Lewin Kelly Heliodex

Heliodex project update - June 2023

Welcome back! Summer has begun, and I'll be able to work on projects more often over the coming weeks. Here's a summary of what's happened in June:

Mercury

Improvements to the asset system have been added, and we're working on a more cohesive moderation system for admins to allow users to upload their own assets to the website.

As always, many optimisations have been added to parts of the client and website. I and many other of the developers will be much more active in the near future, so expect more updates soon!

Heliodex project update - July 2023

Almost forgot about this one! Here's the monthly project update again, I have several updates to existing projects and a new announcement.

Mercury

Several updates have been made to Mercury's website. Error pages are improved, the design of the landing page has been updated, and we moved from Sass to Stylus for styling, which allows multiline statements with a cleaner indented syntax. A couple of client bugs have been fixed as well.

Navigation for the site has been improved, with a much simpler bottom navigation bar for smaller screens. This allows us to get rid of the cumbersome hamburger menu, and alongside it, a significant amount of bloat from Bootstrap's CSS and JS. The top navbar has also been improved on larger screens.

Heliodex project update - August 2023

Now entering Autumn, here's the updates to the projects I've worked on over the past month.

Mercury

Mercury's site has had some generic fixes. You know, fixing styling issues, optimisations, reducing bundle size, that sort of thing. What's more interesting is the updates to the client.

As Mercury uses a 11 or 12 December 2013 build of the client, lack of many many features, improvements, and documentation results in a degraded development experience compared to modern Lua and Luau. This is the main reason why similar projects that use newer clients usually have more original content created for them, and why older clients are often filled with copies of games from their era.

Heliodex project update - September 2023

Completely forgot about this one! Here's an update to some projects I've worked on over the last month, 8 days late.

Mercury

Mercury's repository recently reached 1500 commits! We're well underway with work on a new backend and database structure, as the previous 2-database system was difficult to work with. Hopefully the new system will allow us to move fast and also not break everything.

Once the migration is finished, the database will be reset and we'll accept a new wave of beta testers. We're also working on a system that will allow beta testers to be accepted easier, so we can get more testers in. After that, we have a few more things to do before we can finalise a public release.

Heliodex project update - October 2023

Not quite as late as the last one, another update to some of the projects I'm working on.

Mercury

The database reset and backend migration is finally fully complete, and site renders are now using RCCService (July 2015) instead of my temporary terrible 300-line three.js thing. Avatar shop/catalog/catalogue/library/marketplace is being worked on heavily, and shirts, pants, and faces are working well, with hats and gear coming soon. DLL hooking is being worked on for the client (mainly by debian) which will reduce the number of exploits that can be used on the client.

The Mercury 2 Teaser has been released and again received good reception on the r/oldrobloxrevivals subreddit, and we're beginning work on the full trailer/short film. However, we're running into some issues with getting RCCService to work and render p

Heliodex project update - November 2023

Wack. Welcome back, and thank you all for one year of Heliodex project updates!

Mercury

Fun fact: Today (or tomorrow) is the 10th anniversary of the release of the Mercury client. yippee

Development on Mercury has slowed significantly after hitting a roadblock in getting RCCService (2015) working, shortly after we re-issued keys to beta testers. It periodically returns garbled responses to the server for clothing renders, and dealing with gzipped responses is also a pain.

Bootstrap considered harmful

Bootstrap is a CSS component library/framework/frontend toolkit/stylesheet set and Javascript plugin collection. It's the most popular CSS framework used on the web, and is a popular choice for many Roblox revival websites.

After writing, modifying, and looking at the source code of many revivals written with Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks, I've come to the conclusion that in it's current state (v5.3.2), I don't like Bootstrap and I don't think it's a good choice for revivals, and perhaps not for a lot of web developers in general.

Here's a list of my biggest pain points with Bootstrap:

Progressive enhancement
Modification and customisation

Heliodex project update - December 2023

Welcome to 2024! Here's an update to what I did in the last part of 2023.

Mercury

If it wasn't clear by my previous gist, I'm not the biggest fan of Bootstrap as it is currently, and I wanted to leave it in 2023. The removal of Bootstrap from Mercury at the beginning of 2024 serves as the clean slate to build the highly anticipated frontend rewrite upon. Navigation and readability need to be improved across the site, and enhancing the ways members can communicate with each other on site is important as well.

At the beginning of the year, Mercury barely even had a proper backend, and now it's flourishing into a near full-fledged revival with industry-leading features and web design. I've been focussing heavily on code quality and maintainability, as we want to open-source Mercury once it's complete.

Heliodex project update - January 2024

That's 2024 off to... a start. Here's what I've been up to during the first month of the year!

Mercury

Improvements continue to be made to Mercury. Changes have been made to some UI and form elements to make them work better with JS enabled, optimisations to corescripts and better library support, and the generic major updates of dependencies.

Go has been making its way into the Mercury codebase, including the new client deployer found in my previous gist. It has helped to greatly improve efficiency and speed of many processes.

	// Mercury Setup Deployer 3, now in Go
	// goroutines make it run fast as FUCK

	package main

	import (
	"archive/zip"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"os"