Yesterday, Ace Attorney Online received an "almost Christmas" present (it was St. Nicholas's Day, after all). After a long wait, we've had an update! The last announced update was in March of 2020, but we've had some silent updates since then. The last one was in 2022, between March and June.

We hope in future to have more regular, smaller updates. We here means myself and ThePasch, the two active AAO developers, and presumably Unas as well. While both of us have lives outside of AAO (and I have other duties keeping the English section running), we do want to keep this going.

For those of you with some programming skill, the best way you can help is to get involved with programming Ace Attorney Online yourself. Send either of us a message, and we can help you get started. Otherwise, the best thing you can do is to put up clearly reproducible bug reports and feature requests. We greatly prefer threads rather than direct messages. If you've done that, then play some more trials, and tell the authors you played their cases!

My personal goal for the immediate future is to finish v2 of a certain tutorial of mine and get to some long overdue QA business before focusing on programming. This gives us some time for reports to come in if any problems that have been introduced in the latest update. Out priority for the next update, which we want to come our fairly soon, is to patch any problems we inadvertently introduced. We do our best to test these things, but some things slip through the cracks.

Post here if you notice any important changes! Details are in the two spoiler tags.

Things have been quiet on the AAO development front lately. For those who aren't aware, the AAO development team as of late has been myself, ThePasch, and Unas. Unas has been clear that his time was very limited, and others would need to take the lead on new features. ThePasch and I both have schedules that limited our time to contribute. I've changed jobs, so my schedule is now much lighter, but the same is not true of ThePasch. So I expect to be more active, but if I have to go quiet again for a while, as things stand, AAO development is going to go quiet again.

This doesn't mean AAO development is over. Now that I have a break in my schedule, I've gotten four pull requests up today, and I can promise that the next AAO update will include a long-awaited feature: being able to fade out audio. I'm hopeful that we can have this by the end of the year.

That said, we can get AAO in a much more stable place if I could get some additional help on the development side. If you're interested in helping, here's what we can use, in order of least to most time-intensive. If you can help, reply here.

Translator
To keep AAO translated across the German, French, and Spanish sections, I need people who actually know those languages to translate brief snippets of text that will be instructions in the editor. I currently have people who can translate into German and Spanish, but any French translators would be very welcome.

Testers
If you're interested in testing new updates before they roll out to AAO, that would be very welcome! Unas is working on some improvements to make this easier, but right now, you'll need to run some commands on the command line, and you won't have access to all the built-in resources of AAO unless you add them yourself.

Code Reviewers

AAO is written in a little bit of PHP for server-side operations, but mostly the web development standard of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. If you can review code to make sure it looks sane, you can get started on the open pull requests.

Developers

Taking the most time but also being the most valuable, if you want to contribute to AAO yourself, go right ahead! The code is all available, and you can make whatever pull request you want.