Winter arrives once more, and like I mentioned in August’s progress report, I am extremely excited for what’s in store. In fact, many of the really big goodies I’ve decided to seperate to their own articles, which should be coming up in the next few weeks. There’s also been many changes this month that improve the speed of emulation across the board, on top of the usual improvements in accuracy and features.

Networked Multiplayer is one of those features that was so surprising to see, that the lucky few chosen to test it were wondering if it was real. For the past year, several developers have banded together to bring this amazing implementation of online play to Citra. The Nintendo 3DS heavily relies on wireless for its slew of multiplayer compatible titles. Considering that so many games feel empty without their multiplayer features, we’re excited to announce that in select titles, you’ll be able to play together with your friends across the world in the latest Canary builds of Citra!

Emulators grow quickly. Last month alone, there were 39 pull requests merged to Citra. For this reason, it’s important to be able to manage the many different versions of an emulator. Until now however, Citra has had no installer or updater for the nightly builds. Although the now obsolete Bleeding Edge builds did have both of these things, it was limited to Windows, and the installer framework had some issues that restricted what we could do with it.

2017 has been an amazing year, with more work having been put into the project than ever before, but it’s not over yet! Last we met was June, and just two months later the Citra issue tracker is brimming with lots of changes once more. I am extremely excited for this month (and what’s coming up the next few months) but we’re getting ahead of ourselves! On this progress report, let’s check out the big fish in the July and August pond of patches!

Citra has some issues, and by its nature as an open source project, they are visible to everyone and fixable by anyone. Unfortunately though, most contributions are made by a small minority of developers. These developers have found it difficult to prioritize their efforts, since the majority of issue reports are written scattered across Discord, Reddit, forums, IRC, and too many other places to count. Because of this, the Citra team has put together a framework to report data about how Citra is used to our server, and use that data to discover what are the most popular games and hardware configurations, where emulated games crash in Citra most often, and more.

The summer of 2017 has just rolled in, and although we don’t have a summer of code, the patches continue rolling in regardless. We’ve got a ton of fixes this month in the renderer, so this report is going to be very screenshot heavy. With that out of the way, let’s get right to it. Implemented Procedural Texture (Texture Unit 3) by wwylele There is a rarely used feature in the 3DS’ GPU called procedural textures, “proctex” for short.

As game compatibility has broadened and the popularity of Citra has risen there’s always been a lack of consistent information on what could be played in Citra and what couldn’t. Often times the best way to find out if a game was working properly in Citra was to jump in and test it for yourself, but if any issues were encountered you’d be left scouring through forums sifting through potentially out of date information for answers.

In the last quarter, we’ve further improved the speed and accuracy of citra along with supporting more 3DS features, and we are very excited to show what we’ve been working on. It’s a bit hard to believe, but Citra is already three years old, and in these three years we’ve gone from an emulator that could barely run homebrew, to one that can run many commercially available games at playable speeds!

As we approach the first birthday of Citra’s website, we’d like to announce yet another project infrastructure update: We’ve decided to launch a new forum based on the Discourse forum software! When we first introduced the new website back in February of 2016, we chose to use Flarum over more classic forums used on other websites (such as phpBB, MyBB, or vBulletin). The reason for this was because Flarum was a much more modern platform, with better mobile support, and a attractive and innovative UI.

As you all know, the Nightly builds have been down for some time now due to the former maintainer not being around, but the issues have been resolved, and the Nightly builds are now available on our downloads page once again! With downloads available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, you’re no longer required to compile the build yourself. Likewise, we’d like to remind all users that any bugs found within Citra, or during emulation, be reported from the Nightly builds, and not the Bleeding Edge ones.