State of FortRise
As you may know, FortRise has stayed on 4.7 for quite a long time now. As myself maintaining this project, I feel burnt out on the features that I had to add, bugs that I had to resolve, and cross-platform and version compatibility issues. I am maintaining this project since April 26, 2023 and it is almost been a year that FortRise will now be a 1 year old mod loader and I am really happy about it. Thanks to the community for getting along with this project and helping it grow to be the second? mod loader in TowerFall and it all just started with just making a simple Dark World mod that allows importing a custom level made by a user and it separate from the vanilla level.
# Inspiration
The mod loader itself is heavily-inspired from the mod loader called Everest which is a mod loader for Celeste. The project structure is almost the same, and some of it functionality like the Relinker and virtual filesystem stuff. It also uses a same framework called MonoMod, in which we use it for patching the game, and also hooking via RuntimeDetour and HookGen. I plan FortRise to be its own different thing, but it will need to be in FortRise 5.0 for it to happen.
# Thoughts and Issues
So, today I want to share about my thoughts while maintaining this project. First of all, I love y’all for accepting me and the project as a community despite
my clumsiness on how I maintain it. Second, I do love maintaining this project, even though, I am tired of doing it so, maybe due to school projects that I am
dealing with and probably an in real life problem, but I still keep doing this for as long as I could until eventually this project could be replaced
by something else. Now, I want to address most of the issue that everyone had in the project and will fix soon. First, the installation process. I get why people
do not like the current way of installing the mod loader and I do know the reason. The launcher or called Pyrgos did not really got the intended UI-friendly approach
of doing it. It is due to because of I keep trying it to be a multi-instance launcher in which the user may be confused on what to do, and most users do not use
multi-instance TowerFall anyway. I will fix this by providing a launcher that is just straight to the point and does not add anything to it. User is still need to
select the installer, but it is guided in a way that they could just do it in two clicks. Second, The modding api is confusing in other cases and a lot of
deprecated stuff. I sadly could not fix this today or anytime soon, however all of this will be fix in FortRise 5 and the api will be cleaner once again when that
version does reached. It is too late to change stuff now, and I do not want to break a compability between old mods. Finally, the mod content system where we still
rely on the hacky Content/Mod system that is pretty unreliable, yet it still well known to others. I want all mods, and even content mods to be just a mod that
mimics the way how vanilla TowerFall load its content. This is basically most mod loader do but not in the case of FortRise as of yet, but I am trying to migrate
most mod such as Adventure mod, and ArcherLoader by RedDude.
All this issues that I said here is non-exhaustive, tell me more if you have other issue with FortRise besides on what I said here.
# Conclusion
FortRise has mean a lot to me, it is my first big project that I made with some inspiration from other mod loader. It is not possible to made this without everyone in the community that participates to make mods, or everyone that is playing with those mods. This is the first community that accepts what I made for this community and I decided to continue maintaining this project for as long as I like or will be replaced by other mod loader. I, to be honest want my mod loader to be replaced since I did make a lot of mistakes while creating this project, and the latter will may improve this further on. This project is made with purpose of helping the community going forward with mods and the newcomers may enjoy this game as well.
And for that, FortRise is not dead yet, I am still maintaining it as long as I can maintain it, and thank you everyone for the support! I love y’all!
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