Moving to a new release model

CW: I talk about mental health a little in this post.

I need to make changes to how I’m working on Mutant Standard:

  • I wanna move Mutant Standard away from batched releases (0.3.0, 0.3.1, 0.4.0, etc.) to something like a rolling release, where updates are smaller and incremental (possibly just named after dates ie. ‘2019-06-29’).
  • I really need to spend some time on improving my use of technologies to streamline Mutant Standard compilation and releases so they don’t waste the amount of time and energy they do right now.
  • I don’t want to do roadmaps as I’ve done them anymore because they just don’t work.
  • I kinda need to work on Mutant Standard less.

Here’s why I really need to do these things…

Continue reading “Moving to a new release model”

Patreon news

Patreon has started unveiling their plans for what basically every VC-funded commerce/financial support platform does once their investors start demanding more – make a pointless, multi-tier funhouse version of their platform.

As far as I can tell, none of these proposed changes should affect any of you and they shouldn’t affect the percentage of money that I get from any of your pledges. (One of the nasty things about these changes is that they have re-introduced those payment processing fees against small pledges that they attempted in 2017 – but this time to prevent a backlash, it only applies to creators who make an account after a transition date.)

This will not be the end of Patreon’s bullshit – they will have to keep screwing people for more and more, bot hopefully nothing destructive will happen for Mutant Standard before I can move onto XOXO’s upcoming alternative.

As always, I’ll keep you all updated on any changes and let you know if you might be affected so you don’t feel in the dark about this bullshit <3

Early 2019 Progress!

0.3.2 was cancelled

I did mention on social platforms but not this blog (I make weird assumptions sometimes of when I should and shouldn’t make a blog post about something :S). There was too much R+D required for 0.4.0 so I cancelled 0.3.2 and am instead just moving all of those planned improvements (such as text descriptions) and new emoji stored up for 0.4.0.

Fonts are going well!

Hey, just giving you all an update on how the font compiler (currently named forc) is going.

These are the things that it can now do right now:

  • It can now generate font files that are considered valid in macOS, iOS and Windows 10.
  • sbix glyph formats are now fully working in macOS, iOS and Windows 10.
  • Multiple ‘strikes’ of PNG images can now be compiled into an sbix font.
  • OpenType formats are almost 100% valid according to Microsoft’s validator.
  • Exports of various formats are almost 100% valid according to Google’s validator.
  • It can compile valid, tested iOS Configuration Profiles (so fonts can be installed on iOS).
  • Some effort has been made to be able to work out how to replace the default emoji set in macOS with Mutant Standard’s font.
  • forc is starting to enforce good fontmaking standards, throwing errors and refusing to work when the input data is not proper.
  • Ligatures (combinations of emoji characters) are now working in many respects!

The things that need working on:

  • Working CBDT/CBLC (Android/Google) format
  • Fix metric inaccuracies and inconsistencies
  • Finish all of the input data validation
  • orxporter integration
  • Basic emoji picker web page
  • Accompanying web content and guides

Things I’m thinking about potentially adding to forc at a later point in time:

  • Custom binary compiler to improve reliability and accuracy
  • COLR/CPAL (Windows 8/Microsoft Emoji) format

As far as I know, by the time it will be done, forc will be the most comprehensive open source emoji font creation tool that exists. It will also make orxporter an even more powerful emoji creation tool, becoming a one-click solution to generating custom emoji sets that can work in a really wide variety of places.

You can see the overview of progress for this project on Trello – https://trello.com/c/y6CliBKR/35-mutant-standard-040-fonts-forc

And you can check out the current source code and track it’s progress here – https://github.com/mutantstandard/forc

Early 2019 Plans

macOS' Font Book, showing my collection of fonts that are installed for this user. The current selected font is a Mutant Standard test font, the demo pane of the window showing the transgender flag and hot shit emoji.
(Don’t mind the glitches on the window, my Hackintosh has been having problems lately. -_-)

Hey! After some research, I managed to (semi) successfully manually compile a Mutant Standard emoji font. This is really exciting!

This was a small test to test my (still incomplete) research though – it only contains two emoji. Like how orxporter recolours and exports thousands of emoji, we need software that can process and put thousands of emoji into a font.

kiilas and I have been talking, and we’re going to work to make fonts in the release after the one I’m working on now.

So with that in mind, I thought I would give a general outline of what we plan to accomplish in the next few months!

A lot of these new updates are heavily related to our emoji production technology, and the new tech will be released to coincide with each new release, so I will list alongside each of these Mutant Standard release in this timeline.

 

Continue reading “Early 2019 Plans”

The beginning of fonts

(This is a mirror of the Patreon post of the same name because I realised that relying on Patreon is a bad idea but I didn’t wanna delete that post either)

Hey, I’m starting to get into emoji making some more again, it’s still really hard and exhausting after my burnout in November, but I wanna slowly get back into stuff.

 

Fonts have been a much-requested feature for Mutant Standard. The trouble for us is that it’s not a particularly easy or quick thing to get into.

Continue reading “The beginning of fonts”