It's hard to believe that in a few months it will be 2 years since I launched my last Mesa crowd funding campaign. I must once again apologize for the lack of updates things have been progressing and I've been hoping for a while now that I could just send out an update announcing the work was complete.

There are a couple of reasons why the work hasn't landed yet. One is simply that not all the patches have been reviewed, Arrays of Arrays hasn't been to high on the priority list for other devs, one reason for this is that no games have seemed to use it. However “Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor” which was released in July is using it in a one of its shaders [1] so we may start to see it pop up elsewhere too.

The other reason it hasn't landed yet is that as each new extension that extends the gl shader language is added to Mesa it can mean that Arrays of Arrays support is needed for that extension too.

The good news is that I sent v5 [2] of the patches for review last week, I also have some follow-up patches that implement a feature required in the spec that both the AMD and Nvidia closed source drivers don't support so Mesa should hopefully soon have an Arrays of Arrays implementation that is more spec compliant than both of these drivers.

I should also point out that while these latest patches haven't landed there have been bits and pieces landing over the past couple of years so there is already partial support in Mesa.

So what's next for me? I've been asked since starting this campaign if I would do another one and for now the answer is no as I will no longer need to. As of November I will be working full time on Mesa for Collabora as part of their arrangement with Intel. I'm really excited about this and need that thank all of you for allowing me to get involved in Mesa in the first place.

One final thing before I go, before being offered the opportunity to work full-time on Mesa I was actually working on a game about Linux as a way to fund my next bit of work on Mesa. Nothing special just a bit of fun with RPG Maker XP to create a game which runs on the open source implementation of the engine. I've had a bunch of great custom artwork done (at my own expense), custom scripts, the story-line is done, and I have a playable demo (start to the game). The thing I don't have as usual is the time to finish it alone, so if there is anyone out there with RPG Maker skills (or pixel/vector art skills) that would like to have a bit of fun partnering up on finishing it of let me know, and I can provide the demo to see if your interested.

Linux Game

That's all for now, as always thanks for your support. Please feel free to leave comments below or email me at the email address you can see in link [2].

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92059

[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-September/094652.html