Experimental Beta Release

As many of you know, I've been developing the Ditty of Carmeana for a long time. And it turns out, when you've been developing a game so long, some of the software used in the game and the toolchain can end up being on the old side, unless you are very on top of things. Which I was not.

Well, it turns out obsolete software can be a big maintenance burden, so I spent some time upgrading the game's dependencies to be not embarrassingly obsolete.

To give these new updates a spin before I inflict send it out to everyone, I have created an Experimental Beta branch. It's the same game as the main branch, but new versions of some underlying software.

I am also planning to use the Experimental Beta branch to test other game engine changes and minor content updates. So if you do play the Experimental Beta branch, you might get an advance preview of some small updates or additions.

Another thing: if you run the Experimental Beta branch, and the game crashes, it will send a crash report unconditionally. So make sure you're okay with that.

At some point, I will update the main branch to use the new software versions.

The major changes to the Experimental Beta branch are listed below.

• Base version of OpenGL increased to 3.3. It had been, I think, 2.1. I don't know why I didn't go all the way to 4.5, which is probably the last version of OpenGL that will ever be.

• Blender upgraded to version 4.5. I had been using Blender 2.79, the last version that used the old Blender Render materials. It was kind of embarrassing that in 2025 I had an actively maintained game based on Blender Render. Because the internals of Blender changed a lot over that time, this is the diciest change in terms of things that might be different or broken.

• Got rid of the OpenAL-based sound engine in favor of SoLoud.

• Updated Python to version 3.13.

• Pulled the latest versions of various other tools

• New way to send crash reports based on Discord.