Welcome back for another edition of — what got updated in RPG Architect. While there was a big focus on fixing issues and adding quality of life features, I did manage to put in something not insigificant.
February’s “hero feature” implementation was ambulation, as had been previously discussed. It is most of the way in (you can do a lot of cool things like jump, change speed, etc), but the physics engine still has a number of quirks and fixes that are needed to make everything “feel” nice and tight. These fixes are in progress and will likely be in by early March. Ambulation was originally going to work more like a State Machine, similar to how other engines have it, but after playing around with ideas and our (growing) community, it became clear that this wasn’t as intuitive as they’d like (although, it is for me as a programmer). So, instead, they were reworked a bit differently than what was planned. Virtual Keys now have an Enter, Ongoing, and Exiting state that get processed like any other script, so it’s incredibly intuitive. We’ve played around with a few samples internally where a “jump” key is assigned, the Enter script sets the initial jump details and changes the character’s pose, the Ongoing script watches the character’s velocities appropriately and applies the force of the jump, and the Exit script will watch for the character to hit the ground, adjust the pose, and then allow the control to be used again. We’ve also implemented “running” as well with a Virtual Key press, which is also incredibly simple. In addition, an “Interaction” was added to Entities that allows you to poll for a Virtual Key — so you can EASILY add a new feature that you might want to implement outside of standard “interaction” from the action key (Octopath Traveller’s Steal/Bribe/Recruit/etc come to mind).
A few Architects are working on a new 2.5D sample, which is coming along quite nicely. As we played with it (and they decorated it with tons of doodads), performance started taking a hit — so there was a performance enhancement added to reconcile this. The 2.5D sample is coming along nicely, but is still a work in progress. Hopefully we’ll have something for distribution sometime in April.
Speaking of samples, we’re likely going to include a Platformer sample as well, so users will be able to see how ambulation works. It won’t be very hard to make a sidescroller, action/adventure game soon. That said, I still haven’t worked on projections (e.g. fireballs, sword slashes, etc), so that’ll be important for anything more than a standard jumping platformer. I’d really love to see some cool platformers and Metroidvanias! I’m not sure when Projections will be added, but it’s in the backlog of tasks to add.
Several new commands were added for Characters and Physics, as well as some new Data Sources to support physical objects and ambulation.
Linux had an update on the Editor and now appears to share parity with the other platforms. The issue we had was due to outdated and broken bindings for the X11 platform. I went thru to figure exactly what went wrong and fix it (memory buffer issue). As a result, everyone on Linux should finally be good. Sorry for the delay on updating it — it was bothering me significantly.
Did I mention that there is an in-built mechanism to publish your games now? That was added too. There isn’t any fancy packaging yet — just enough to let you distribute a game to another platform (Windows, OSX, and Linux) and play it. At some point, I’ll try to add other features (encrypting assets, Steam integration, etc) as they are requested.
Most of the fires from Early Access are put out and things seem to be working nicely. I’ve seen several projects already and I’m excited to see what the community does with RPG Architect.
Next month, I’ll be wrapping up the Physics engine changes and hopefully it will be ready for prime time (and ideally the last updates). With physics working nicely, I’ll be wrapping up some things that will hopefully help the 2.5D project work the way the Architects are hoping to have it work. On map battles made some progress, but are still not honoring some of the other details I am capturing. I’d like for battles to also handle an “Escape” option. We might even get a caterpillar-style party as well (along with some Party commands). It just depends on what the community asks for and what pressing issues need to be resolved first.
That’s all for February!
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!
