After nearly 9 months of development, Buttplug v6 is out today. If you’re curious what this does, or more likely, doesn’t mean for you, this post will lay out what’s in today’s release and what’s yet to come.

This release isn’t really everything I wanted it to be, but in the end it became obvious that the line of yaks requiring shaving to get this out in a “complete” state was going to stretch on for a few more months at minimum. Therefore, Buttplug v6 mostly contains the foundation for the new features I wanted in the new version of the library, and I’ll be building on that through point releases in the upcoming months to turn it into what I feel it’s supposed to be.

I’ll be covering a lot of these topics in their own blog posts over the next few weeks, but for now here’s a summary of what’s new and future plans.

If you just want the gritty details, check the changelogs of the spec and the library itself.

When I released Buttplug Rust v1, I figured I’d be rolling major versions whenever we updated the Buttplug Protocol. Here we are, at major version 3.0, still running the same protocol, but with more surface API changes. So much for those plans.

Another week, another release of almost every piece of software in our stack!

I made a rule for myself that I’d wait 2 days after any software update to announce it on the blog, just to make sure I didn’t have to go back and fix even more things and flood the blog with “fixes and performance improvement” posts. The last blog being 2 weeks ago says a lot about the release schedule lately.

Thanks to a lot of interaction with developers using the libraries after the v1 launch, I’ve been making a ton of patches and bugfixes. There’s a pretty severe lack of tests in several parts of the platform at the moment, so it’s a very “testing in production” situation. With production for our software being what it is, it means seeing bug reports like “multiple gigabyte memory leaks during hours of intimate hardware usage.”

Anyways, here’s a list of things I threw the fire extinguisher at over the past 2 weeks.

So nice to finally be able to have release notes that aren’t tweets!

Buttplug C# v1.0.2

Really simple fix here, but it was stopping the logging system from working at all in some cases, so very important.

• #44: Log Handler now held for the lifetime of the process, meaning it will no longer throw an error when the GC sees the only reference is possibly held by a bare pointer in a native library. Isn’t FFI fun?

Buttplug JS v1.0.1

Even simpler:

• #43: Forgot to include protobufjs as a dependency (was a devdep), meaning typescript would cry when trying to resolve types

That’s it. That’s the change list.