entry: Add intro

site/content/entry/citra-progress-report-2023-h2/index.md

@@ -1,20 +1,22 @@
 +++
-date = "2024-01-25T20:00:00+01:00"
+date = "2024-03-25T20:00:00+01:00"
 title = "Citra Progress Report 2023 H2"
 tags = [ "progress-report" ]
 author = "emufan_4568"
 coauthor = "PabloMK7"
-forum = 845615
+forum = 1013527
 +++
 
-<Intro>
+Welcome readers, and happy (belated) new year! 
+We hope you all had a brilliant 2023, just as we did. The past year saw a boom in development across all areas of 3DS emulation for Citra, which we're super thrilled to share here. From networking changes, to HOME Menu compatibility updates, to graphics enhancements, we've got it all! 
+So strap in - and get ready for the very best of what we cooked up in the latter half of the last year.
 
 # Contents
 1. [Emulation]({{< relref "#emulation" >}})
-1. [Network]({{< relref "#network" >}})
+1. [Networking]({{< relref "#networking" >}})
 1. [Amiibo]({{< relref "#amiibo" >}})
 1. [Graphics]({{< relref "#graphics" >}})
-1. [Miscellaneous]({{< relref "#miscellaneous" >}})
+1. [Audio]({{< relref "#audio" >}})
 1. [Conclusion]({{< relref "#conclusion" >}})
 
 # Emulation
@@ -23,7 +25,7 @@ There was a lot of progress this time around in achieving full system emulation.
 
 Last time we mentioned that, while launching games from the HOME menu worked, suspending or re-launching titles was generally hit-or-miss, with some titles crashing outright. This is because Citra was not cleaning up kernel objects correctly on process shutdown. Games deservedly expect a clean environment when they are launched and any operating system worth its salt is responsible for that. A process in HorizonOS is conceptually quite similar to the concept of a process in modern operating systems. It has its own address space, child threads, and is responsible for babysitting any kernel objects created by those threads.
 
-Given that we are talking about this in a progress report, it’s safe to say that's a problem no more. Steveice10 [pulled](https://github.com/citra-emu/citra/pull/6680) a few strings here and there and made sure that exiting a kernel process releases all the memory it owns and stops its child threads as well.
+Given that we are talking about this in a progress report, it’s safe to say that's a problem no more. Steveice10 [turned](https://github.com/citra-emu/citra/pull/6680) a few nobs here and there and made sure that exiting a kernel process releases all the memory it owns and stops its child threads as well.
 
 Steveice10 continued the HOME menu streak, implementing some additional service commands in the APT module and adding a power button sufficed to complete another crucial part of HOME menu functionality: powering down the console. Whenever the HOME menu has been launched, pressing V on the keyboard will trigger the familiar screen.
 
@@ -294,8 +296,6 @@ It's hard to believe any game would intentionally require that many shaders. Mos
 
 Contributor [m4wx](https://github.com/m4xw) first [noticed](https://github.com/citra-emu/citra/pull/6895) something peculiar: Citra would always take into consideration the PICA lighting state when generating fragment shaders, even when lighting was disabled completely. Changing lighting parameters shouldn't matter much when the feature is disabled, yet Citra would generate new shaders each time. By masking out parameters when their respective feature is disabled, the amount of generated shaders has been greatly reduced, without any behavioural changes.
 
-<graph.png>
-
 Based on this observation by m4wx, GPUCode expanded upon it, by masking out even more unnecessary parameters, this time in the TEV shader generation. This mainly affected the title screen of A Link Between Worlds, which generated dozens of duplicate shaders. With that change the number of shaders being compiled was halved once more. The final change regarding shader compilation was done on the OpenGL backend. As a remnant of old OpenGL versions, Citra would respecify the uniform interface for every compiled shader, even though that never practically changed. This interface describes what data the fragment shader receives from the vertex shader and what data from the CPU. Utilising ARB_explicit_uniform_location afforded by the OpenGL version upgrade to 4.3, Citra no longer has to do this, further reducing the amount of work done per shader.
 
 # Audio