The pre-alpha is getting so close I can feel it. There is now a fully-functional Windows installer. I set things up with CPack so that I can press one button and have the installer built, with all the binaries inside it as well as the installer itself signed with my EV certificate. The binaries now have branded icons, and uninstalling works flawlessly. And the installer has the annoying-but-important screen where the user has to agree to the EULA.

The next work to do is to get all my recent changes up and running on MacOS. Which should hopefully be trivially easy, but this depends on whether the new vcpkg manifest just magically works on Mac. Which, it should, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Provided that I can get vcpkg working, though, it should just be a matter of running the unit tests to make sure things look good, and then configuring CPack to generate a MacOS .dmg file installer thing.

After that there are just a couple of small administrivia tasks. For example, there needs to be a doc that explains the 3D interface controls. Most of the other controls have menus and the hotkeys are discoverable, but some of the interactions for 3D are non-obvious. One huge thing that will be missing in the pre-alpha is any kind of hand-holding for new users. Eventually I want to have a tutorial system (inspired by Factorio's) to help new users learn the ropes, but that's definitely more of a beta thing than an alpha thing.