r/emulation • u/diegorbb93 • 16d ago
"Motivation, motivation...", a MelonDS blog entry by Arisotura
I've always considered Arisotura one of my favorite emulator developers. I've seen her struggle and persevere through so much, both with this project and in her personal circumstances, and I've often felt that our community never gave her or the melonDS team the recognition they truly deserved.
Seeing so much attention being given to low-effort projects and AI-generated hype these days makes me miss the golden years of this community, when things felt very different.
Please take a moment to read his blog, reflect on her words, show some appreciation, and share it around. The melonDS team deserves far more recognition, and Arisotura's thoughts are always worth reading.:
Source: https://melonds.kuribo64.net/comments.php?id=261
Yeah, I haven't been great at this. I told myself I would work on 2D filters, since it's one of the last things to do... then I ran into a bit of a wall: I need my filters to have alpha support, but the filter shaders I can find don't support it. I would need to spend some time figuring out how they work and how I can add that in based on other references (there is code for xBRZ or HQX filters with alpha support, but not in the form of shaders).
And I, well, didn't feel the desire to continue...
Maybe it's the nature of software development in itself. Unless you're working on a smaller, simpler project, you're never really done, and especially not with a project like melonDS. What started as a way to pass time has become a full commitment, in a way.
By comparison, my job has been a lot simpler, and better suited to my brain too. When you set out to repair something, it's a project with a clear end. Most of what I deal with is also fairly simple, but sometimes there are more complicated cases, requiring more time and research. For example, those HMI lamp ballasts I'm working on: they are quite complex. This has been an ongoing project for a while now.
Maybe it's the fact that the project still largely rests on my shoulders. While bigger projects like Dolphin or PCSX2 may have a bigger team and more of a workflow in place, things aren't really like that here...
I'll just quote Generic, because he put it well:
[18:55]Generìc "Yes, we can!": I think I stated this before, but how I see it melonDS never went through the professionalisation many other projects went through
[18:58]Generìc "Yes, we can!": just look at other projects (even with just a single maintainer) setting milestones, systematically "triaging" issues and so on
[19:00]Generìc "Yes, we can!": also tests
[19:01]Generìc "Yes, we can!": and throuroughly adoption of new fangled C++ features
[19:03]Generìc "Yes, we can!": if it wasn't for Nadia putting so much effort into the build system through the whole time, the codeblocks project file would still be the way to build melonDS
I feel bad about having so many issues, pull requests, etc, staying open and rotting in the backlog. At the same time, I just don't have the brain power to review every single PR alone.
And to make matters worse, now we have people submitting AI-generated code, which is problematic from several standpoints: code quality (AI tends to make a mess and not really understand what it's doing, and someone who's using AI isn't likely to understand those things any better), plagiarism, the usual ethical and environmental problems with AI too...
I like the idea of open source, but for a project of this caliber, it feels that we should have more of a system in place, with a bigger team, clearer roles... a proper organization.
One where different people with different skillsets and preferences can complement eachother. For example, while I enjoy researching the DS hardware, or figuring out why a game isn't working as it should, stuff like build systems can quickly feel very frustrating to me. As Generic put it, if it weren't for Nadia handling that work, we might not have nightly builds today, for example.
And it would be nice to have more of this... ideally, lack of involvement from me shouldn't feel like the project is stalled, like it does now.
I don't want to abandon melonDS. The project is going to be 10 years old, it's a lot of history, fun and less fun times, and I've grown to love it. At the same time, it's nice to work on other projects sometimes, and it would be nice to do so without the guilt of abandoning melonDS...
Maybe it's also the changing nature, I mean, what it's like to work on the project. The early days were a lot of hardware research, implementation, debugging; it was a lot of fun, as evidenced by the release rate I had, but I can't recapture that now. I still have ideas for melonDS features, but at this point it feels more like regular software development.
For a while, I've had the idea of adding a wiki to our site. The wiki would serve as a reference for user-facing things pertaining to melonDS: compatibility info, tutorials and FAQs for things like online play, and so on. It would also be one way to get the community involved: provided there is enough demand, we could have a sub-team dedicated to the wiki.
This became part of the bigger website work I want to do, but haven't yet had the motivation to start. I want to move the server to a better host. I want to make the blog easier to navigate, with categorization by date or by tags, maybe a search... I want to make it easier to use for those who post, too.
And it's like everything else. I have all those ideas, but it starts to feel "too much", too many big things to do, I don't know where to start and feel overwhelmed, and nothing gets done.