December ended up being a pretty heavy month for stability and general back-end development. There isn’t a whole lot to show for it on the front-end, aside from a few “new” commands.
Roughly speaking, there were about 75 88 (updating this just before this gets published!) bug-fixes and a few small feature adds that are hopefully going to improve the quality of life for a lot of users and get us moving towards a “more stable” 1.0.
One of the first updates was the Save Entity Unique ID command which will let you figure out the Unique ID of any entity on a map (without having to be on the entity itself). This makes manipulation of entities much more versatile and useful.
I added the start of a new line of Data Sources, which can pull information from the Database itself. Right now, you have access to Characters and Equipment. This is useful in the event that you want to have something like a shop, which might want to find the “reference” value of a statistic or trait, to compare to what a Hero currently has equipped. There will be more in the future, most certainly. In addition, you can access the Statistics and the Traits Table on these. Traits can be a bit finnicky to understand, so I added documentation to show how everything gets mapped (to which flag/property).
Data Entries finally got “finished” and the appropriate Context Provider was added. These, as mentioned last month, will give you the ability to do things like have Quests/Bestiaries/Logs and so forth (just make sure that you filter them appropriately).
Another big ticket item — the Battle Counter got remapped into the Statistics Container (which contains statistics for Equipment, Heroes, Enemies, etc). This lets different trait effects (like Battle Counter) be applied on skills and the like, reliably. This was a big undertaking and had a few little bumps along the way, but looks to be very clean now.
No progress was really made on the overall Roadmap to 1.0. I’ve made some notes on what I’m working on next — exporting maps to images, displaying a preview of movement, and changing collider via script, as the “big ticket” items for January. That should push us closer to 1.0. There is also the ever-looming and often-requested “Key Press in Action Sequence” that has been asked for forever. I really need to get on that.
On another note, I’ve given the GDD (Game Design Document) to a few folks to start working on the first RPG Architect DLC for an Action/Adventure Battle System. It will feature a game that is roughly as long as the 2D Sample Project, along with a Template, and some new resources. There will be no additional commands or code that isn’t possible in RPG Architect already. This will give others a more “complete” view/starting point for an action/adventure game, beyond what has been covered in tutorials and the included quick sample we have already.
That’s it for December! And 2024!
As always:
Thank you so much for your support so far. I’m looking forward to building this community further and giving you the engine you may not have known you always wanted!
