Hello everyone! This blog is under new management and hopes to post about things happening in the community periodically.

The SkyTemple Podcast is a interview series run by Yakkomon where he talks to creators about their hacks. And as part of the interview, you can get the chance to ask questions! The next interview will be recorded on Sunday November 24 around 10:30am Australian Eastern Daylight time with Cait Sith, developer of Explorers of Darkened Sky

If you want the chance to ask her (and potentially others in her team, to be confirmed) just fill out this form: https://forms.gle/UZbxRXyDVRRmhQCA9

Hey everyone!

This blog is now also not just available via the Fediverse but also via Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/skytemple.blog.skytemple.org.ap.brid.gy

Please make sure to follow @ap.brid.gy if you are on Bluesky, otherwise we will not be able to interact with you.

Hey everyone!

This is a short announcement about an outage yesterday and an explanation for why SkyTemple or SkyTemple Randomizer may have not worked for you and the steps we are taking to prevent this from happening.

SkyTemple may not have worked for all users with internet access from around 9pm UTC yesterday to today around 7am UTC.

How the downloads page works

SkyTemple's download page is hosted by a web service, which has it's files (i. e. the downloadable executables but also the file containing all the metadata, such as which versions exist) hosted on online cloud storage provided by Wasabi. The cloud storage is replicated accross three regions, Europe, North America and Japan.

The download page service also provides the banner you sometimes see when you start the app, and the notice about a new version being available, if you are running an old version.

Why everything broke

This is exactly why yesterday, from around 9pm UTC to today around 7am UTC you could not start SkyTemple or the Randomizer.

SkyTemple and the Randomizer are checking for a banner and a potential update every time you start one of the apps. They wait for a response by the server, even if the server takes minutes or even longer to respond. Yesterday this happened: the download page service took multiple minutes to hours to respond to requests. But why?

Our cloud storage provider had an outage on the EU-CENTRAL-1 region. This outage caused all requests that the service made to fail after around 30 seconds, including the request to list all available versions of SkyTemple and the Randomizer. Every time a request came in from SkyTemple, the Randomizer or a user browsing the downloads page, the app queued the request, tried to refresh it's data from the cloud storage in region EU-CENTRAL-1, waited 30 seconds for a response, and then continued with the next request. This caused not only all requests to fail, but also created a huge backlog, since each request was only processed one after the other. So it could potentially take ages for the server to respond.

But why was this preventing SkyTemple from starting? Simple! SkyTemple and the Randomizer have no limit on how long they wait for the download page service to respond. And only after it responds, it continues to open. However this does not mean that SkyTemple or the Randomizer require internet access to function in general: If you disable your internet connection, SkyTemple realizes that the server is not reachable at all and immedieately starts.

How can we fix this?

So what now? We will take some steps to prevent this from happening again.

1. Yesterday Frostbyte already contributed code that adds a maximum wait time of 4 seconds to the requests SkyTemple and the Randomizer make to the downloads page service. This will be included in the next releases.
2. I will make changes to the downloads page service, to not just use EU-CENTRAL-1 as the only mirror when trying to load metadata. As I wrote initially we have the data available in three regions. If one region fails, this shouldn't cause the entire service to stop working. Code will be added to make sure data is loaded from the NA or JP mirrors if the EU one does not function.

That's all for today! Thanks for reading and sorry for any inconvenience this caused!

Capy

Heya!

It's time for another Randomizer update. This one fixes various smaller issues.

• Download and Release Notes

Hi! Time for yet another update!

This update fixes the image converter not working under Windows.

• Download and Release Notes

Hi! It's time for yet another update!

This time we bring you a new version of the Randomizer, which fixes font and icon rendering issues under Windows.

• Download and Release Notes

Hey! We bring a new small release that fixes some minor bugs in SkyTemple.

• Download and Release Notes

Hi!

We bring you updates to both SkyTemple and the Randomizer.

SkyTemple 1.8.1 resolves some issues with the latest release and SkyTemple Randomizer 2.0.1 brings the improvements of SkyTemple 1.8 to the Randomizer.

• SkyTemple 1.8.1
• SkyTemple Randomizer 2.0.1

Hey! We released a new SkyTemple release that is packed full with features!

It includes a new version of ExplorerScript with tons of new features and up to 8x faster compilation. It also comes with a new symbol editor for hardcoded data and improvements to sprite importing.

Find more information and download links on our downloads page.

There will probably be a follow-up release in the next couple of days that further optimizes sprite imports and adds a new patch (FastChimecho).

Hey!

Nightly releases for SkyTemple are now available at https://download.skytemple.org/skytemple/nightly .

These releases are always based on the last successful run on GitHub and provide the latest state of development. Be careful though, just because a nightly can be downloaded doesn't mean it will actually work. You can report any issues you run into with nightlies at https://github.com/SkyTemple/SkyTemple/issues

Hello everyone! I was informed of a data breach affecting our service for error collection Sentry, which you could have opted in when using SkyTemple.

Sentry had a data breach affecting 15 customers, unfortunately we are one of them. Stack Traces (technical error information) for one issue was publicly accessible for a short time. I checked this issue and currently am pretty confident that it contains no personal information, however I still wanted to let you all know. More information can be found in the PDF.

We are currently in contact with the Sentry team and will do a further analysis of the breached data. If there is sensitive information in there, we will let you know ASAP.

Download for Windows & macOS or Linux (Changelog).

Version 2 of the SkyTemple Randomizer is now out! This release brings a completely redesigned and localized UI that should make it much easier to use the Randomizer! The new UI also works great on smaller screens.

Download for Windows & macOS or Linux (Changelog).

The new update brings two new optional modes:

• "Blind Items": In this mode, all item names are replaced with random names from a list. This list by default contains some randomly generated item names, original item names from the game and item names from other Mystery Dungeon games. The descriptions of all items are replaced with "???" and all items have random icons and shop costs.
• "Blind Moves": In this mode move names are pulled from a list of random names and descriptions are replaced with "???".

Good luck with these!

There have also been great improvements to the text replacement algorithm (optional, enabled by default).

Hey!

The first beta for SkyTemple Randomizer 2 is here!

This new release of the Randomizer comes with a fully redesigned UI using GTK 4 and Adwaita. It's also localized into multiple languages.

If you want to help by giving it a try or want to read the full changelog, head over to the download page.

Thanks for your support and to all contributors on this version!

The upcoming SkyTemple Randomizer 2.0 release will feature a fully new UI! But also some new features, one of which are the "Blind Items" and "Blind Moves" modes: https://youtu.be/nyb9haBoOsw

Heyo! We released a new SkyTemple update that mostly fixes some issues introduced in SkyTemple 1.6.5.

Find more information and download links on our downloads page.

Soon the next SkyTemple Community Hack Jam starts!

The Sixth SkyTemple Hack Jam is about to be a reality! Everyone will have the opportunity to create and submit hacks under a specified Topic and Gimmick in just three weeks! You can work solo or as part of a team!

This jam will last from March 24 16.00 UTC to April April 14 17.00 UTC! We will reveal this jam's Topic and Gimmick on the starting date via YouTube Premiere!

For more information see our Discord server (https://discord.gg/skytemple) and the YouTube Premiere video (https://youtu.be/Xgw_YkD5Fss).

The SkyTemple community has gathered for this year's "SkyTemple Direct" - Find out about new and upcoming PMD ROM Hacks that are currently in development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynxz7K2B07I