Give Me Documentation or Give Me Death
So this is a little less development focused and a bit for of a vent, but the update part regarding Proximity Alert is that I have made a decision to switch from Popochiu, the Godot plugin that I was using, to Adventure Game Studio. In a lot of ways that is a downgrade I'll admit. The software is older, clunkier, slower, and more limited. However, I'm pretty used to that kind of thing having made AGBAS in RPGMaker XP. Old software isn't that hard to use, especially when it has strong documentation.
Despite how promising and straightforward Popochiu is, the documentation is really lacking. There is a basic tutorial in the docs, but it doesn't go over a lot of relatively basic fuctions, and the coding documentation is incomplete and the search doesn't seem to work. The docs don't even include reference on how to change rooms anywhere that I could easily find. The fallback is something that I see more frequently recently, especially with indie projects and it's quickly becoming a bugbear of mine.
A Discord server =/= Documentation.
It's not even close. It's rather frustrating to have to try and search through months of old discord posts to maybe find something like what you're trying to achieve. Or failing that, posting in the troubleshooting channel(if they even have one) and hoping that someone replies sometime. Meanwhile, the Discord is the only place that update logs are posted. If you're lucky, that server will have a dedicated channel for updates and announcements, but more often it's just posted in the General channel with an @ everyone and then left buried under other messages.
Anyways, all that is to say that I'm more than willing to put up with clunky old software and proprietary code that's a bastard of C++ and Python or something, if that bastard codebase has thorough documentation. Being able to solve my own problems with a well organized set of detailed instructions and references is far too crucial for how I work for me to find the chaos of a chatroom anything close to a substitute. So for now, I'm moving forward with AGS since it lets me work more effectively on my own without having to search through a dozenish discord pages and scour an unrealted video in a language that I don't speak(common monolingual L) to find code that isn't even the point of the video so that I know how to change rooms.
In AGS I've been able to rebuild what I had built in Popo in less time and with less frustration, confusion and searching. Everything I need is pretty much right there and the bonus is that I don't even have to learn how to fill gaps that Popo doesn't cover, like title screens, much more easily. This has put me back a bit on this hobby project, so I'm not really gonna dedicate as much time as I initially thought on beautifying or small environmental animations. So in light of that I'm probably gonna steam ahead with some more simple animations and fewer of them so that this doesn't take more than another month hopefully.