No more empty promises
Posted by HJfod on 13/09/2023
Since around April of this year all the way until the start of August, I was suffering from massive code burnout. My usually incredibly high activity dropped down to basically zero for months. I couldn't even open VS Code without immediately feeling tired.
This made me very worried for the future state of my GD mods - mainly, of course, my flagship mod BetterEdit. Given that I was their sole developer, their development was also completely halted over the span I was burned out - not good when I was just working on a major overhaul on all of them.
However, my burnout finally started to get better in August. I managed to actually open up the BE codebase without feeling tired, and got back to adding features and fixing bugs. By that point, Geode had received many breaking changes that needed to be addressed with an update, which I promised to do ASAP.
Unfortunately, that update ended up never coming. To put it short, I lost interest. It wasn't burnout holding me back anymore, just simple boredom. I had no motivation to work on BetterEdit - not even my usually high sense of duty could motivate me to keep working.
At this point it's painfully clear that as long as I'm its sole developer, BetterEdit 5 is dead.
I really hoped it wouldn't come to this. When my burnout ended, I wasn't at all sure if I was experiencing just a temporary motivation boost, and as such my main priority was trying to speedrun BE 5 to be stabile and to have all the main features I wanted to add. I wanted to ensure that even if I got burned out again, I could rest assured that I had made a good, finished product.
That didn't end up happening. BE 5 is still in a buggy, incomplete, constantly crashing state - and I can't promise it will ever leave that.
I have made a lot of promises regarding BetterEdit over the years. Some of them I have kept; some I have fulfilled very late; but it seems that most I will have to break. I can no longer promise anything regarding BetterEdit. I can't with good conscience promise something I know won't happen.
I know this news is going to upset a lot of people - probably most the Geode team. Just when we finally got v1.0.0 released, Mega Hack ported, and looking like the dream we had been working towards for 2 years was going to be fulfilled - out comes me, the de facto project lead of Geode, announcing that I won't be finishing one of the most anticipated mods for it, which will inevitably cause enthusiasm for the framework to quiet down.
Well, at least BE is open source. If someone wants to take over v5, or port over the old v4 to Geode, consider yourself free to do so. Or if someone just wants to seize the golden opportunity of a filling the sudden, huge gaping hole in the GD modding ecosystem with tons of potential money involved, go for it. I'm willing to share the ideas I had come up with BE 5. That mod was going to be really insane.
As a final note, I also can't promise that I won't work on BetterEdit. Maybe when 2.2 releases I will suddenly regain all my motivation and crank out a finished BE 5 within the first month. Who knows. But if that happens, I will try to make one promise: it won't happen under the public eye. You will either see the full, finished product released for once, or never see anything.
Hopefully I can at least keep that promise - that I won't make any more empty promises. That I will finally learn from the mistakes of Hyperdash and shut up until I actually have an usable product to present.
That's about it. I would once again like to congratulate the haters who said BE 5 would never come out, and apologize to the fans who were waiting.
Cya.
-HJfod