Release 33 of LCARS Interface for Windows 8 has been submitted to Microsoft for approval. It will likely be released and start rolling out within the next couple of days. Those of you who have been unable to load playlists since Release 31 will now be able to again. Sorry about that! There are also several other bug fixes and performance optimizations included which should have the app running a bit more lean on lower end devices.
With our track record of pumping out new features with nearly every release, you may have noticed that recently it's been mostly maintenance releases. We haven't stopped working on new content! Quite the contrary, actually. We are looking ahead to version 3.0, which is going to be a HUGE update, and will be the first one that will require Windows 8.1. So what does that mean for you? Quite a bit, actually! Read on to find out...
Having completely rebuilt the framework for all of our LCARS apps in order to take full advantage of the multiple Windows platforms and their ability to share code recently, we are now in the process of building a brand new "starship." Up until now, all of the modules in the "entertainment" side of LCARS Interface which control ship systems have been self contained and not related to each other. That is all about to change, as what we are coding now will function much like a game engine in that it will be able to provide constant information about the ship systems and they will be able to communicate with each other, so for instance an overall Engineering panel will show the status of the Warp Core among other things, and changes to one system can/will affect others. This is quite a large undertaking and we are still making changes to the design in order to come up with something that will be more complex than the current panels, but still possible for one person to operate multiple systems. Our initial tests have been very promising! As you can imagine this takes time, but over the holidays coming up we hope to make some significant progress.
So with all of these new changes to the ship systems (and some upcoming additions to the productivity side of things as well), we are going to overhaul the entire interface which has stayed mostly the same for the past year. The disparity among screen sizes is just causing the panel layouts to be too restricted. We will most likely be changing the main "horse shoe" panel to something else with more transitions, similar to what happens with the Windows Phone version, in order to utilize more screen space for each one. We will also be doubling down on animations, as even the lower end hardware has proven to be able to handle most everything we've thrown at it in terms of LCARS animations so far. LCARS is known for looking "alive" and we hope to capture more of that going forward.
At this time we do not have an ETA on when version 3.0 will be ready, but rest assured we are working on it and the lack of recent content updates is the opposite of a bad thing in this case. The demand for new features in this app has proven to be very high, and so we want to set up a platform that will more readily support expansion and interaction so that it really feels like you are controlling a ship rather than individual dummy panels.
I can't wait for version 3!
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