Yesterday I finished up work on the website for now. It now has everything needed (at a basic level) to run a pre-alpha test. The last thing I finished up was using Cloudflare's R2 for storing binaries for download. During the pre-alpha, I'd really be sad if the binary leaked out, because if it got cracked while the paid version was not yet available, I can imagine curious people who'd otherwise like to pay for it would grab the cracked version. So I'm using ephemeral URLs for the downloads -- if one leaks to the broader web it will only be good for a few hours. Not bulletproof, but better than pure public URLs.

Today I got back to the plugin c++ code, working on the license key stuff. At the moment I'm implementing the code that makes the HTTP request to the server, gets a signed license key, verifies it, etc. This should all be simple, but I wasted a bunch of time on incidental complexity. I decided to use vcpkg for the crypto/http libraries, and hey, while I'm in there, I might as well upgrade the other packages right? Yeah, except the new versions have horrible bugs. And then it turns out that pinning package versions with vcpkg requires using it in a different way, and then... well anyway I got that all sorted out. After spending a couple weeks using "npm install whatever" I am spoiled and dealing with the insanity of library distribution under Windows is no fun.