Pebble Development Plans

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since I posted an update, so I wanted to check in & let you know that the project is not forgotten.

Around this time last year, I was working on a small update to expand the in-engine font sets. I was also looking into a way of adding a builtin screen-reader. Before I finished those, Godot 4.0 came out, and that kind of threw off my plans a bit.

The thing about Godot 4.0 is: it has a bunch of new great features! But it also pretty much completely breaks Pebble's existing UI. I can't get Pebble up-to-date with 4.0 with just a quick update. It's going to need pretty much a full rebuild of the front end.

I considered finishing the update I had been working on using the previous version of Godot, but that also seemed a little silly, because Godot 4.0 has a new font system, AND it has a built in text-to-speech engine. So I would have ended up re-doing everything from the small patch eventually anyway. So I set that aside too & decided to wait until I could invest time in a bigger Pebble update.

Since I have to re-do the UI anyway, I'm going to try and work in some other larger goals as well, and we'll probably call the next version Pebble 2.0, since it'll likely look a fair bit different.

~*~*~ Pebble 2.0 Teasers!! ~*~*~
I can't make any promises as far as what will make it in, and I don't know what the timeline will look like, but here are some things I have on the idea board for Pebble 2.0:

• Going Open Source! We'll probably have a non-commercial share-alike license for the most part, but with an addendum that you can contact me for individual licensing if your project doesn't fall within those parameters.
• Switching from my custom pixel fonts to regular fonts (with far larger ranges of characters than I could ever design). This also opens us up to the possibility of: user-added fonts, and emoji support!
• Adding a built-in Screen Reader! And better keyboard control support.
• Adding some handy editor options (like "Insert Blank Measure" or "Generate Scale" or whatnot)
• Adding PLY (Play) and RDR (Render) chunks
• Adding a 'real-time' clock option for Pebble modules
• Adding a Tempo module.
• Adding a 'Mono' mode to Sequences that merges all the lines into one line. (Mostly to make the Portamento module work easier to work with.)
• Adding a new sustain character '~' that applies a customizable 'after-touch modulation' module to either Level or Pitch for the playing Instrument.

There are also some experimental ideas I've been kicking around that may or may not even be feasible:

• Adding 'parameter' lines to Sequences & Mixes. These would basically be extra lines that apply volume, pitch, speed, limit, (or other operations) to the lines above them.
• Allowing modules to move backward in time??
• Playable Instruments
• Custom variables for modules that can be rewritten later on

I haven't started working on the update yet (beyond just making plans & kicking around ideas), but I'm thinking about doing so either in December or early next year.

Nash