V3.8 delayed to next week due to dying laptop

Unfortunately on Thursday I was about 1 day away from finishing the update (the actual kink bit is all done, just commissions and bug fixes left), when my laptop just refused to boot up again after I came back from lunch. Took it to the repair service, they said it was a motherboard issue (it’s a 6-year-old laptop that is always working ~16 hour a day so it reached its expiry date basically). Thankfully, they promise they will able to do some patchwork to ‘revive’ it, but this won’t last forever, I’ll get maybe another 3 months out of the laptop and that’ll be it.

I just went ahead and buy a new laptop today (might as well, it’s something to be done sooner or later even if their 3 months estimate is correct), but the old laptop (with the LifePlay v3.8 project files) is still being fixed by the repair guys. As soon as I get the old laptop back from them, I will finish v3.8 within one day and release it. This should be at the latest Sat 29 Aug (thankfully we still have enough days left in the month to guarantee two updates released in Aug), but more likely to be around Wed I think. Then, I will immediately start transferring the project to the new laptop, getting Unreal Engine set up there and v3.9 onwards will be worked on using the new laptop.

My sincere apologies for this delay. I’m a pretty deadline-obsessed person but not much I can do when the laptop doesn’t even boot up.

Just to reassure everyone, this won’t have any bad long-term impact on the project at all, this delay of v3.8 should be all that is caused by this laptop incidence. Even if the old laptop is completely dead and cannot be used to finish v3.8 (the repair ppl seem confident enough though), there’s a way to copy the project files directly from the old laptop’s hard drive into my new laptop anyway. Even if the hard drive is also dead somehow (nearly impossible since I had been using the laptop perfectly fine until the motherboard failed), the project up to v3.7 is backed up both on Github and on my external hard drive anyway, so even in the worst case scenario, the project is safe.

(Could someone repost this on the F95Zone thread please? I have access to both Discord and Patreon via my phone but don’t have my password saved for F95 on there somehow and I can’t remember what it was)