the possibility that L3DT would ever be released to the public²⁾, much less sold to the public. It did what I wanted, and nothing more. It was really ugly, and damn-near impossible to use if you were not, in fact, the programmer himself.

Now it's a product. It has to do what other people want it to do, in the way they expect it be done. It has to have an intelligible, no, intuitive, user-interface. It has to check entered data, it has to work on other computers, it has to have sensible documentation, and it cannot ever crash. In fact, it shouldn't even throw errors. A warning might be acceptable, but not an error. Lord no. You don't pay money for errors. It can be quite a responsibility to meet those expectations, particularly so when it's your hobby, not your job.

Wow, that makes the whole thing sound miserable and unrewarding. The reality is quite the opposite. Delivering a program that people use, that people like to use, is just an awesome feeling. I honestly get a vicarious kick out of seeing what other people do with L3DT. Making their own games, making their own worlds, making art, having fun, being creative, pursuing whatever their hobby happens to be. Compared to that warm-and-fuzzy feeling, the annoyance of having to 'fix' a bug that's not a bug, or write some bizarre file-exporter, or even re-do a dialog that's a bit hard to use, is utterly trivial. It's a good deal for me, and I shan't complain.

Cheerio, Aaron.

PS: I nearly forgot - The very first of the 6-month trial keys for L3DT Pro will expire on the 9th, so this release won't be a moment too soon.