State of Dixie Ball, 2025

I would like to give folks an update on what we have been up to.

We got stuck on a technical problem with Dixie Ball. We had hoped to get version 2.5 shipped several months ago, but there are numerous problems with the Godot 3.x engine which caused performance issues. The Godot community has also been fracturing due to politics, particularly a far left community manager who went on a banning spree against anyone who dared suggest that the engine's development team try to stay a-political.

As a result, the Dixie Ball team began to loose confidence in the Godot engine. So we looked for an alternative, and discovered we rather like Redot, which is forking off from the Godot 4.x branch. It includes numerous performance improvements over the 3.x branch that we have been using. However, porting Dixie Ball over to Redot requires allot of time and energy on our part. We hope the performance improvements will be worth the wait. Rest assured that our team remains committed to getting Dixie Ball 2.5 out, but it's going to take awhile.

So, what exactly is Dixie Ball 2.5? Well, we came to realize the game world feels a little dead. Yes we have vegetation and some ambient sound effects, but it's lacking animal life. So we plan to add butterflies, fireflies, flocks of birds, owls, and an eagle to the game. These will be scattered throughout the map and help if feel a little more alive.