gStands Development Updates and Discussion

This update was written mostly from the context of our discord, you can join it here: https://discord.gg/E63y942CY7

Hey everyone, Copper gStands here, wanting to fill you in on some upcoming changes and plans that are being put in place so that we can greet the new year with vigor.

First up, addressing the lack of updates. Obviously it's not a good look but I have been working hard behind the scenes on a whole lot of technical things that aren't interesting to show off. Going forward the restructuring will make it much easier to develop new stands, and in the far future should make it quite easy to add your own stands to the game as additional content. Going for a more object oriented approach to development.
You may notice model addons like Star Platinum receiving updates soon, we've completely restructured the internal assets so that our Khnum assets team can more directly influence development. This will grease the wheels quite a bit, and already has in some places as @Ferpe#4305 and @worldprop#4644 have been working to make Star Platinum's animations and sounds more clean and robust. We're looking to push those kinds of changes to more stands, and thanks to the technical changes and restructuring it will require minimal effort programming.
Keep an eye on channels like #no-memes, #announcements, and #patron-announcements for some small updates and previews.

In case you're curious as to what sort of technical things have been worked on, the entire code for the base Stand entity has been rewritten. This allows for easier development of features that affect all stands such as stand leap mechanics and item pickups, and will make the active stand using experience more consistent across the board. There's also a completely new animation framework system which ties actions, damage, sound, particles, etc to the animation itself, allowing for more consistency than the current timer based system and cleaner workflow. Think of it like framedata in a fighting game. We have some graphical improvements like the new aura, and as I've been sifting through things I've been optimizing as I go, so framerates with stands will also improve.

My team member @Squidler#2112 and I have been working on getting a better solution for some internal things, which means the new Patron test servers will be coming back. As it stands, the schedule for that is within the next couple months so stay tuned for a proper announcement.
The current plan is for a dedicated patron server hosting the latest version of gStands to be active during part of the day for World patrons and above to use.

Lastly I want to mention a new unlisted patron benefit, which is access to the #the-35553-files forum channel, where you can post your in depth ideas and concepts. Mostly just a fancier #ideas and of course feel free to continue to use that channel, but using #the-35553-files will ensure that I'll see and be able to comment on the ideas (and remember they exist).