Portmaster

Today was entirely infrastructure: no gameplay code touched, no rendering bugs fixed, but it felt like a necessary kind of progress. The project now has a real release pipeline. Push a tag, and GitHub Actions builds Linux, Windows, and a combined PortMaster zip for both aarch64 and armhf, all in parallel, and assembles a GitHub Release automatically. That is the kind of thing that is easy to put off indefinitely while you convince yourself it can wait until later. It cannot wait until later. ...

Today is less about raw speed and more about making the handheld build look like a proper game again. I have cleaned up the data rebuilds and Linux packaging, refactored the main menu script, cut out the unused options path, and the whole front now works cleanly. More importantly, the main menu is now functional instead of crashing when I drive it with the control keys, which makes this feel a lot less like a renderer demo with ambitions and a lot more like an actual build.

I am still working through a covid fog, so concentration is poor and progress is arriving in short useful bursts instead of clean, sensible sessions. Still, late last night I finally got the PortMaster build to usable speeds on the Anbernic after all the GLES2 and render-queue work, and that changes the mood of the whole thing a bit: it no longer feels like a theoretical handheld port, it feels like something real enough to keep pushing.

Today feels like the point where I stop treating GLES2 as an experiment and start treating it as the PortMaster target. The reasoning is fairly plain: there is already a real direct GLES2 path here rather than just SDL’s backend doing the work for me, the device build wants that renderer to be the default path, and if I am going to get proper handheld performance it probably comes from pushing batching and draw ownership deeper into the renderer instead of staying close to the old immediate-style SDL flow.

This was the day PortMaster support stopped feeling theoretical: a substantial compatibility refactor landed, packaging moved into a proper portmaster/ area, docs and performance notes were reorganised, old bundled libraries were thrown out, and the renderer/platform work bent further toward the realities of handheld Linux hardware. By this point Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot were doing most of the implementation heavy lifting, and the real project for me was learning how to manage coding agents well enough to keep the speed benefits without letting plausible nonsense sneak into the codebase.

Today the project started looking properly toward PortMaster, with more old window-management pieces cut away, PortMaster-focused docs and Docker setup added, a launcher script put in place, and the renderer pushed further toward portability rather than desktop-only assumptions. It was also the kind of structured engineering work that suited the new workflow well, with Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot doing most of the implementation legwork while I focused on steering, checking, and making sure the end result matched the real goal rather than some beautifully wrong robot interpretation.